Sara Elkamel: Sam, it’s so good to be seeing you and hearing your voice, after so many emails. I have a sense we’ve all been resenting Zoom over the past few months—for replacing non-virtual engagement; but it’s still a wonder to be able to connect while we’re oceans apart.
Samuel Ugbechie: Yes, it’s lovely to connect, Sara. Are you still by the sea with your family?
Sara: Yes! I’m currently with my father on the North Coast in Egypt, on the Mediterranean. We’ve been coming here since I was a child, so it feels like a second home to me. It’s nighttime now though, so you probably can’t tell at all where I am—especially with this bare white wall behind me.
Samuel: It’s still daytime here in Edmonton. The weather feels good and I hope to bike around the block later in the day. We don’t get visited by this kind of weather all the time, so I try to make the best of it while it lasts.
Sara: You know, one of my favourite writers, Iman Mersal, lives in Edmonton and teaches at the University of Alberta. It’s such a funny coincidence that the only two people I know in Edmonton are poets!
Samuel: Oh, I don’t think I know Iman Mersal! Please, tell me more about her.
Sara: Iman is a fellow Egyptian. She’s primarily a poet (working in Arabic), but she’s also written a couple of nonfiction books that I adore. I could talk about why I love her poems for hours—but I think for now I’ll just say that they resonate with my spirit, as if they were written specifically for me.
Samuel: That’s beautiful. I will definitely look her up then. It strikes me that you chose to refer to the effect that Iman’s work has on you as a reader, without necessarily describing the craft elements behind the work. I’ve been looking up your work lately, and it’s actually sparked my interest in craft. I’ve always been curious about how writers approach their works. So I would really like to begin by asking you how you approach a poem. Do you have a plan or an outline of what you want the poem to say, or do you just take the risk, and go with the flow (like what is termed pantsing in prose)?
Sara: I can actually never decide before I sit down to write what the poem will be about. I’ve had several writing desks, in Cairo, New York, and Amman, and somehow they all end up looking the same—I assemble a few books I’m reading at the time, objects I’ve collected from travels, artworks by friends, and I keep a stack of loose, blank paper to draft on. So I settle down at the desk, and whatever wants to come out that day will surface. Sometimes, I will be taking notes for a few days before I draft a new poem. I often write ‘in response’ to other people’s poetry or films—so I keep my notebook nearby when I’m reading or watching a film. Over the past year for instance, I’ve written poems inspired by poets I love, such as Iman Mersal and Carl Phillips, and a few films, including Date Wine by Radwan Al-khashef, The Wind Will Carry Us by Abbas Kiarostami, and Before I Forget by my friend Mariam Mekiwi. I also jot down snippets of conversations or dreams, and when I sit down to write, I’ll use my notebook like a word bank.
Samuel: Insightful. So there’s no theme in mind? You don’t say I want to write about landscape, or about love, or about birds?
Sara: No, honestly, it just happens. I often feel like I have very little control over the process of bringing a poem to life. Once it’s on the page, I can begin to intervene. But its journey from brain to page is out of my hands.
How about you? What’s your process like—do you decide in advance what you will write about on a particular day, or do you just let it happen?
Samuel: I try both ways. Sometimes I plan and create an outline. Most times, though, I go with the flow. Recently, I’ve planned a handful of my poems. Still, both ways seem to have something in common: I don’t know how the poem would end. I might not know how to even start it. I might know what to say but I wouldn’t know the first line. For example, I wrote a poem yesterday about a kite. The kite was a metaphor for something unknown. I just had a good feeling for the word ‘kite’ and wrote it down in my poetry document. I didn’t know what it was going to speak about for a while. Then recently the full picture began to crawl into my mind and I began to write the relationships that crept out as I pondered on ‘kite’ and all its contours and frames. While writing it, it suggested its own flow and ending and I followed. So in both ways, I still have to go with a ‘flow.’
