Interview with Hayan Charara on These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit — March 4, 2022
Hayan Charara is a poet, children’s book author, essayist, and editor. His poetry books are the forthcoming These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit (Milkweed Editions 2022), Something Sinister (Carnegie Mellon Univ Press 2016), The Sadness of Others (Carnegie Mellon Univ Press 2006), and The Alchemist’s Diary (Hanging Loose Press 2001). His children’s book, The Three Lucys (2016), received the New Voices Award Honor, and he edited Inclined to Speak (2008), an anthology of contemporary Arab American poetry. With Fady Joudah, he is also a series editor of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. His honors include a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lucille Joy Prize in Poetry from the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, the John Clare Prize, and the Arab American Book Award. He is a professor in the Honors College at the University of Houston, where he also teaches creative writing.
Christopher Nelson: First let me say congratulations on a beautiful and powerful book. I love that there are two sections of haiku and "Mean," a poem comprised of several very short poems. But even the longer poems have the terse, carefully wrought lines and syntactic compression of short poems. What do you do—or not do—to arrive at a poem in your style?
Hayan Charara: Thanks for the kind words.
As a young poet, and for a while after that, I worried a lot about moving away from the aesthetics of the poets I loved and was reading and re-reading. I don’t know if I have completely exited their orbits of influence—a more careful reader than me could probably point to this or that line or phrase and say “Levine” or “Ginsberg” or “Lorde,” especially in my earlier poems. Even with these new poems, I could probably tell you which ones the poets I admire most today have influenced, but that’s not quite getting at what you asked.
What I do or don’t do—I take that to mean the conscious choices I’ve made while writing and revising. In a word, I would boil it all down to clarity. I want meaning, image, sound, and so on to be clear and intelligible. Even if I’m intentionally playing with or going against the usual order of things—the syntax in a line or sentence, for example, or the associations generally made between any set of images. I try hard to make sure that the words or their meaning or whatever may be going on in that line or sentence doesn’t get obscured. Simply put, I want people reading my poems to “get” them, even if that means they get them somewhat differently than I expect. This isn’t to say I try to make my poems easy—instead, I want them to be accessible, and clarity is the way I achieve that.
If a poem is a kind of house, the goal is to make a few keys that will open the doors to that house. Those keys are language, sound, pattern, structure, to name a few. As an example, the poem that comes immediately to mind is “Bees, Honeycombs, Honey”: every line contains six syllables; every stanza, six lines; and the words in the title, “bees,” “honeycombs,” and “honey,” repeat throughout the poem, as do a good number of images and phrases. All of these, I think, stabilize the poem, center it, give the reader ground to stand on—they are the keys to the poem.
But the poem is also dizzying. The sonic echoes, the repeating words and patterns—they start to blur the distinctions being made from line to line, stanza to stanza. And that is exactly the sense I had, before writing the poem, when I discovered a beehive under the soffit in our house. Over 20,000 bees were living in a corner of our home, and for two days my wife and children and I stood by as a beekeeper removed the honeycombs and the bees, transferring them to makeshift beehives so that they could be homed elsewhere. All the while, thousands of bees buzzed about us while we watched. I had the clearest sense of actuality standing there in the presence of all those bees, but I also experienced awe and bewilderment.
Those conflicting experiences—clarity on the one hand and awe and bewilderment on the other—set the poem in motion, and I used a handful of formal elements to capture them in the same space. At least that was the intention behind the poem. A lot of poets do that, consciously or not. The masters have been doing it since the beginning of poetry, with form, meter, rhyme, and so on.
What I don’t do in my poems is also aimed at the kind of clarity I’m talking about. The things I avoid—which for other poets work perfectly fine—I avoid, again, for the sake of clarity, but I keep in mind that I still want just enough tension and agitation in my poems so to keep them from simply being simple. You won’t see ornate or lavish descriptions in my writing. You probably won’t need a dictionary to get through my poems, and not because I don’t know my fair share of $10 words—I just don’t find them that useful. Also, however much playfulness or whimsy I may allow in a poem, I won’t let these become the dominant attribute or attitude in a poem. It’s not that I believe poems are precious or that I take myself too seriously. Rather, for better or worse, I view poetry, mine at least, as a carrier of meaning and meaningfulness, as well as human value and dignity, and these things, ultimately, need to take centerstage over playfulness. My poems do have funny, witty moments, but they are ultimately poems, not jokes, not witty remarks, and that I see them as belonging to the category of poetry does mean something, even if it puts a limit on what constitutes a poem.
