Share
print preview
download audioback SOLMAZ SHARIF
A Reading by Solmaz Sharif
captured March 29, 2018
Gregory Donovan: Now I’d like to introduce Emily Block, an outstanding VCU MFA student completing her graduate degree this year—and she is also our current Levis Reading Prize Coordinator—to introduce our guest of honor this evening. Emily.
Emily Block: Thank you, Greg.
Good evening, and thank you everyone for coming out tonight. My name is Emily Block, and now that you’ve been introduced to two introducers, I will introduce you to the introduction of the next three introductions. Just kidding, I am concluding the introductions.
I’m this year’s Levis Fellow, and so I’ve been conferred at least two real honors: first, of facilitating reviews for the Levis Reading Prize, and second, tonight, of briefly introducing Solmaz Sharif, a former Stegner Fellow, a current lecturer at Stanford University, and winner of the 2017 Prize for her debut collection of poems, Look.
In an interview following the book’s publication, Solmaz made a statement that stuck with me and deepened my understanding of her project. In this interview, a podcast host defined Look as a work of recovery. He was referring, as a lot of this audience knows already, to the recovery of language co-opted in the Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. Solmaz said in response that she preferred the word “caretaking” rather than “recovery.”
Now, her answer, of course, embodies the very care it describes, but, besides this, it recalls what I found so striking about Look when I read it last year for the first time. Namely, that the power and the clarity of vision of this collection could only have emerged from profound care for human life. That inspires Sharif’s attention to language and that’s why the poems in Look refuse to turn their gaze from images as stark and true as “the sand spilling out the bullet holes” or “a torso held together by black thread.” That’s why they are unafraid to speak in the same breath of bombs and the pigeon nests gathering in the quiet engines.
As Look proves to anyone who would doubt it, it can’t afford not to pay attention, and neither can we. Both political and elegiac, Look illustrates that war is always personal. It gives voice to a diverse chorus who speaks to the horrors of the Iran-Iraq War of the ’80s and the US’s long military campaign in Afghanistan. Look addresses also the continuity of all wars and the violence inherent in our language and everyday lives.
As one speaker contemplates in the poem “Free Mail,” and I’m quoting here, “Love, I’ve started to say such senseless things: ‘I know where he is coming from’ and ‘I’m just doing my job.’”
Solmaz Sharif confronts these senseless platitudes directly, and so must we as readers. At the rate empire tries to strip words of meaning so that it can operate unquestioned and largely unseen, Solmaz Sharif’s poems work faster, calling out assaults on language that translate literally to lives lost. Time and again, Look underscores that a malleable language orients and shapes the world that language describes, not just elsewhere but everywhere, even in the most private and intimate of places.
Look was named a National Book Award finalist, a PEN Open Book Award finalist, and winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Poetry, for its incisive intelligence, poignancy, precision, and for its clear-eyed reckoning with the language of war, which is our language. But also, Look was awarded these prizes and named on so many best book lists because critics and readers agree with the argument behind it: “It matters what you call a thing.”
Everyone, please join me in welcoming Solmaz Sharif.
Solmaz Sharif: “Let this be the body through which the war has passed”—Frank Bidart.
[“Drone,” Solmaz Sharif, Look, Graywolf Press, 2016]
It’s such a tremendous honor to be here with you all tonight. I can’t thank you enough for coming, and I can’t thank VCU enough for this honor, and Emily for that beautiful introduction and care.
I’m reading from this first book, which is called Look, which is—it’s not a rewrite—it is something that deals with the US Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, because the US Department of Defense has its own dictionary aimed to supplement standard English dictionaries. So words that we use everyday are redefined in that dictionary to fit a war context. The title “look,” for example, was redefined by the DOD to mean, “in mine warfare, the period during which a mine circuit is receptive of an influence.” “Influence,” I’m pretty sure, is the person that steps on the mine, in this case, so it gives us a good example of the kind of linguistic acrobatics that are involved and the language that is needed in order to premeditate and excuse violence against others and violence against bodies.
There are terms from the dictionary throughout, and I’ll read a poem that’s called “Deception Story.” Most of the words in this book that begin with the letter d, for example, are words that are used in the Department of Defense’s dictionary, just to give you a sense of the language.
[“Deception Story,” Solmaz Sharif, Look, Graywolf Press, 2016]
“Reaching Guantanamo.” Letters that are sent to Guantanamo detainees are heavily redacted by the Joint Task Force, so I wrote a series of imagined letters, and I’ll just read a few of them.
[“Reaching Guantanamo,” Solmaz Sharif, Look, Graywolf Press, 2016]
[“Mess Hall,” Solmaz Sharif, Look, Graywolf Press, 2016]
So there’s a long poem in here called “Personal Effects” that’s an elegy that I wrote for an uncle that was killed in the Iran-Iraq War. He was a draftee, and I never met him. He died before I was born, but my father told me—I discovered—that there was a slim photo album on his body when he died and there were some letters that he had sent from the front lines. And so I took that material and I tried to kind of piece together a life or, you know, what an imagined life with him might have been like, and so I’ll read just pieces of that one. It’s called “Personal Effects.”
[“Personal Effects,” Solmaz Sharif, Look, Graywolf Press, 2016]
The first two lines of this poem are lifted from a translation of Ovid’s “Ibis” poem, which is a long curse poem that he wrote when he was in exile and is very elaborate in its cursing and curses, and I like the ghost of that kind of haunting this poem, so that’s why I open with it. It’s called “Desired Appreciation.”
[“Desired Appreciation,” Solmaz Sharif, Look, Graywolf Press, 2016]
If it’s all right, I’m gonna use that poem to transition into new work. In the course of writing that poem, I was—I wrote that poem actually after the US Senate report on torture came out, and in the course of researching the CIA’s torture program and discovering that the psychologists, so to speak, that were behind the design of it had started or based their design, really, on a offshoot of psychology or a school of psychology known as “positive psychology.” I got really interested in the kinds of psychologies and the modes of psychology that have asked us to change the language that we use to describe the world around us in order to make the world around us more tolerable and pleasant and in order also to make us more pleasant in that world around us. So this poem that I’ll read now opens with two examples of little tweaks that you find: like if you wanna get this thing, word it this way—you know, How to Win Friends & Influence People kind of speech—and so it opens with two concrete examples of that, and it’s called “Social Skills Training.”
[“Social Skills Training,” Solmaz Sharif, BuzzFeed Reader, 2016]
Last poem. Thank you.
[“Lay,” Solmaz Sharif, Look, Graywolf Press, 2016]
Thank you. 