Sara: I wonder if you also go with the flow in terms of the poem’s final form? I ask because I noticed a few of your poems are set in couplets, but we also see a more sprawling form with interspersed white space, for example in ‘Scars of Utterance.’ At which point do you decide the form of a poem? Does the form also appear with the flow, or do you originally compose the piece in couplets, or whichever form you end up with?
Samuel: I write like I’m writing prose. I don’t line-break it until I’m through with the first draft. My poems take up the full width of the page, and then I begin to shape them. I employ a handful of shapes when I write, but many of my poems seem to mould into couplets. I know some poets insert line breaks as they write, but I don’t write that way.
Sara: I actually have a very similar process! And sometimes, the draft serves as the raw fabric that I then shape into a ‘kite’ that can fly—to steal your metaphor. Which I actually wanted to ask you about—I noticed that in your poetry, which I really enjoy and admire, figurative language is really abundant. (For example, I love: “There’s an utterance / of dawn on the laundry / of my breath” in ‘Scars of Utterance’.) So I’m wondering what role figurative language plays for you, and if you think in metaphors, if they come easy, or if this is something you have to work to construct.
Samuel: This is a beautiful question. I’ve written in a handful of ways, shamelessly stealing styles from poets I admire :). I try to make music when I make poems. Speech-music. Mark Tredinnick is the poet I first read using this term to describe poetry. Music is like a foundational principle in my poems. To paraphrase Glyn Maxwell’s thoughts, captured in his book, On Poetry, poetry is written on silence. He calls this silence whiteness or white page. Another example I can think of is that of song lyrics; song lyrics, as we know, rely on their rhythm to make musical sense. In other words, to become music, we sing them.
If you strip a lyric off its music or rhythm, it would sound bland or fall flat, because its rhythm is gone and it can’t survive on silence. Poetry, however, makes musical sense on silence or ‘white page,’ to borrow from Maxwell. Unlike lyrics, poems need not be sung. They’ll sing anyway, because of how their sentences run. A poem’s music is inbuilt, inherent in its words and sentences. No music or song needs to sit beneath it. Just silence. And it’ll still make musical sense.
That said, as I try to make music, I also try to create some elements of surprise and tension in my lines. Everybody likes surprises, I guess? I’m trying to compare objects or images that are unrelated. I’m trying to compare a stomach with a river, or a bird with an ocean. I’m trying to create surprising metaphors, which is difficult and sometimes a struggle. Some of the poems I admire possess a main or major metaphor flowing through the entire piece. There are also poems I love that employ a variety of metaphors or images.
Sarah Rice’s poem, ‘Speaking Bluntly,’ which won the 2014 Ron Pretty Poetry Prize, uses different cloth fabrics as metaphors for vocal texture or speech. As the poem grows, she employs a point system (Braille) and other images to fertilize the poem even more. They enrich the poem and make it memorable. Hers is a poem furnished with a variety of images.
Contrast that with Chinua Ezenwa-Ohaeto’s poem, ‘A Page from My Diary,’ published in 20.35 Africa’s Vol. II. It contains quite a handful of images, but employs a major or leading image, the ‘mouth.’ From the image ‘mouth,’ Chinua cleverly plucks other images and objects that relate to the ‘mouth.’ Beer, prayers, screams, microphone, food, rinse. But Chinua is a skilful poet. He employs even unrelated objects, and compares them with ‘mouth.’ In one line, “A girl once walked into it and became a blackboard.” How can a girl walk into a mouth? Impossible. But that’s a literary device employed there and it creates surprise, and when the rhythm is right it captures your senses (our proclivity for music as humans) before you even consider making logical sense of it. Beautiful poems, both of them.
Sara: I found that poem by Chinua very moving. I’ve been thinking about the line “My mother puts prayers inside my mouth” since I read it. There is something simultaneously tender and violent about it, implying both gift and violation. And like you, I was impressed by how the writer was able to stretch and extend the mouth metaphor throughout the poem. Elsewhere in 20.35 Africa’s Vol. II, I noticed more examples of these dynamic metaphors. In Saddiq Dzukogi’s stunning poem ‘Figment’, for instance, the speaker’s son’s milk teeth become bits of a puzzle, which in turn become a map. Saddiq writes: “My son cannot wait for his milk teeth to fall / from his mouth. He wants to pick them up, / save them below his pillow like bits of a puzzle— / perhaps a map to something valuable.”
