Undocupoets

ALT DUJIE TAHAT I bristle at being called anything I don't ask to be called. Substitute teachers were the worst. So were middle school boys. My poet friends call me a Formalist and I pupa. Cramp. Harden-James: I am not a system player, I am the system. The things we are called or call ourselves—like poetic forms— are the permission structures for our own being. I remain skeptical. Language is (at minimum) a quick, immediate transaction and (at most) my purchase in the longest-running exchange in human history. I obsess over the extremes. Poetry places language in tradition- even if to reject it. For now, that means I am writing ghazals. I've always been drawn to ghazals—at first, for the way they mirrored my favorite rap verses: • the way the rhyme, usually repetition, fuels an unfolding of endless meanings • the lack of narrative fidelity (a reprieve for my associative brain chem-istry) • the isolated units-couplets or bars-creating the setup and the punch line, and • the final…

ALT HERE TO STAY invites the improvisational juxtaposition. Occupying the occupier nation, I desire for the improvisational leaps to be on my terms. When I think of Agha Shahid Ali reading his ghazals, I recall not the perfectly cut universe-gems of his couplets but the jokes he cracks between, the barbs, the laughter. Form requires play. Play requires presence. So repetition as devotion. So a counterweight to the hurtling restlessness that characterizes the conditions of our place and time. So my ghazals, as my upbringing, are All-American. To the purist (apologies, Uncle Shahid), I blaspheme. I am careening, not reckless. Drink, Dujanaht. Swallow whole.