I had never thought very hard about the fact that the letters that make up a word typically don’t touch each other (what typesetters call kerning), until I talked to Kaur about his book. Vowels and consonants standing there on their own, longing to lean, to rest, to reach beyond the enclosure of their form. Cursive – “to write with a running hand” – is a means of joining letters, or what an etymology dictionary rephrases as “joining hands.” Suddenly words become dashes of deindividuated collectivity – meaning made only through the fact they do and can achieve such hapticality together. These are the kinds of realizations Kaur’s debut book of poems gives us. Through a dazzling recursivity and repetition, Kaur’s Cursive Paradise busts out paradise’s historic mode of enclosure and lets the letters touch, lets us touch the letters. The poems make me want to trace each word with my finger. Meaning pools and spills, the velocity of longing ricochets off some distant horizon and returns us to the here and now, returning us to our own shadows. Returning us to our loss. Speaking of loss and paradise, it strikes me now as appropriate that last summer Kaur tattooed me with a figure of Milton as depicted by William Blake, our Ur-poet of Lost Paradise. The paradise Kaur offers us here is lush with shadows, and enacts a radical opacity that breaks from inherited scores into an improvisational present that doesn’t leave any draft or any version of itself behind. Kaur invites us to know and love each other and ourselves in our own obfuscation, trying for it recursively, trying for it again and again. This recursive again is the chorus of Kaur’s paradise—where he is in the practice of how to not-say something over and over. These poems arrive in the thickness of “not-saying” and in doing so, give us so much.
—Rosie Stockton

Rosie Stockton: I was rereading Cursive Paradise today, and I was thinking about how it's such a poet’s book. The language is so thick and sticky and slippery; everything means twice. There’s so much play, so much sliding of signifiers. As someone who goes crazy for language, your poems are really thrilling. Your language has a viscosity and is material in this way. You are both a poet, sculptor, and tattoo artist, and you work with a lot of different materials – glass, metal, ink – so with this in mind, I wanted to ask you if this book started with language for you, or another material?

Kaur Alia Ahmed: When I started the book, I put together the original draft as a manuscript of writing only. But usually in my process of writing, I draw around my poems, or I take fragments from pages of thought that are on the same pages where I've done drawing. I submitted this manuscript of writing to Wendy’s Subway, and then was like, I don't know if I like this. I wasn’t satisfied and decided that I needed to rewrite and redraw it and integrate the different versions. That doesn't really answer materiality, but when I use language I definitely think of it like a material I’m sculpting with or playing. So it doesn’t feel separate from the other forms I use that might be taken as more visual and physical— language is physical to me.

RS: That gets us to the form of the book: the poems appear amidst your drawings and tracings on the page. Often the poems appear with the same title twice, almost as if they’ve been translated, appearing with slight differences from the original. I think about Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets, and love the moments in the most recent Tender Buttons edition when first drafts of her poems appear alongside the “final” edit. It’s a treat for readers to see the poet’s process in this way. Layer upon layer.

But you are doing something different than “editing.” Actually, it reminded me of this essay that I had read of yours recently where you evoked a scene of shedding layers of clothes with a lover, where, counterintuitively, the more layers that are peeled back, the more solid the layers become, while the revealed body dissolves, instead of becoming more “real” in exposure. You then contrast that with the scene of yourself bowing in prayer at an Islamic day camp as a kid, and you write about the layering of language of prayer that you don't totally understand, but you know it's pointing towards God. In the two anecdotes God and the body have inverse mechanisms as they collapse with desire: the repetition of layering and un-layering is meaning, not what is hidden underneath. Is “layering” part of your writing method?

KA: I love your question about the gap and God and desire collapsing. I was thinking about that, what you said about it feeling counter intuitive—that where the body recedes or dissolves, the layers are shed. I feel like the more the body recedes and dissolves, the closer we move towards a space of desire and transcend the body to a space that is intuition and play and psychic magnetism, where God and desire collide. And in the book, in translating the language of the poems and presenting the layers as tracings, drawings and versions, I'm trying to express that space. That isn't something that can be articulated one way. It is difficult to describe how I did what I did, I guess…

RS: Yeah, like, if you could have said it any other way—without what is procedurally unfolded via this ghostly repetition—you would have…

KA: But also I am really aware of this being a poet’s book, and that the materiality of the language might make more immediate sense to a poet. I both like that and I feel bad about it. I don’t want to shut any reader out. So I’m trying to offer multiple access points to the meaning by articulating it with different gestures and words that come from the same place in my mind.

RS: The thing you said about the body is so beautifully put and I think has a lot at stake politically for how one relates to their own sense of self or imposed concepts of identity, especially for queerness and transness. You have a line that goes “my body will never be my own, but my shadow is my own.” I read you as undermining this regime of self-possession: the liberal fantasy that we possess ourselves, our bodies. I’m wondering what it means for you to have a more potent relationship to your shadow than your body, both in terms of the politics it suggests, and the relationship to gender, to your “self.”

KA: Yeah, that self-possession is political to me, connecting to a changing body, or shadow, a form that evades capture.

