An Art of Mystery: A Conversation with Tarfia Faizullah

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Seam (SIU 2014) and Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf 2018). Her work appears in Yale Review, The Nation, Poetry Magazine, Guernica, American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets, BuzzFeed, PBS Newshour, and the like, and is reviewed by NPR, Slate Magazine, Paris Review, Boston Review, Ms. Magazine, and others. Her awards include a Fulbright fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes, as well as awards from the Writers League of Texas and a Texas Institute of Arts and Letters. She occasionally serves as faculty at Bread Loaf Writers’ Environmental Conference and Sewanee Writers’ Conference, among others, when she is not busy being an introvert. In 2016, Harvard Law School recognized Tarfia as one of 50 Women Inspiring Change.

The following conversation took place on Monday, September 9, 2024 in Tarfia Faizullah’s office, which is in the Auditorium Building, on the campus of The University of North Texas.

Dan DeVaughn: How would you describe the creative writing program here at UNT? In your experience, what makes it special or unique?

Tarfia Faizullah: The UNT program is, in my opinion, ideal for introverts—there’s a pretty natural pendulum here between people doing their individual work and converging as a community. It’s a really good program for anybody who is a self-starter, and needs support, as we all do, and also needs plenty of room to do what they do on their own. Many of the PhD students I’ve encountered, for example, have pretty specific projects that they’re working on already and have been working on for some time. This is a great place to finish a book, and a great place to make headway on one. And Denton itself is a small liberal arts town, a pretty small progressive stronghold, in what’s thought of as an unprogressive state. Although I don’t need to go into Texas and its mythos…

We’re a little bit outside of the city, which can be nice, and at the same time we have proximity to the city, and programming in Dallas or Fort Worth. So, if you’re somebody who is okay with some wide open spaces both metaphorically and literally, then this is a great program for you. The faculty here are just nerdy and passionate enough about their own work, and about the field in general, that you’re dealing with people who are definitely in-touch in terms of what’s going on [in the wider poetry community], but also perfectly out of touch.

Obviously, I think every creative writing program has its pitfalls. No single creative writing program can create a writer or solve a writer’s problems. We’re not saviors here, but the folks here–I keep saying the words earnest and sincere.

DD: I wonder if you could talk about community, your own thoughts on having a community or being a part of a community, or being in conversation with one. Poetry is such a solitary craft and pursuit, so what does community mean to you as a poet? 

TF: We need each other! And I also need to go home after a while. I guess I find community equal parts threatening and reassuring. Being an artist in community with other artists is always a bit daunting—everybody is always on their own path and sometimes the way that your path converges with another person’s is challenging. You get kind of jolted into awareness around, Well, here’s what I’m not doing. Here’s who I am not. For example, I often compare myself to angry, edgy minimalists, you know.

DD: Like Paul Celan?

TF: Yeah, exactly. I guess my own path is one that seems to be evolving into more sentimental than I want it to be, more whimsical. I’m basically a big baby, you know, who cares too much about the things that I care about. Poetry is a container, the safest container I have found for those things. That’s the other thing about poetry, the realization that there are many rooms of poetry, and we all wander into all of them. Perhaps community gives me a kind of space to do that, so that I’m not always just having a self-indulgent conversation with myself. It’s important to be in community in conversation with others. But it’s definitely a vacillation between my fear of people and my love of people. I guess community lives somewhere in between.

DD: Sure, I can relate to that. I think that most poets probably can relate to that. A fear, or even terror of other people, and love at the same time, and the wrestling between the two happens on the page in some way.

TF: Sometimes the most accurate response I have to anything is a poem, not further conversation. And—like I said, this is my first interview in a while—in part because I feel deeply resistant to explaining myself too much or to talking too much about what I’m working on before I’m ready to talk about it. So, sometimes in that way community can feel like a kind of surveillance that, feels a little…well, we’ll put that in the ‘threatening’ column. And as a teacher I’m always emphasizing to my students the point is to figure out how to think for yourself and find stability in your own vision. Ideally, the value of the vision of another person, is that it clarifies your own perspective.

DD: As a sort of a follow-up to that, do you think the “poetry world,” especially in the United States, the scene of American poetry, do you think that it’s changing? In what ways might it be unchanging or stable or very much the same as it’s always been.

