JASMINE KHALIQ is a Pakistani Mexican poet born and raised in Northern California. Her work is found or forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Black Warrior Review, The Pinch, Poet Lore, The Rumpus, Bennington Review, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She holds a BA from San Francisco State University and an MFA from University of Washington, Seattle. A finalist for Diagram’s 2021 Chapbook Contest as well as both Tupelo Press’ 2021 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize and Snowbound Chapbook Award, she currently is a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah, serves as Assistant Editor of Quarterly West, and reads for Split Lip Magazine.
HOW DID YOU COME TO POETRY? TELL US THE STORY OF YOUR BEGINNING WITH POETRY.
I’ve always loved reading and writing. Like many other writers, I read a lot as a child, as a teenager, as an adult, as anything in between. Middle school English classes started looking at poetry. I was reading poetry, here and there, but I feel I really became a poet myself when I was thirteen or so and got a hold of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. I hadn’t known before how feeling could be so precisely wielded, and self so expressed. I felt really connected to that book. The poems rang in me. I had to try to express myself in this mode, too.
WHAT “LAST AUGUST” INCORPORATES LINES FROM HÉLÈNE CIXOUS’S ESSAY, “LOVE OF THE WOLF”. HOW DO YOU INCORPORATE OTHER VOICES INTO YOUR WORK, AND WHAT DOES INCORPORATING OTHER VOICES ENABLE FOR POETRY MORE BROADLY?
I love incorporating other voices. The one genre I love to read almost as much as poetry is drama. The idea of poetry having a speaker—that the poem is a real voice, and is not simply disembodied thought—is essential to me. I’m speaking and I’m speaking to someone. Bringing in other voices, I think, having another voice to bounce off of, speaks to me more truly of the way I compose poetry, anyway. Enriching my understanding of the world with art, Cixous included, are one of many things that shape my daily thoughts and experiences and writing. My life and my writing are in conversation and indebted to an endless number of things. It feels important (and simply joyful) for me to acknowledge those connections.
COMMON MOTIFS IN YOUR POEMS ARE SUMMER, SEATTLE, FRUIT, AND HORSES (AMONG OTHERS). DO YOU FEEL A CONNECTION BETWEEN YOUR WORKS, THROUGH EMOTION OR PLACE OR SOME OTHER ELEMENT?
There is certainly a connection! Images reappear, transform, and create narratives across different poems. We shape places and they shape us in return. All of these things are emotionally and symbolically charged, for me. It’s hard to ascribe any single meaning to any single one—they’re shifty, their legibility changes depending on when and where they’re viewed and by whom…I love poets who create a little poetic universe within their manuscript. I love to really inhabit a particular world. I’m attempting, I suppose, to create the world as my speaker exactly experiences it, which is a world extremely particular to them.
WHAT, IN YOUR VIEW, MAKES POETRY A PARTICULARLY ALLURING PLATFORM FOR EXPLORING YOUR DISCONNECT WITH AMERICA AND HOW YOU MISS YOUR HOMELAND?
What’s funny is it is my homeland—I was born in California, but there’s different degrees of connection we all get to feel to American at different times…what I miss, I suppose, has more to do with wanting something I haven’t ever quite got. Poetry is an alluring platform for exploring disconnection in that it is attempting, often, to make some connection. To make some voice, and something to voice speaks to, and draw things together in language. Language is an imperfect, failing medium. It doesn’t make anything tangible. But we can almost access anything in language.
WHAT ARE THREE POEMS OR BOOKS ALL WRITERS AND READERS SHOULD KNOW?
So hard to choose only three! Well, I do love Plath, but I already said her, so I’ll pick three more books I love that I recommend to everyone:
Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers by Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi. Absolutely genius, opened poetry up for me in, like Plath, a life-changing way. Any of her books, actually, but that one and Autobiography of Death especially.
Any Mary Ruefle book you can get your hands on (but my favorite poem of hers ever might be “Provenance”).
To name a single poem, to encourage a reader to read it in this very moment: Czeslaw Milosz’s “Encounter.”
CAN YOU SPEAK TO THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PUNCTUATION (OR THE LACK OF IT) AND NARRATIVE IN YOUR POEMS?
Yes, I do use punctuation sparsely, for the most part. I think of punctuation as a way of controlling speed and attention. Line breaks and stanza breaks also do this job. When used sparingly, the punctuation seems to perform its duties with twice the saturation. Sometimes, I think, punctuation gives too much a guide to a sentence, prioritizes one meaning and reading when I’m often interested in multiple meanings surfacing at once. I’m really interested in the words themselves being the focus of the poem. I like the voice of my speaker to become manifest through images and sounds and atmosphere rather than the indicators of punctuation.
ON YOUR WEBSITE, YOU MENTION THAT YOU READ AND EDIT FOR LITERARY MAGAZINES. WHAT SEPARATES THE COMPELLING AND MOVING SUBMISSIONS FROM THE REST?
This is such a hard question! Specificity. Voice. Something at the center, something it really cares about and is invested in doing or exploring. I want a poem to both surprise me and feel like it was inevitably moving towards its next line or its end all along.
HOW HAS POETRY IMPACTED YOUR LIFE MOST SIGNIFICANTLY, AND ALSO MOST SURPRISINGLY? WHY IS IT MEANINGFUL TO BOTH YOU PERSONALLY AND TO THE LITERARY WORLD AT LARGE?
It’s impacted my life in all ways. From helping me process my life, to bringing me to the greatest friends I’ve ever had, to bringing me to Seattle or Salt Lake City to study it for years and years…it has absolutely impacted my actual life’s course—and I’m so glad for that. That might be both the most significant and the most surprising. I didn’t even know it was possible to get a PhD in poetry when I entered a Creative Writing degree as an undergrad. I’ve shaped my life in the pursuit of it—I wouldn’t have ever been able to guess that. It’s very lucky. Poetry makes me feel so connected to myself, others, the world.
FINALLY, DO YOU HAVE ANY ADVICE FOR YOUNG BIPOC WRITERS LOOKING TO INITIATE WRITING JOURNEYS OF THEIR OWN?
Read! Write! And keep at it! Find communities of people, online and in real life, who enjoy reading and writing, too. My best friends are also some of my favorite writers, greatest readers, most trusted editors, etc. Nothing has enabled my growth as a writer so much as reading and working with peers. Writing is a practice. Trust in yourself; keep writing.