I remember that in his Editor’s note to the anthology, Ebenezer Agu stated: “Never in the African poetic history has writing become as self-indulgent as it is now, & we can all agree that this is a productive liberty.” I believe that metaphor-making is incredibly self-indulgent; it feels like such a personal (and delicious) endeavour, to search your own spirit and mind for connections. And to then communicate that seemingly strange or unlikely association to a reader—I find it very freeing and bold. I do think the writers in this anthology, and in the work of contemporary African poets I am reading, are employing figurative language in the service of nuance, and as a way to luxuriate in self-reflection.
I also found that in the anthology, poets were reflecting not just on their personal experiences (with memory, sexuality, and spirituality, for instance) but on the significance of mothers and fathers as well. Both poems we discussed, by Chinua and Saddiq, are perfect examples, and there’s also ‘God is a Mother and She is Everywhere, Everywhere’ by Megan Ross. And I’m now thinking of one of your poems, ‘A hundred-mile breath’, and those two gorgeous lines: “to disembowel fear, / as mom says, by rubbing it on my face.” Do you remember how you constructed this image? And do you know why you often make references to the mother figure in your poems?
Samuel: I was trying to explain what it means to confront one’s fear by dismantling it. “Rubbing it on my face” was just a way of saying confront, or face one’s fears.
A publisher spoke to me some time ago about one of my poetry manuscripts. He wanted to know who ‘mother’ is in my poems. Sometimes I’m referring to my mother, sometimes a friend’s mother or a fictional mother. My poems often capture true stories I’ve been told or some fictional worlds I built while writing the poem.
Sara: I too oscillate between repurposing stories from my life and the lives of people I know, and creating fictional, even mythical worlds. That’s definitely not something I could do in my work as a journalist.
Samuel: That’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you about, actually. I saw your work in The Huffington Post and Guernica, and all the interviews you did. And I was thinking: she is big. Why is she in poetry? You seemed to be doing so well in journalism, what got you into poetry?
I believe that, irrespective of what I write about, if I employ these techniques and devices, people will find themselves in one of the provinces or cities or corners or huts in my poems.
– Samuel Ugbechie
Sara: I started doing journalism when I was still in undergrad. In 2009, I did this internship at an English-language newspaper here in Cairo, where they asked me to cover hard news. One of the first stories I was assigned was the Islamophobic murder of Marwa El-Sherbin, an Egyptian, Muslim woman in Germany. I was only 19, but I pursued the story seriously and reached out to Marwa’s family, and it was absolutely devastating. I did the work, but it definitely took an emotional toll on me. So for my following internship, I asked the editor if I could write about art and culture. I started covering visual art, and I was really grateful for the opportunity to talk to artists about their processes. Then when the revolution happened in 2011, I found myself at the intersection of arts and politics; so many artists were active in protests, and you couldn’t cover one without the other. Then one thing led to another, and I went to New York to do a Master’s in arts journalism at Columbia. But I remember being there and fantasizing about writing creatively. I think my heart was never fully into journalism. I was very restless. At the same time, I was very drawn to poetry. So I took some writing classes in New York, and slowly forged more and more space for it in my life.
Samuel: Were there some poets you read that inspired you, that made you kind of think poetry could be a thing for you?
Sara: A couple of years before I moved to New York, I bought this book called Beirut39, which was a collection of work, including poetry, short prose and novel excerpts, by Arab writers under the age of 39. One poem in particular, ‘A Little Sugar’ by Jordanian writer Hussein Jelaad, was enough—its lyricism and narrative elasticity floored me and found a nest in my spirit. I was also reading a lot of Iman Mersal, Anne Carson, Kimiko Hahn and Ben Lerner in New York. Because of a class I took with Alan Ziegler at Columbia, I was reading a lot of short prose, which I guess was a more friendly entryway into poetry. Even though a prose poem can be quite technical, visually at least, it wasn’t intimidating. I thought well, maybe I could write a block of text too! Of course, now I know it’s not just a block of text.
Samuel: I think of journalism as prose. When writing a piece of prose, what are you doing differently from writing a poem?
Sara: While writing a poem, I relinquish a lot of control. I write whatever wants to escape my subconscious and make its way into the form of language. I think that the boundaries between truth and fiction are so much more malleable in poetry. It’s very interesting to me that when we say poetry, we don’t say fiction or nonfiction, we just say poetry. And it feels very true to the form that the distinction is not clearly defined. Sometimes, I do write in first-person, and I am the speaker in a large way, but other times I just completely create these fictional narratives and speakers. In prose, though, certainly if it’s journalism, you’re trying to de-personalize the speaker, and not insert them into the text. While in poetry, I think you’re trying to create a compelling speaker; even if the story they’re telling is not that interesting, you want the reader to trust your speaker enough to keep reading. In journalism, you have to have a compelling narrative, or else you lose the speaker. It’s a great question, I’m happy to be thinking about it.
Samuel: When you write a piece of prose, do you think of its sound?
Sara: When I’m writing prose, it’s not that I never think of sound, but I’m not dominated by it, I’m not ruled by it. In poetry, however, because the scale is much smaller, I feel like I can afford to be very exact with sound. But even in poetry, I’m not always thinking of sound.
Samuel: I’m beginning to think some poets use sound or rhythm subconsciously or naturally without thinking much about it. I’m looking at your poem ‘Buried at Sea’ in The Adroit Journal, and ‘The Prestige of Terror’ in Winter Tangerine, and they’re both quite musical in my ears. Are you saying this isn’t intentional?
Sara: Sometimes, it is very intentional; I will revise for sound, and try to get it just right, but other times the poem surfaces with its own sound. And sometimes, I don’t really hold sound as the governing factor.
Can I ask you the same question you asked me earlier—how did you arrive to poetry?
Samuel: As a teen, I knew I wanted to be a poet. It was like an epiphany, kind of. And it doesn’t make sense when I think of it today, but I just knew I should be writing poems, although the poems I wrote then were, of course, bad poems. A friend of mine introduced me to the late country musician, Don Williams. The music was so good that I started reading his lyrics, and I found his language poetic. I was asking myself then: Why does he have to bend things? For example, there was a line in his song that says “age in your eyes”, which might sound cliche to some (I think good music makes beauty out of cliches), but as a teenager then, it sounded creative. I was thinking, why not just say, “you’re old?” How he bent language captivated me. Then the same friend introduced me to Tupac. All I knew about Tupac then was Hit ‘em up, a diss track that doesn’t portray the full poetic genius of the rapper. Listening to Tupac then, it was the same experience, a bending of language and poetry. Although I rarely listen to Tupac these days, I still remember some of his beautiful poetic lines. I started trying to write like these musicians, and that was how I started getting into poetry.
Sara: And did moving to Canada change anything about the way you write?
Samuel: I can’t really point to some inflection or bend or curve in my writing that’s been carved from my travels. But I think I have more topics or themes to write about because of them. So yes, there are thematic changes, but nothing aesthetic or stylistic. I’ve just had more things to say and some life experience. I’ve written about cities in countries I’ve lived in like England and Canada.
Speaking of travel, there’s one of your poems in Jet Fuel Review I really liked, ‘Finally the Land Is Surrounded By Seeds.’ It’s a touching and religious poem about the freedom (or lack thereof) to move across lands. I enjoyed reading the poem. I googled the meaning of the word, ‘Rizq’. I felt that to understand the poem fully, I had to find out what it meant. I researched it, and now I understand Rizq to mean ‘destined provision.’ Is that correct?