TF: You know, for about the last year or so I have just been proclaiming that I don’t believe in change, which I mean a bit provocatively on purpose. What I mean is I’m not sure I believe in the seeming fallacy of “progress.” I feel that we live in cycles. We are experiencing a lot of things that we swore would never happen again, for example, that keep happening. Whether we’re talking about genocide or everyday violence or racism or any of the -isms, frankly, I mean, I think those keep happening, so it’s hard to believe that change as it’s sold to us is real. That said, I do believe in personal transformation–and I believe that enough of us were invested in self-transformation, then actual progress could occur.

DD: Maybe even the question is a fallacy. Is there, in fact, a ‘poetry scene’ or a ‘poetry world’?

TF: Yeah, is there? It certainly feels like it sometimes. I feel both intrigued and curious about it, and also, like, middle fingers up at the same time. I want to be invited to the parties, and then I want to not go [laughter]. And then when I do go, I fully reserve the right to complain about it the entire time, while also having a blast with my friends. Maybe that’s how I feel about scene in general.

At the same time, I don’t know if there’s a poetry scene or not. It feels made up, you know? What we call hierarchy can feel made up as well. At the same time, there are real forces that have the power to make change. There are organizations and institutions have real power to make broad and big changes. And whether they do or do not are sort of ultimately up to the powers that make up those organizations, right?

I’ve heard people talk about a sea change and I think what they mean is that more people of color are being published, but I have complicated feelings about that, and ambivalent feelings about representation in the first place.

DD: Could you speak to that a bit further?

TF: I’ve gotten myself into this… I think representation is… It’s not nothing, but sometimes it feels along with kind of the fallacy of hope, a cheap opiate for the masses. As if we should be content with just more of us in the building, for example. [Not to mention] the fact that people of color have been making art since the beginning of time, so what kind of change are we talking about.

That’s why perspective is important—I think identity is a subset or a filter of perspective. I think the lesson of poetry is that you can be anywhere at any time, in any moment in your life, and figure out a way to be attentive to the world that takes into consideration both your metaphysical interiority and your physical surroundings, and who you’re in community with, and who you aren’t. And that’s a conversation you end up having with yourself.

DD: Speaking to those inner and outer worlds, and the divide between them, for me, one of the things a poem does is provide a landing zone or a station, a stanza, between the inner and the outer world, and the two coming into conflict with one another and I think we should never ignore any of those parameters or labels or anything like that. You shouldn’t ignore any of them. You can take them all into account, but it’s a matter of what you’re deciding to identify with. Are you glomming onto one and saying this encompasses me as a person. I think that’s when you potentially could get into trouble, saying, ‘That’s me. This is me.” That can be dangerous, and limiting. It’s a potentially limiting and always reductive, or incomplete, perspective.

TF: I remember there was a journal that wanted me to do a guest editing stint on Identity, or on Diversity, etc. I appreciated the invitation, but I ended up saying, ‘I’d rather do it on surrealism.’ Because I think the de facto idea is that, oh, well, because she writes from a place of identity, then she must be only interested in that, right? And then I think the truth of the matter is that poets are broadly often interested in so many topics that have nothing to do with what we’re seen as.

DD: Yeah, that’s such a delicate line to dance or balance on because you don’t want to seem reactive or angry. You know, like, ‘That’s not me. Stop labeling me.’ At the same time, you want other people to see you in the way that you see yourself, right? It’s impossible, but you can try.

TF: Right, exactly. That’s what poetry does—strives to make that which seems impossible to describe more legible.

DD: Could you speak a little more to your disbelief in change?

TF: I don’t believe in change—but I desperately want to be talked out of my disbelief. It’s more accurate to say I don’t believe that systems are as invested in “change” as they are in selling the idea of it—which keeps systems from actually having to change. And I think about Octavia Butler saying, “All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you.” Which is why I believe in personal transformation, and I believe that even as I believe that systematic change seems to have eluded us thus far.

DD: What about progress, Like cultural, political progress?

TF: I think it’s possible, but requires personal transformation.

DD: It sounds like maybe you’re speaking to change in a seasonal or ecological sense, cyclical in that sense.

TF: Yeah, I think we’re on a planet spinning through space so we are just going to naturally hit ourselves over and over again. You know? I mean, we’ve never been able to really solve the question for why racism continues, why genocide continues. In the 1940s poets were trying to write about the Holocaust, and now in 2024, poets are trying to write about Palestine, and Sudan. So 80 years later, what have we learned?

DD: This speaks to my general disdain for what I call advice poetry, how you can finally live your truest life or be your best self. Or even poems that are like, “How to Survive ____.”

TF: Survival and healing are actually very bloody affairs.

DD: Also, who wants to “survive”? It sounds like a sad, Capitalist consolation.

