SPREADING THE WORD:
AN INTERVIEW WITH
AHMAD ALMALLAH

By Peter Campion, NEN Ramirez-Gorski, Chi Kyu Lee,
Brandon Hackbarth, Said Farah, & Steven Blythe

January 7, 2021

When Ahmad Almallah’s debut collection, Bitter English, came out in 2019, a new planet swam into the ken of contemporary poetry. Here was a poet like no other. The poems in Bitter English relate the narrative of a Palestinian man who finds himself wrenched between his life in the United States and his place, family, and language of origin. With remarkable lyric intensity, Almallah makes art out of a discontentment with language itself. But while many writers affect frustration with the limits of language, as if to show off a badge of their disaffected modernness, this poet accepts that frustration as a challenge—an opportunity to make something profoundly new, what Naomi Shihab Nye has identified as “astonishing, breathtaking ways of unfolding” and Charles Bernstein has called “prismatic pulsations writ against moving backgrounds.” 

Now, in the poems from a new manuscript, Tables and Chairs, Almallah has turned his attention to the life of objects, the obdurate and often heartbreaking things that we live among. We’re fortunate to feature four of these poems in the new issue of Great River Review, and we felt especially thrilled this fall when Almallah, who teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Pennsylvania, agreed to answer questions from some of us in the creative writing program at the University of Minnesota.

Peter Campion: The four poems in the current issue of Great River Review are from a new manuscript, Tables and Chairs? How do you see this book as similar to or different from Bitter English? 

I don't think of them as different. But maybe they don't seem to fit with each other as an arrangement, that's all. Bitter English makes a demand on the English language to carry meaning for the speaker in exile, and the poetic sparks come from the friction between the mother-tongue and the adopted language of exile. Language, in other words, is rendered a thing, and is used to make another thing, a poem or poems…a book. Tables and Chairs carries on with the same stance, if you will. It demands the surroundings to speak “a language,” to make a statement outside the semantics contained in a specific tongue. But outside of these convoluted arguments, the main friction between the speaker and objects in the new collection is rooted in exile. It comes from the fact that I find myself baffled by how little resemblance the most common of objects here, like tables and chairs, have with my home, my true background, Palestine. Maybe one of the facts of exile is that all surroundings become alienating ruins as we have it in classical Arabic poetry, which is also true in the poetry of Emily Dickinson, for example. And maybe that’s what draws me to her work so much. Maybe.

Said Farah: If poetry is a mode of meaning-making, how does the language of exile help you negotiate the alienation of home, of exile? In other words, how does the act of making meaning through the language of exile help you make meaning of the exile itself - even when you’re back home?  

I’m not sure that writing in itself can help in compensating for the loss of home, or anything for that matter. It’s a nice idea that we play around with, especially in academic circles and so on, but I don’t think it works that way. One’s connection with the land is real, and when it’s broken by injustice, oppression or any other reason, the consequences are just as real and devastating.  For me, that’s a political reality. It’s separate from the poetic reality we seek as poets in language. I even think that mixing the two realities together is not healthy. There is this pressure on “othered” writers and poets to transcend their personal backgrounds and difficulties through the act of writing. That’s an attempt at incorporating their voices, and I believe one should resist it. The things that happen to us in life end up in our poetry in some way or the other, whether we like it or not. There is a difference between writing from your experience as a Palestinian, and positioning yourself as a Palestinian in order to write. Ideologically speaking, the latter is easier, even convenient, for the receiving culture to digest. Your voice or your writing has been already framed within the ideological parameters that include you as an “other” but limit your inclusion as a poet, or as someone whose main concern is to grapple with language. I would like to see my grappling with the English language being appreciated on its own terms as poetry, without any framings and not as a personal attempt to alleviate past wounds from my background. 

Brandon Hackbarth: Your poetry featured in Great River Review is both focused on particular objects (mouth/tongue/lips/letters) and unabashedly engaged with abstraction and ambiguity. I’m also preoccupied with the finitude of word-meaning, especially as it relates to effacing temporal shifts and narrative structure. How does your use of enjambment & white space deal with this tension---that of language ultimately failing to clearly describe our perceptions and experiences? How do you negotiate the balance between the two?