In terms of psychology, so much of what I do in poetry resembles what I’ve done my entire life, and that is to try, as much as possible, to have some control in an otherwise uncontrollable, unpredictable, and at times chaotic environment. The idea of control is mostly illusion, of course, both in poetry and life, and I know it is. That’s where letting go becomes crucial. So, while I may impose structures, patterns, conceits, etc. in order to give a poem stability and coherence, making it easier for readers to inhabit it, I know that I’m not really in control at all, and that’s freeing—this allows me to let go of the reigns a bit, to let the rough spots remain, to make space for the uncalculated and the unexpected; this relieves me from some of the pressures and burdens of making a poem, and ultimately this opens the way for surprise. I’ve read and heard fascinating interpretations of my poems, and usually I find them way more interesting than anything I thought about when I wrote them.
Nelson: You mentioned “human value and dignity,” which is a thematic concern of the book. In “The Problem with Me Is the Problem with You,” you reflect on torture photos from Abu Ghraib and consider the xenophobia of a woman sitting beside you on an airplane. Shortly afterward in the book’s sequence is “Fugue,” a long, ambitious poem about war, killing, God, illusions, writing, and more (its various subjects suggestive of the dissociations of a psychological fugue). Amid the turmoil and traumas of these subjects, people live their lives. Does poetry help you find or more fully experience human value and dignity?
Charara: I recently came across this definition of a poem by Charles O. Hartman: a poem is “the language of an act of attention … There is the initial act of attention that prompts a poet to write a poem … Then, there is the attention the poet pays to language, in order to shape that attention.” So, poets (most? many? some?) spend time and effort trying to give shape to whatever grabbed hold of their attention, be it a memory, an experience, an emotion, an idea, and so on. The deliberateness behind paying attention can, I think, translate into a fuller experience of human value and dignity, simply because the more attention I pay to something, the more I see it, know it, and possibly relate to it. If I look closely, really look closely at the way my neighbor tends to her garden or at my dogs playing with each other or at an army of ants carrying a fallen potato chip through the grass to their ant pile, and I pay even more attention to the ways I may render these instances into poems, I am hopefully creating more opportunities (for myself, to start, and then for a reader) for more understanding, more insight, more feeling. It must be the case that widening our thinking and feeling, whether in poetry or just life, will help us to better recognize and understand and feel what others go through, what others may see or hear, and how others know the world.
With my poetry students, I talk about this in terms of craft. True or not (I think it’s true enough of the time), the premise goes something like: if you, the poet, pay more attention during your acts of attention (observing, thinking, feeling, and then with language), then so too will your reader, and the more attention a reader pays, the more the poem will give. So, in theory, yes, I think poetry can help us to become more attentive, to ourselves, to others, to what other people endure or value, even if we don’t share the same experiences or values or vice versa. In practice, it depends on the poem. Not all poems share the kind of attention necessary or practice it to the degree required for such acts to take place.
Nelson: One of the things I marvel at is the tonal range of the book: brashness and sensitivity, insight, candor, empathy and ruthlessness. Yet your voice is consistent throughout. Can you talk about the variety of subjects here—aging, love, war, hanging out on the porch, trees—and how you treat that variety so that the book is unquestionably unified?
Charara: My first thought goes to the time it took to write these poems. I spent five years working on most of them, though a few I began a lot earlier, like “Fugue,” which I started putting together fifteen years ago but didn’t finish until recently. Anyhow, I’m thinking that if you work on something for five years, there’s bound to be uniformity or consistency in something—if not subject then language; if not language then something else.
But this first thought is probably wrong or at least not exactly right. For one thing, I didn’t work on all the poems at once. I work one poem at a time. Usually, I won’t move on to a new poem until I have something close to a finished draft, and this partly explains why I have only written two books of poetry since 2006.
So, my initial thought was that since these poems were written during the same time period, my mindset, my perspective, and the conditions under which I wrote them must have remained pretty much the same. But that can’t be true. I know for a fact that my life—personally, professionally, socially, intellectually, emotionally, and so on—underwent dramatic changes over this time period. Those changes probably account for the range of subjects. That plus I’m not very interested in writing a themed book or a book-length series of interrelated poems—not yet at least.