RS: I was gonna ask you if you're thinking about Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity while writing, because there's a lot of gesture towards omission or occlusion or shadow, even the last line of the book is kind of like this refusal of being definable, identifying with the rust on the mirror, not the image reflected back. This book is so dwelling in that opaque space between self and other, and offering, I would argue, this poetics of opacity.

KA: I'm definitely influenced by reading that text and Glissant’s concept of opacity. Especially in the line that you just quoted, I cling to the word grasp, and exceeding what is graspable. It is an intentional refusal to write against clarity, for the language to turn away from essentialism and disregard a route to being legitimized that would make it easy to take.

RS: The first and last poem of the book are called “gave me nothing to answer.” In a way, the whole book is an answer to the nothing you were given. The poems confront this meeting of refusals, of opacities. The poems are about what happens to desire and the body in this confrontation of otherness, confrontation of the non-response or the opaque response of the other. It’s a double refusal. You were given nothing to answer, and then there’s so much in response to the nothing…

KA: I don’t think what I’m about to say is really an answer. Again, I want to challenge a need for closure, but I worry about leaving the reader with nothing. I worry that writing about the gap between the self and the other, the gap between self and shadow, might leave the content unstable and lose the reader. That’s not what I want. If it leaves you with nothing to grasp, is there anything taken from it? To me, that gap is a refusal of resolve, which, even in the lightness of love poems, I see as political, but also, as a space of faith. I want to insist on transformation rather than resolve. I just wonder about the experience of reading the book when it’s that much void and refusal.

RS: But you also give so much. You translate your own poems, and they appear twice. Double refusal opens to a double giving. There is so much in the refusal that's offered: like, you have to say it again. You have to not know again. You have to not say it again.

KA: Yes. That again is in pursuit of formlessness, seeking something that keeps going, that continues. Again, faith?

RS: Speaking of form, I wanted to ask you about musical scores, which is also something I know you've worked with in the past. I wonder if there's like a metronome or even a musical technique that guided in the writing of this book, or if you think about musicality as you write?

KA: Definitely. In this book, I didn't have a strict metronome but in later writing and projects, as I've studied musical scores and created my own, I'm starting to put more order into my form, but this book is more improvisational music. Jazz? I have a clear plastic metronome in my room….I’m like, if I filled that with water, and it somehow still kept moving, that describes how I got here. Writing these poems I was driven by the sonic quality of the words. It felt like playing the language like an instrument. And when I draw, I follow the line with a speed and flow similar to dancing in that it is a physical trace of music. I might draw to the poem, hearing it in my mind or even reading it aloud. But I wouldn't say I was following one consistent beat or measure.

RS: That’s a beautiful velocity: it’s improvisational insofar as it’s trying to refuse a pre-scripted design of what will come next. And what “comes next” is a lot of recursivity and repetition. Poems repeat titles and lines repeat. But like Gertrude Stein says: “there’s no such thing as repetition.” It changes every time you repeat it. Which also seems like a question of translation. What was it like for you to translate the first poem into the second version, and leave both versions in the book? Do you think of them as translations?

KA: I do think of them as translations, definitely. The titles are repeated in sequence, to indicate that it’s the same poem in translation. Stein goes on to say that “the inevitable seeming repetition in human expression is not repetition, but insistence.” I’m drawn to that as meditation. Repetition directs focus to different points of consciousness. I have curiosity about how my description of this form might be taken. I have told people I see the poems as translations but I know that the way that appears in the book might not immediately make sense. It’s a kind of intralingual translation that doesn’t simplify the language, and I wonder if it gives any transparency back to the text. I’m excited about the multiplicity of meaning in the words, I invite them to be taken the wrong way. It’s about that? What I’m intending is purposefully open. A traditional translation of another writer’s poetry is fraught with the desire for accuracy. There are greater stakes there, in respect to the original intent, when working with the words of someone you might not know, or who is no longer alive.

RS: Do you think of the drawings also as translations, or do they have a different relationship to the poems?

KA: They are translations too. With each poem, I drew a second version, and then wrote another version. It wasn’t that the second written version was only in reference to the drawing, or that I erased the first version. It’s a conglomerate of both.

RS: And not to suddenly demand legibility in your process but I am curious, did you have a system for deciding which one would go on the white page and which ones would go on the black page?

KA: The white pages with line drawings are the first versions of each poem. The black page is the second version. I was inspired by the idea of a verso, and liked imagining the two versions on facing pages. That didn’t make sense because many of the poems are longer than a page, so Rissa Hochberger, who designed the book, and I came up with this system of differentiation.

The black pages also have silhouettes. To get those forms we took my glass sculptures and photographed my printed poems through them. Initially we wanted the image, even if it was somewhat obscured, to have some sense of legibility as text. The images we ended up with didn’t quite capture that and we were more interested in the shapes the light made—the way the text changed the light. It was another surface for the language to filter through. That’s what we paired with the second written versions of the poems.

RS: Speaking of light, there’s a lot of tension between light and dark, enlightenment and shadow. You have a line, “I light myself by my own obfuscation.” There’s reverse logic—anti-enlightenment era logic—that you deploy: you can know something in obfuscation that you can’t know in the light. There is a line in the book that’s like, “You want the moon in the day and the sun at night.”

