A Conversation With Hari Alluri
Hari Alluri (he/him/siya) is author of The Flayed City (Kaya Press) and chapbooks The Promise of Rust (Mouthfeel Press) and Our Echo of Sudden Mercy (Next Page Press). A co-editor of We Were Not Alone (Community Building Art Works) and co-founding editor at Locked Horn Press, siya has received grants, fellowships, and residencies from the BC Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, The Capilano Review, Deer Lake, Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and others. His work appears recently in AALR, Apogee, Four Way Review, Marías at Sampaguitas, ti-TCR, and—via Split This Rock—Best of the Net 2022.
Photo by Erik Haensel
By Heather Qin
Recently, I had the honor and privilege of interviewing Hari Alluri about his new chapbook, Our Echo of Sudden Mercy (Next Page Press, 2022). We discuss migration, belonging, and experimentation with structure and mundanity—and how these ideas guide his work. His poems “The Sculpting,” “When I Whisper Your Hand, Yes, Release Me (Bowstring Dakshina),” and “Old Fears, New Names” appeared in Issue 7 of COUNTERCLOCK.
Heather Qin: In Our Echo of Sudden Mercy, you write about your experiences with migration, tradition, and belonging, specifically how these themes can construct grief and confusion but also unity and an intimate connection to one’s lineage. How have these experiences shaped your writing?
Hari Alluri: Can I swear real quick? This shit is existential. All of it! I feel like migration means to live with the ongoing (and recurring) presence of necessary questioning. These experiences you name are central to my writing, at the level of process.
If I can begin by obsessing over that first word, I feel like my attempts at writing, at art at all, are forms of attempting migration—to migrate sensations, emotions, ideas, often nebulous and felt pre-expression into the expressible realm, maybe even to approach living itself with the curiosity and wonder of a spirit who can never quite belong in the world. I was looking up the word “metaphor” in relation to one of your other questions and, while it felt selfish to start nerding out on a research kick, it feels worth saying that the word’s origin seems to describe something a heck of a lot like migration. I can’t believe I hadn’t thought of it like that before!
These experiences you name, they’re alive in my process of writing, alive in how I approach writing at all. There’s multiple sections in Our Echo of Sudden Mercy that teach me how living with incompletion (of story) is crucial to me, even as I work to dig into and learn about multiple traditions, their gifts, their harms, their dangers and possibilities, about the ways that lineage operates in my body and the ways I can deepen my connection to lineages I carry and ones I have mutual regard for.
HQ: You reference “in another version of the story” to navigate between multiple layers of imagination, identity, and displacement. In your eyes, how do these layers create a lens from which you view the world?
HA: The anchor phrase comes from Faisal Mohyuddin's “A Ghazal for the Diaspora,” in which it enacts this amazing turn. I repeated that turn over several writing sessions, trying to access those layers you speak of, trying to turn a mess into a lens. Maybe that’s it—and I'm remembering a note from Aurora Masum-Javed here—our mess is also our lens? How do I learn to have my attention work through my mess instead of it primarily harming how I perceive? The work of attending to the mess, in poems, in my personal and social relations, feel crucial. Thank you, despite my shame at the current state of my living room, I’m going to keep thinking about that: our mess is our lens.
I’m working on how I can refract these experiences you name through a language that in many ways can't hold them but into which they've been forced to exist. I’m also working, thanks to a moment Rick Barot shared at a Digital Sala event two years ago, on attending to many more layers of my identity, and that's where imagination becomes more active I think. I think there’s a way in which displacement is constitutive of human experience, likely more so than many of us want, which also means that there’s so much for me to learn from approaching the questions it asks of me.
There’s a tension I’m learning as I return to the work and read it, a tension between what I’m calling over-belonging and an urge to explore what unbelonging can teach me. Meanwhile, the grieving in the work responds to both existential and direct forms of loss. The joy in the work lives in relation to both of these, to actual and hopefully actualizing relationships with the beloveds in my life, living and dead, human and non-human. I guess what I’m saying is that these questions the work carries, they’re moving me towards an ethics of care for self and other. They’re crucial parts of what moves me to create and to live.
HQ: Can you talk about your process in writing this book? Did you have different visions for each of the three marked sections—Situation Card: “an inversion of the gaze,” Obstacle Card: “foundations are being shaken,” and Response Card: “when all seems too much”— and did you write each section separately?
HA: I found the centre card first. The whole work was initially written as a single poem—the first and third cards came later. The process itself was quite layered. Come to think of it, I’m going to dig into my notes to pull some of these threads together. Thank you for this occasion to revisit the process!
Okay: I began gathering the work that would become Our Echo of Sudden Mercy when musical artist, friend, intricately transformative storyteller (and more) Khari Wendell McClelland invited musicians, thinkers, activists, and poets to participate in The Essentials, a multidisciplinary web-streamed event in Spring 2021, presented by The Cultch and Soft Cedar. The invitation was for us to respond to several questions that were haunting him during the first year of peak pandemic, with its attendant moments of deep grief and social significance: “What is this time offering us? What are some of the things we should be thinking about? What’s needed? And what’s essential?”
My friend and many-time collaborator Cecily Nicholson was also invited. While we recognized that our schedules wouldn't allow for a full-on collaboration, we wanted our individual poem contributions to include moments that called back to each other. So, we decided to chat and brainstorm ways for this to happen. Pulling cards together was something we had been doing for some time before the pandemic. I’m gratefully remembering some specific moments with folks like Mercedes Eng, Junie Désil, Phanuel Antwi, and Denise Ferreira da Silva that shaped our relational energy around that.