“Language ultimately failing to clearly describe our perceptions and experiences” I highlight those words from your questions because I’m thinking “that’s about right! Especially now!” Language is the most cliché of “the materials” for art. It’s all over the place, and we tend to fall into certain patterns of using it in our day-to-day lives that make it even oppressive. I think technology has probably contributed to that a great deal, we tend to fit our languages into strict parameters. Language is no longer the breath that defines us and comes out naturally to signal our identities in terms of locals and regions. It’s something else. It’s becoming more and more rigid and fixed. So I believe that the ultimate challenge for poetry as an art is to save itself from the redundancy forced upon it by our reliance on technology to interact with one another, and to spread the word, so to speak. I hope I’m not being redundant myself as I type away at this answer.

Chi Kyu Lee: Your affinity for Dickinson is really interesting to me. It seems like sound, a kind of sonic density or liveliness, is something you have in common. I wonder if you could comment on how you think about the sound or music of a poem as you write it.

I try not to think about it too much, and let it happen. Maybe. I’m not sure. But when I was reading Dickinson, I could just hear her words striking my ear-drums, and the cranks in my mind were simply shifting with her sounds. I got into a routine of reading her every morning, picking a line or two that were semantically and musically striking, and then I would respond to them mostly in an imitation of her own music. After months and months of imitating her music, I began to consider responding with mine. I still cling to the idea that poetry should be musical and not simply tonal. To put the tone to some sort of tune is my preferred way of going about the act. But to answer your question more directly, I try not to go about the music in poetry in any direct way. I create many musical experiments that I tend to discard, and I keep at it until I reach something that is both semantically and musically sound. And sometimes—as you can see here, I can’t resist this ridiculous play on words. That’s also something I really like about Dickinson: the playfulness in some of her poems that you could share with a child…and that I often share with my daughter.   

Steven Blythe: Frustration is often an occasion for your poems. I mean that frustration, whether linguistic or personal, is surprisingly generative in your work. Do you find that writing poems is a way to solve or ameliorate frustration?

Simply, frustration as a mode of writing is much more interesting to me than always knowing what to say.

Nen Ramirez-Gorski: I read in an interview you did with The Daily Pennsylvanian that you felt that your poetry in Arabic improved after writing Bitter English. I was wondering if you could say a bit about how translation has affected your own writing.

Even if I did say something along these lines, I don’t believe it to be true now. To be honest, I don’t know what happened to my poetry in Arabic, and that is the tragedy of being disconnected from your native land and your mother-tongue. You don’t feel like you are “in the know” about the details that once defined you, and most importantly for a poet, the language that made you. That’s the reality of being displaced, and translation is another reality of that fact. Bottom line: I don’t get to escape translation, even if I want to. Is it good, is it bad? Only time will tell.

Peter Campion: Your discussion of translation reminds me of how your poems are so often engaged with other poets—with Dickinson as Chi-Kyu mentioned, and also with Seamus Heaney in “To the Music of What Happens.” All of which leads me to ask a simple question: what have you been reading recently that has inspired you?

I feel this question is my opportunity to sound pretentious…which I’m going to pass. Let me say: I read at random whatever falls into my hands…while reserving a special contempt for most (not all­­—and thank god for those exceptions!) contemporary stuff…I guess it goes without saying that I’m not very good at networking or connecting with “the poetry scene.” Maybe I’ll reform in 2021. Maybe not.     

Nen Ramirez-Gorski, Chi Kyu Lee, Brandon Hackbarth, Said Farah, & Steven Blythe are MFA candidates at the University of Minnesota.

Peter Campion is an American poet. He graduated from Dartmouth College with a BA, and from Boston University with an MA. He taught at Washington College, Ashland University, and Auburn University. He currently teaches at University of Minnesota and heads the Department of Creative Writing there.

Ahmad Almallah’s debut collection, Bitter English, is now available in the Phoenix Poets Series from the University of Chicago Press. He received the 2018 Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize for Creative Writing, and his set of poems “Recourse,” won the 2017 Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship. Some of his poems appeared in Jacket2, Track//Four, All Roads will lead You Home, Apiary, Supplement, SAND, Michigan Quarterly Review, Making Mirrors: Righting/Writing by Refugees, Cordite Poetry Review and Birmingham Poetry Review. He holds a Ph.D. in Arabic Literature from IU-Bloomington and an MFA in poetry from Hunter College. He currently lives in Philadelphia and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania.