Hi Rafiq. Congratulations for your upcoming book.
Hope it all goes well. So first question, how did you first get into
poetry?
Poetry got into me, was always in me,
as it is in all of us, I suppose. It took the generosity of a group of friends,
in Manhattan's West village, who helped me plumb my depths, every Tuesday
evening, over ten years, to try recreate my mother who has been afflicted with
schizophrenia ever since I was a lad growing up in Kashmir.
Was that a writing group?
Yes, that was an amazing writing group.
Is there where most of your poetry
collection was written?
Substantially. Stuff got sorted at that
workshop. Later, at Columbia U, I had the privilege of working with teachers
who nurtured me as well as other students, naturally. We read seriously,
thematically...reading is crucial to writing...that is where my work was
structured, styled, chiselled.
When did you move to New York? I’m trying
to get an idea of how long after Howl you came to it?
I moved to NY when I was
21. Howl was first published in
1956 as part of a collection. I came to it nearly 20 years later.
What pushed you into poetry rather
than, say, prose?
My mother's madness, and a bit of my
own.
But I’m asking why poetry and not prose
or film or painting or butterfly collecting?
My first recollection is when I was
five/six years of age, my sister read me 'The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner' as
a bed time story. One night, when the rain and wind were desperate, she read,
Macbeth. I bet that was her home work assigned by the blessed nuns at the Jesus
and Mary Convent in Murree, Pakistan. Later, as a teen growing up in Kashmir, I
enjoyed hearing long-haired poets, wearing bell bottoms, recite Urdu ghazals at
poetry gatherings. That chutney must have formed an inner template, an inner
homeland for language.
What a lovely mix of east and west. Do
you write only in English?
I write only in English but I
have translated from the original Urdu selected poems of Sir Mohammad (Iqbal), one of the two great South Asian poets of the
20th century writing in Urdu.
Tell me a bit about the Urdu
Ghazals?
The ghazal (in Middle
Eastern and Indian literature and music) is a lyric poem with a fixed number of
verses and a repeated rhyme, typically on the theme of love, and normally set
to music...(that's copied and pasted from Google).
Many contemporary poets, including Paul Muldoon, have written ghazals
following its strict metrical discipline. The title of my collection, In
Another Country, is a ghazal, dedicated to my childhood friend, Agha Shahid
Ali, whose main contribution to contemporary English poetry is that he showed
many poets how to write it correctly. Sadly, Shahid died young...whom the gods
love die young.
What poets or poems would you recommend
a poet who is starting out should look at?
Depends on one's subject: mine was
defined for me by my mother's schizophrenia, which is substantially the subject
of my book, from the point of view of a lad growing up, even though it was not
until I was in my early thirties that I first learned exactly...in a
dispassionate way...how madness had torn apart my mother, and to a large extent
shaped the characters of her six children, the youngest drowned past November,
and Mother, who is still alive in New York does not know about it, but she
knows...mother's know, you bet.
But I digress, you asked me about
poets/poems I would recommend to young emerging poets: Norton Anthology of Poetry, latest
edition. It's over a 1000 pages, Chaucer
to present day. Each poet represented by at least 3/ 5 poems, some more. Read.
See who you connect with at a visceral level, who you enjoy reading. Then,
delve deeper into those poets.
That’s good advice, “see who you
connect with.” What writers do you admire? Who are your influences?
In addition to the Norton
Anthology, there are separate anthologies on specific subjects, as you may
know: on War, environment, race relations, sex/sexual orientation,
feminism, pets, madness...what's your subject?
Aside from Shakespeare, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge,
Byron, Keats, Eliot ... which were standard fare during school and college
in Kashmir, I was mesmerized, in New York, by the 'new' (for me) language in Allen Ginsberg's Howl.
You can draw a straight line
from Shelley's, "Ye are many-they are few," ( 'The
Masque of Anarchy') to "I saw the best minds of my generation
destroyed by madness..." ( Howl). I
connected to Howl at once. Next, upon
reading 'Kaddish,' I
discovered that Ginsberg's mother too was 'off kilter,' to put it kindly. That
sealed it. I absorbed all Ginsberg wrote. Through him I found my own
voice... such as it is.
I'm drawn to contemporary post Freudian
poems which speak to me specifically. That's not to say that pre Freudian poets
didn't have any notion of the subconscious. Of course, they did. Wordsworth is
perhaps the first pre Freudian poet who mentions 'that inward eye,' but I'm
quite certain Wordsworth was tipping his hat at the Bard.