As for explaining the consistent voice throughout despite the broad tonal range: like a lot of people, I’m all over the place. We like to think of ourselves as these complete, coherent individual selves who come off to everyone who encounters us the way we imagine ourselves to be. What I’ve gathered from most of the people who I know—who aren’t my family members or very close friends—is that I am a calm, well-tempered, even serene person. This is stunning to me. Not because I haven’t experienced myself as that kind of person but because, most of the time, I see and hear and think of myself as a hot mess of dysfunction, full of contradictions, anxieties, uncertainties, doubts, and disconnected thoughts … I could easily keep going.
Here's what I’ve been doing most of my life and particularly as a poet: exerting whatever control I have over that interior whirlwind so that when it makes it way to the exterior, it’s no longer a hot mess. And the controlling mechanism is language. I use language to manage my inner self skillfully and carefully. To readers, students, colleagues, friends, and strangers this looks like a confident, certain self. Let me be clear: there’s nothing fake about this voice and version of me. It’s me. But it’s a self, a voice that conveys certainty and control, a voice that says, by way of a particular refined and practiced speech, “I know what I’m doing, I know where I’m at, and I know where I’m headed.” The truth is: it’s the language that insists on this, and it is, as you’ve pointed out, unwaveringly insistent upon itself. But it’s not me—it’s not the me on which my ego constantly imposes itself. That self, that me isn’t certain about anything, not even death itself. My best guess: if that self were to write a poem, it would gladly have nothing to say.
Nelson: When you consider your new book of poems—These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit—and your previous—Something Sinister—what stands out to you, in terms of content, tone, or form? Have your concerns changed or remained the same?
Charara: When Something Sinister was published, I’d gone ten years between books. Obviously, I went through a lot of transformation over that period—as a poet and as a person. Much of the focus in my poems (the content, the intention) changed and so too did many of my habits as a poet—I dropped old ones, picked up new ones.
There are also the changes that happened outside of poetry, which may have been just as crucial to the poems: I moved from one part of the country to another; I was single then got married, got divorced, and got remarried. I became a father. I got older—when I wrote the earliest poems that would end up in Something Sinister, I was in my early thirties—I’m now almost fifty years old, and I’m much more self-conscious and aware of what it means to grow older.
Anyhow, it’s been six years since Something Sinister was published, which means it’s been about seven to eight years since I wrote the last poem in the manuscript, which also means that enough time has gone by for me to look back and reflect on that book in ways that I can’t quite do yet with These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit. Whatever I may claim right now about these new poems, I may, in a year or two or ten, view as total bullshit. But there are worse things than a poet’s BS, so here goes.
What’s changed the most—or to put it more accurately—what’s changed that has had the most impact isn’t so much any single concern or a group of them but my thinking, my ways of understanding. Regardless of how much I’ve read or written—or the countless conversations I’ve had about poetry with other poets, students, myself—I learn, realize, or come across something new all the time. I’ve been thinking about poetry for thirty years, and I’ve probably learned more, and realized more about it in the last ten than in the first twenty. The revisions and adjustments in my ways of thinking, seeing, writing, and so on, they’ve come out not only from my engagement with poetry. In fact, I figure that the most consequential influence on how I see, receive, and transcribe the world into poems is not poetry; it’s literature in general: poems, yes, but also philosophical and historical works, novels, short stories, dramas, sacred texts—ancient, modern, and brand new.
Right now, today, I have no doubt that I am the most mature I’ve ever been as a writer. But maybe more importantly, I’ve never been a better reader or thinker. The irony of all this—and this isn’t a ground-breaking idea or new by any means: I realize now, more than ever, that I know so very little. That compels me—that’s often the trigger to so many of my poems, to what I’m attempting in them.
Twenty years ago, when my first poetry book came out, I thought I knew what I was doing—not just as a poet, but as a human being. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Recently, I saw that a famous poet, who’s still relatively young, referred to me as a “master.” It was flattering, and, sure, I’ve mastered this or that. But it also made me laugh because, again, if I’ve mastered anything it is the realization that I have my limits: I can only see and know in so many ways, and the fact of my limits keeps me from writing all kinds of poems.
I’ve opened up, more and more, to new understanding. I still make judgments and choices, but my allegiance is not to a movement or a school of thought or an ideology; it’s not to any group of people, whether they’re poets or politicians; my commitment is to the back-and-forth I have with other thinkers, with other inventive minds, and it doesn’t matter one bit if they invent poems or religions, philosophy or art, and I don’t care if they’ve been dead for a thousand years or if they were born yesterday.