Sara: That’s correct.
Samuel: It’s a beautiful poem. You wrote about a religious concept. You succeeded in brilliantly infusing your thoughts into the concept, expanded the concept a bit without altering it, by striking an enviable balance between the personal and the religious. It’s beautiful to be able to engage a religious concept like that.
Sara: It was a challenging poem to write because I was writing it in English, obviously, for readers that are not necessarily familiar with the concept. And I couldn’t really find a translation for it in English, so I had to use the word as it is, and ask the reader, informally, to do what you did, which is to go and find the meaning for themselves. It’s always tricky to write something that’s so rooted in Egyptian or Muslim culture for an English-language reader, without feeling like I’m translating myself too much, or that I’m explaining something, which I don’t really feel like I want to do. It’s already frustrating enough that I find myself writing in English when my mother-tongue is Arabic. So, you mentioned finding a balance in the poem between the religious concept and the personal story, and personally, I’m always much more interested in the personal story, but it was important to draw a context for it somehow. It’s a great question, and it’s a constant struggle.
I wanted to ask you if you also find it challenging, limiting, or perhaps exciting to be writing poems that will be read by people who might not necessarily share your background or your context?
Samuel: I have this assumption—and I might be wrong about it—that the language of creative writing, whether it’s poetry or fiction or creative nonfiction, is universal. I think there’s a common language there: the features of creative writing that attract people to it. I’m talking about the way we tell stories, the way we use and bend and alter language, the way our sentences think and sing and run or roll on their tracks, the way we engage the world and employ metaphors and musicality and other literary devices. I believe that, irrespective of what I write about, if I employ these techniques and devices, people will find themselves in one of the provinces or cities or corners or huts in my poems. I believe they could find themselves in one of my sentences or images or metaphors, or fall in love with a line or two. I believe that, in creative writing, how you write matters more than what you write about. Many people seem to come to creative writing for the stories, and for something more than the stories; the language, the creativity, the sentences. This affords me some freedom to write what I want to write. In one of my poems, I used some Igbo words and I felt, given my engagement with that universal language of poetry and creative writing, people would appreciate what I was trying to do in the poem. It’s kind of the way people enjoy music that’s sung or written in a foreign language or a language they don’t understand. Art—music, dance, poetry, fiction—seems like a universal, unifying and powerful piece of the human experience that everyone could fit themselves into.
Sara: I am really intrigued by this idea, Sam. I think, for now, I am leaning towards the belief that poetry can be isolating as much as it can be a unifying force. There’s a lot around accessibility, the limits of language (and translation), as well as modes of publishing that are keeping me from surrendering to the idea of poetry as universal. But I look forward to discussing this again with you in the future—maybe my position will change. I am curious how our ideas and approaches to poetry will change over time.
Samuel: Yes, I am too, Sara. Let’s definitely keep this conversation going! It must be getting late for you, should we call it a night?
Sara: Yes, I have to be up early to have breakfast with my dad! And you’re probably eager to go on that bike ride.
Samuel: Yes, that’s true! Well, have a good night, Sara.
Sara: Thank you, Sam!
Sara Elkamel is a poet and journalist living between her hometown, Cairo, and New York City. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at New York University. Named a 2020 Gregory Djanikian Scholar by The Adroit Journal, Elkamel has had poems appear in The Common, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Nimrod International Journal, Four Way Review, The Boiler, Winter Tangerine, and as part of the anthologies Halal If You Hear Me and 20.35 Africa, among other publications.
Samuel Ugbechie has works published or forthcoming in Ruminate Magazine, Palette Poetry, Aurora Poetry, Nottingham Review. His poetry manuscript, Monologue of Fire, recently won the Many Voices Project Prize from the New Rivers Press, and will be published in book form in 2021. He is the winner of the 2020 Aurora Poetry Winter Contest, the 2016 Frederick Holland Poetry Collection, and his works have been recognized in awards like the Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize, Into the Void Poetry Prize, and others. He tweets @sugbechie.