Yet, for me the most compelling poet of
the pre Freudian era is Rumi who
says, "Stay with the pain and sorrow, for the wound is the place where the
Light enters you." Even Mr Sigmund couldn't have said it better himself.
Agree?
Tell us a bit about your links to
Ireland.
As the first non-Irish winner of the
Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award 2013 in 46-year history of the award, it’s not
just about the new multicultural Ireland, brilliant as that is, but it's also
about the proselytizing of the English language by Irish missionaries. Had it
not been for Father Galvin, McMahan, and Sisters Mary, and Aoife, who all
introduced me to the English language in my native Kashmir, I doubt if I'd
writing this.
Irish
literature has had a global reach, from Swift
to Heaney, and after Heaney, by the
established as well as emerging Irish women authors. The Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, who died in 2013, named
his seminal work after a line in a poem by Yeats,
Things Fall Apart, where you'll
discover gems borne of the Irish experience: ‘When the wind blows you see the
chicken's arse.'
We live
in a visual culture. In the film Mughal-e-Azam,
which is to Bollywood what Gone With
The Wind is to Hollywood, a polished marble statue of a beautiful
woman comes to life as a Mughal prince unveils it. Don't tell me that isn't a
nod to ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray.’
But in a
larger sense, we are all children of Lord Macaulay, and what the British did in
India they had already done in Ireland. There is a book out, ‘Masks of Conquest,’ by Gauri Viswanathan, a protégé of Edward Said, in which Gauri shows that
English Literature as a subject was first introduced in schools in India before
it was rolled out in England. That's pretty amazing.
We are
just starting to see, 200 years after the Minutes of Macaulay, the impact
English-medium education has had on India, now fast becoming the back office
for global capitalism. But we also see the English language enriching itself in
India: Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy-both
Booker winners, Amitav Gosh, a
prolific bi-continental author, to name just three at the tip of my tongue.
English language is the bridge that links an Emerald Isle at the edge of Europe
to my border town in the foothills of the Himalayas, where those blessed Irish
teachers always reminded us that Irish literature is the revenge the Irish took
on the British by infusing the English language with music.
Are you saying that you
personally do not have an Irish connection other than in the global world of
literature manner?
Of course I
have an ‘Irish connection,’ a physical link to Ireland: I have been
livinig here for the past 12 years, up in Ballyoonan, County Louth, where many
residents can’t even pronounce my name. Some call me Rafferty. Others call me
Dustin, for they say I look like Dustin Hoffman! And a few have been able to
wrap their Christian tongues around my heathen name. Thank you very much,
folks.
How do you share your time?
Don't you work in New York?
I share my time carefully. I work
for myself; so it’s not too hard to share my time between New York, Ireland and
Kashmir.
What
attracted you about Ireland?
I moved to
Ireland during the Celtic Tiger years to serve Ireland in my own cross-
cultural way. Took a mortgage out on a cottage. Soon, the tiger's roar turned
to a whimper, now it’s a whine. I cling on by the cuticles of my nails for I
love the usual bright things about Ireland, despite its mostly rainy days.
Sadly, things are falling apart, but I'm resilient, like Ireland herself.
I guess I'm asking why Ireland and
not Italy or Montenegro or South Africa?
Why Ireland: Personal
circumstances. I'd like to think it was destiny.
Do you have readings planned for
your neighbours and others in Co Louth?
Yes, have a reading planned for
my neighbors: small worldly group.
Thanks Rafiq and good luck with the launch.
The launch of Rafiq’s book, In Another Country is on 26th September
in the Patric Kavanagh Centre, Inniskeen, Co Monaghan.
Rafiq
Kathwari is the first non-Irish recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award, in
the forty four-year history of the award. He lives in Ballyoonan (Baile Uí
Mhaonáin), County
Louth, but has lived most of his adult life in New York. Born, as he puts it, “a Scorpio
at midnight” in the disputed Kashmir Valley, Rafiq has translated from the
original Urdu
selected poems of Sir Mohammed Iqbal, one of the handful of great South Asian
poets of
the 20th century writing in Urdu. He obtained an MFA in Creative Writing at
Columbia University
and a Masters in Political and Social Science from the New School University.
He divides
his time between New York City, Baile Uí Mhaonáin and Kashmir. In Another
Country is his debut collection and is available to purchase from Doire Press here with free worldwide postage.
Poetry Pamphlet Prize
Applications are currently being invited for the Michael Hartnett Poetry Award 2016, an annual scheme marking Newcastle West native Michael Hartnett’s contribution to literature in English and Irish.
The 15th annual award is jointly funded by the Arts Office of Limerick City and County Council and The Arts Council.