TF: That’s why my goal has been for some time what I call “solid mediocrity.” Mediocrity being a goal, instead of, say, excellence, really saves me from dwelling too much on the failures of my own potential. I have found that if I give myself permission to be just mediocre, usually I will naturally float a few inches above that and actually achieve what we call excellence. Maybe I’m just coming up with new ways to trick myself into pushing myself, but without so much strum und drang.

DD: Because we usually naturally revolt against our own parental tendencies. I do.

TF: Yeah. I have to trick myself into everything.

DD: And then it begs the question of who are you doing this for?  

TF: Yeah, exactly.

DD: Who’s the police man in your brain making you do this?

TF: Yeah, and I think in a way this goes back to community. I think I made community an enforcer in my mind for a time. The times when I did not have a good relationship with community, meaning, I felt distant or judgmental of it, I made community into an enforcing entity.

But then I remember that nothing I have accomplished has happened without anybody else. None of my books were written alone. None of my progress as a writer, or my art as a writer, has happened alone. There are always people here for me, you know, either motivating me because they do believe in me or motivating me because they don’t.

DD: Right, which ultimately can be very encouraging, because in one sense, the poetry community is this living community of support, but in the negative sense, in that sense of the standard that you feel you have to live up to, none of that really exists anyway. In one sense, nobody truly does give a shit. But they do care in the way that matters. In the way that you are doing only what you can do.

TF: Yeah, us being at our best—and I don’t mean at our most successful, because maybe that’s another fallacy—but us being able to be tuned in to ourselves, tuned in to others, tuned in to the language to describe what we care about, all of that. That would be a beautiful community to be a part of, a community of people who are equally invested in their own path and invested in being useful in someone else’s.

DD: Poetry is an art form or discipline that, in one sense, seems to have changed very little in terms of its relation to the public, to culture and politics, even over centuries. It’s always been slightly niche, kind of an odd creature that most people seem to appreciate or at least respect, even if they don’t read it, let alone go physically to hear it at public readings. Do we as poets have a political or cultural role beyond being makers of art, poems, and books for the poetry community?

TF: I don’t think poets have to be beholden to any of those big ideas, but I think the poets who end up being thought of as poets who speak to those issues are poets who are metabolizing the full  breadth of the world. Those are the poets often thought of as “political.” For me, a poet can be a great poet just because they’ve written one poem I can’t stop returning to.

But it’s because that poem has managed to activate my awareness of the world as both a human space and a planetary space, and also very much a political space, all at once. But do I think that poets should be trying to write a political poem? That’s where it gets a little bit lost, right, and calls up that question of what it is to be a poet. I’m resistant to even calling myself a poet, to be honest. I will for practical purposes, for example. Like at a conference, I’m a poet. I’m there as a poet, because that’s my function, to be there as a poet.

DD: It’s expedient.

TF: Yeah, I mean, my shit is poetry, so that’s why they call me a poet, but I don’t think of myself as a poet. Because I think of ‘poet’ as a kind of higher calling that I don’t feel comfortable assigning to myself somehow. Which is why I think of myself as a writer. To me, all writing is a way of thinking, and poetry is how I happen to think. What I love about poetry is that it is able to live in all of these places, whether it’s the ivory tower, or whether it’s in the streets as a political slogan or the slogan for a movement. Poetry lives in all of those worlds, and so I don’t know if we write poetry or poetry writes us, I guess. If we’re answering the question, ‘how did you become a poet,’ and ‘why poetry?’ I think I would be the last to know.

DD: Can you track in your memory how that happened for you?

TF: Yeah, I mean I have a few different villain origin stories. I can say things about my appreciation for poetry as an art of fragment, an art of grief, an art of breakage or rupture or disruption, an art of mystery. I’m drawn to all of that, but what keeps me devoted to poetry is… there’s just nothing quite like it. We don’t wander into the mainstream too much. I don’t mind that. I like getting to do what I do in the shadows. I’m more comfortable with that. I never got into this for attention. Maybe that’s a lie I’m telling myself. Maybe I’m just a big fat titty baby who really wants all the validation in the world. But I would like to think that I still go to poetry because it’s just the place that makes the most sense to me, mysteriously. 

Dan DeVaughn is the Poetry Editor of American Literary Review. He received an M.F.A. from the University of Oregon, and his poetry is published or forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, Poets.org, The Adroit Journal, Southern Humanities Review, Texas University Press’s Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. X: Alabama, and elsewhere. A Voertman-Ardoin Teaching Fellow and PhD student at the University of North Texas, he lives in Denton with his fiancée and their two dogs, Patty and Bowie.