With Something Sinister, I was already thinking along those lines, but I was still stuck in a lot of “old” thinking. I had ideas, perspectives, approaches that had become so pervasive, they seemed natural. They were anything but. I also began doing things I never imagined I would ever do—poems like “Mother and Daughter” or “Usage,” they grew out of a deeper commitment on my part to new and different ways of sense-making. With These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit, I would say—again, with the possibility of turning my back on this position in due time—every poem in there stems from this commitment to being more open, thoughtful, self-conscious, and flexible not only about how poems are made but how—well, to how everything is made: history, morality, feelings, judgments, memories, choices, jokes, insults, you name it.
Look, I’m a smart guy, and I’ve read a lot, learned a lot—I can hold my own. Most days, though, I look around and when the question “Why?” pops into my head about this or that, I say to myself, “I don’t have a fucking clue.” That used to terrify me. I used to think I was a fraud or a phony for not knowing. Now, it gives me reason to keep at it, to listen, to find out just where I may be headed next.
Nelson: Tell us about your poem "The Day Phil Levine Died." You reference his haunting "Belle Isle, 1949" and reflect on your personal history as a poet. But the poem is about much more too.
Charara: Philip Levine was never my teacher, but his poems were an education. They taught me how a poem could be written, the kind I would have wanted to write, anyhow. His poems also showed me another way to view the world. Levine and I shared a hometown, Detroit, and it seemed impossible to me that poetry could come out of the place I called home—until I read “Belle Isle, 1949.” The poem floored me. I literally found myself immobilized, stuck to the few square feet in front of the bookcase from which I’d pulled Levine’s Collected Poems, reading this poem, a few times, and then another, and another. I must have been in there an hour with that book. All this happened at the campus bookstore at Wayne State University, and a five-minute walk from there, a chemistry experiment (mine) was going down the tubes, literally, and with it, my future as a doctor.
That’s as deep as I can get about what happened that day. That poem, the whole book: the people in it, their lives, their worries, Levine’s vision, and his voice, the tenderness behind it (despite the grittiness)—all of it made perfect sense without making any at all. From that day forward, I read everything Levine wrote that I could get my hands on. Eventually I wrote to him, and he wrote back (something he did with so many other young poets, I would later find out), and after so many years of exchanging letters now and then, I finally met him, in front of an elevator at NYU—he was walking on (to head home) and I was stepping off (to look for him).
He could have easily said, “Sorry, I’m going home.” But he invited me back to his office and we chatted, for a long time—it felt like a long time, but I’m sure it wasn’t more than fifteen minutes, maybe half an hour. We talked long enough for him to lament that no one was reading Wyatt anymore (I hadn’t read Wyatt—in fact, at the time I didn’t have a clue who Wyatt even was). We talked long enough for me to breathe a sigh of relief: for one thing, he changed the subject about Wyatt, but more importantly, I could tell he was as good a person as he was a poet, and the person I imagined him to be, through his poems and letters, he in fact was.
He remembered my poems, too, and talked a bit about them. I don’t think the poems of mine that he’d read were very good, but that didn’t matter. That he remembered them, that mattered. I needed to hear from someone that in choosing to be a poet, I wasn’t wasting my life. I had doubts about whether I was any good at poetry. Good or not, I still worried about whether I should become a poet. So much about my upbringing told me that becoming a poet was simply not an option. My parents, aunts and uncles, the mothers and fathers of all my friends, all my neighbors—they were blue-collar workers. On top of that, I was the son of immigrants. The choices before me were simple and stark: work and study hard so that I could become a doctor, lawyer, engineer—something like that—or end up working long and hard for the rest of my life in a factory or warehouse, like my uncles.
My father had left one country so that he could “make it” in another, and he busted his ass for years and years only to find himself barely making it. To him, the choice was obvious: there was no choice. As far as he was concerned, my becoming a poet meant I would end up either like him or worse off. He wasn’t having it. Add to this the fact that he likely suffered from borderline personality disorder and was probably an undiagnosed psychopath. “The Day Phil Levine Died” ends on an image that makes clear just how far my father was willing to go to keep me from ruining my life with poetry.
For obvious reasons, I left home—left Detroit. I went to New York City, and soon enough I sought out Levine. I wasn’t looking for him to tell me to keep at the whole being a poet thing, but the day we met, whether he knew it or not, that’s exactly what he did.
On the day Levine died, “Belle Isle, 1949” immediately came to mind, and it would’ve been nice if the day we met in person had also popped into my head. Instead, I went to my father doing what he could, in the way he knew how—which was horrible—to keep me from becoming a poet.