KA: Oh yeah, that line talks about greed in desire. Wanting what can’t be known, wanting to evade being known. I am, now that you mentioned, thinking about shadow. Shadow feeling more true than the body relates to this space of obfuscation. It’s about ownership and gaze, and a shadow is a representation of the body that I control. I'm always writing between light and shadow. That space of obfuscation feels spiritual.

RS: I was thinking about the tattoo you gave me this summer, which is a William Blake etching of a shooting star falling into Milton’s left ankle as he receives divine inspiration to write. It pictures him bent in ecstasy, but also in extreme pain, this space of spirituality and inspiration. I want to ask, was the book inspired from a place of spirituality? What is your version of the“shooting star”?

KA: A lot of the time, making art feels compulsive— and I guess that word could sound negative, but I don’t mean it like that. Especially in drawing. It’s like I'm following a line that I'm supposed to. I have to, so I follow it. That is both a beautiful and painful feeling. Writing is like that when I let the language undo itself. I’m not a musician, but this happens in the way I imagine music might come to someone and spill out. But also, the book describes moments where I see divinity in the world, in desire, change, loss, in losing love, divinity in the temporality of a moment.

RS: There does feel like a cord of grief that runs through the book, partially about losing a love, but part of the grief seems to be about the way we miss each other before we’ve lost each other.

KA: There can be some grief in attaining love. It doesn’t make sense. A lot of my desire has been driven by fantasy and pursuit. Where it remains in motion, it feels alive.

RS: There's nothing worse than getting what you want.

KA: Exactly, yeah, it’s annoying. I mean, maybe when the lover gave me nothing to answer, that nothing is kind of the best gift. Then there’s the ending…

RS: What happens after the ending?

KA: After the ending? It’s either gone or it transforms into something else, maybe better.

RS: Which makes me want to ask – the book is called Cursive Paradise. Is paradise before you get what you want, or after you’ve gotten it?

KA: Wow, extremely good question. I don't know the answer. Honestly, I used to feel that it was before. But I think that’s changed for me—I’ve surrendered, thank god.

RS: Facts. How are you thinking about paradise while writing?

KA: I’m thinking about desire and lushness and what we think we want. A place where anything is possible or surpasses earthly logic. It’s eternal. Our bodies can change into everything, do anything. I was also interested in the etymology of the word “paradise.” The word comes from the Old Persian term “pairidaeza” which means “walled enclosure” or “garden surrounded by walls” —it was used to describe the gardens of royalty. It’s also the garden of Eden, the place for righteous souls, a place of bliss.

I talked about this to a teacher once, and we spoke about the garden as an elite space to own, privatize, design growth and beauty.

I want to challenge righteousness and enclosure to instead insist upon language that continues to unravel, like the letters flowing into each other in cursive, and in the recursive quality of the book’s translations. I find myself connecting that to surrender, and the again in devotional love where there is an eternal possibility of falling in love again and again through transformation. This version of paradise includes both pain and pleasure.

RS: May we be strong enough to have it — the again. So speaking of language paradises… what are you reading right now?

KA: I just reread an essay by Mirella Bentivoglio on language’s materialization that Mónica de la Torre sent me when I was writing Cursive Paradise. The essay speaks to gendered tools of poetic expression. She is also talking about linguistic code and iconic code sharing the same ideographic and pictographic roots, and a return to what language has always been first and foremost: sound.

I also just read the book that Wendy’s Subway published by Minh Nguyen, Memorial Park: Revisiting Vietnam. In the section where Nguyen is responding to the post-socialist condition, she asks, “what may we conclude from the central postmodern contention that there is no fixed meaning and that all realities are fragmented?” I’m brought to question my own desire to loop by the description of postmodernism as an endless present—a trap.

Right now I’m trying to generate lots of writing. I'm trying to write a poem every day.

RS: Every day! How's it going?

KA: It’s getting easier. I mean, I'm letting a poem be two lines, as well as two pages or longer, and that’s helpful, attainable. What’s important is the daily ritual—with the goal of creating a year-long poem or book.

RS: A durational practice.

KA: I'm also collecting some plays to read because I want to write another play. I wrote a play a couple years ago, but it didn't have a strong arc. I want to challenge myself to write a story, and learn how to build a strong narrative.

RS: So from formlessness to form—

KA: Yeah, I’m looking towards discipline and want to try forms that don’t come easily to me. I tried to sign up for a fiction class, but they put me in the poetry class.

RS: Well, you should write fiction in the poetry class.

KA: That’s true. I was really hoping for some guidance in that form. One of the plays that I found and started reading is by Joyelle McSweeney.

RS: One of the GOATs!

KA: And this play is really strange and funny. Julian Assange is the main character. And he published it on WikiLeaks. It's from 2016.

RS: Yeah, so is yours gonna have an equivalent kind of like Julian Assange character?

KA: I’m down to write a character like that.

RS: Well, we will all be on the edge of our seats for what you write next.