POET LORE
The Writer’s Center
A Clear-Eyed Vision The Poetics of Tarfia Faizullah By Helle Slutz
U
. S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey chose a portfolio of Tarfia Faizullah’s work for publication in Poet Lore’s current fall/winter issue. Though Faizullah’s work is new to Poet Lore’s pages, she has been widely recognized as an emerging voice in the national poetry community. She is the author of Seam (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), which won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, and the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and other honors. Guest editor Brenda Shaughnessy chose her work for publication in this year’s Best New Poets anthology. In her introduction to Faizullah’s work, Poet Laureate Trethewey speaks of her “gift of a clear-eyed vision both familiar and strange, a vision tinged with the inevitability of loss.” Faizullah’s poems, which lead the issue, lend universal weight to songs of personal experience and set the tone for an issue devoted to exploring the “news”from the interior - that poetry best delivers. In a recent interview with Poet Lore’s editorial assistant Helle Slutz, Faizullah opened up about her work and community of support.
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Could you talk a little about your relationship with U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey and her work? My first encounter with Natasha’s work was in graduate school at Virginia Commonwealth University, where I read Bellocq’s Ophelia for the first time. Since then, I continue to read everything I can get my hands on, from Domestic Work to Thrall, and many interviews in between. I’m drawn to her work for a number of reasons. Her work is as emotionally moving as it is intellectually ambitious, and I am in awe of how it both renders as well as interrogates the personal, the historic, and the political in poems that are as attentive to music as they are to craft. I first met Natasha personally a few years ago at the Lex Allen Literary Festival at Hollins University, where she was the writer-in-residence. One of the many reasons I am grateful to Natasha is the fact of her: she is a generous, brilliant, and successful woman of color who continues to motivate young writers like me to write the poems we want to write on our own terms.
Tarfia Faizullah
Photo by Arif Hafiz
Was there ever an extended period of time in which you didn’t write? What inspired you to start again? Lately I have been drawing a distinction between drafting and writing. Writing is a practice and a way of seeing the world and myself that I cultivate every day of my life, and drafting is the act of translating that seeing onto the page. In that way, I’m always writing, but not necessarily always drafting. That said, there have been times where I have felt without poetry, but in reading the work of others and trying to remain highly attuned to my own internal and external lives and the lives of others, I always find my way back.
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