On our call, Cecily and I chose a deck: the Kapwa Tarot by Jana Lynne Umipig. When we pulled and read the write-up for “XVI. Imperyalista – The Tower,” it really landed for us: the statement, “foundations are being shaken,” is from the first sentence of the card’s description, so really that one central card is what called and initially held the work together.
For my part, I began by bringing these elements into my personal writing sessions and the ones I attended. Reflecting on the questions and the card, I thought about how one of the most essential elements of my emotional survival during the stay-home order was my participation in impromptu online writing communities such as BIPOC Writing Party, CBAW, The Digital Sala (TDS), and The World We Want. I wanted my work to carry this element inherently and including moments of previous, especially iterative, writing was a way to do so. I revised some of these moments and collaged them with the new writing based on connectivity—collage has the capacity to reveal what’s bubbling up, you know?—then I revised and re-ordered again. The weaving part was fun, finding and strengthening in the text those crossroads between Khari’s questions and the type of attention the card invited.
I do want to give a specific shoutout to Christian Aldana here: I only realized while re-digging into my documents today (and therefore missed in the Acknowledgments) that I wrote a crucial part of Our Echo of Sudden Mercy in response to a prompt they shared. It was during a TDS planning meeting, later on the same day as when I received the email inviting me to contribute to The Essentials. The full prompt is more detailed—and they sent it to me today so I share it at the bottom of the interview—but here’s the part I had in my notes: “Write a blessing for your tired body and your troubled mind.” I’d say that’s a needed prompt on any day, but its arrival that day was ridiculously apt!
The piece I gathered together, revised, and shared during The Essentials—which of course had to be tight as part of a larger show—it wanted to grow. I realized a couple of months into revisiting the work that I might have a chapbook! During that same session, looking at the work as a whole, I noticed there were two specific moments of more pronounced rest, which had me divide the work into three.
In my previous process with the original poem, while struggling with revisions, I had already connected to the “Relief” card from the Sacred Symbols Oracle Deck by Marcella Kroll, which naturally offered the text for the Response Card. For the Situation Card, I returned to the Asian American Tarot from Asian American Literary Review, a collaborative deck I encountered (along with its conveners) when I needed it most, a deck whose making is an inspiration for how I went about this work’s process in the first place. Also connecting deeply to the themes, “The Foreigner,” written by Konrad Ng, illustrated by Simi Kang, is the seventh card, which I got to numerologically via the Obstacle Card’s number: XVI (16). I hope all this makes sense, and I’m sorry if I’ve gone far into the esoteric realm!
The epigraphic moments carry the residue of how each card guided my revisions. Although sometimes I sit down to write a poem or respond to a specific moment and what comes is close to what the piece will become, mostly my process is akin to an accordion of expansion and contraction via re-visioning as I listen for what the work wants: where do I need to implicate myself more and where do I need to get out of the way?
HQ: I found your use of space both fascinating and refreshing. How did you approach experimenting with white space and deciding the contents of each page? What does a title—or lack of—mean to you?
HA: Thank you for your reflection. A long time ago a friend pointed out that I should read my work aloud more slowly, which helped me translate the pacing to the page. The fragmentary or partial also connects to the themes you’ve previously identified. This is something I started to practice in drafting and revising The Flayed City. I feel like Our Echo of Sudden Mercy learns from that and then embodies that learning in some new ways.
When I presented the piece aloud as part of The Essentials, the sheets I read from looked like a single poem with spacing and a “*” between the mini-sections. As the work called me to expand it, I felt the individual moments needed more breath.
At first, I simply put the page breaks where the spacing was. Working with some re-ordering, and with new moments that I wrote as the chapbook began to take on its own being (descended from but different from the original poem), I would revisit the spacing. I would ask questions about unity, about where to pivot, about trying to have each page hold while pulling my attention forward into what follows.
When I think about titles in relation to your question—this is specifically within a single collection—I think about how, by signalling the beginning of a next piece, a title also adds a kind of retro-active layer of ending to what came before. Naturally, titled poems can still speak across to each other, even if in different sections. The full-length collection I’m working on, currently titled Lip Sync to the Goddess of Lost Things, is more like this. And there’s also serial or returning poems that deploy the same or similar titles. There’s a lot of work that titles can do, and I enjoy studying how folks work with them. And, by not having titles between the individual pages, the pieces can work easily in sequence, carrying the shadow architecture of a long poem in three parts, while—and Our Echo seemed to want this—allowing for more simultaneity.
To be honest, after I wrote the above, I did a web search for “simultaneity” and went down a mini rabbit-hole in relation to how it works in physics and music. Highly recommend!
HQ: Lines such as “Say it to mean / drowning is a form of being held” and “Is it possible that countries do not have a body the same way / my knees my hips my spine my lips don’t have a country?” are so gorgeous and moving! What does your process for crafting metaphors look like?
HA: Ah, thank you. We can never truly know what will move other folks, but sometimes we write a thing and it moves us in the moment. Other times it’s in the slow act of revision that the movement happens. It’s a spectrum, no doubt, and these two lines you quoted happen to fall pretty close to the edges of that spectrum when it comes to my process.
The first line—it sort of showed up out of the situation itself, the moment I was remembering, slow-writing into that moment—carries an echo of Christian's prompt, as do, now that I think of it, several moments in the chapbook. In the act of writing back to the version of myself in that moment, that approach to ourselves and our bodies, that call to bless them, to bless ourselves, that line is what brought it forward. I definitely had to stop writing when that line came and just sit with it.
The second line is from my forever obsessions, is a response to questions I ask over and over (yesterday while on my break at work I was asking those questions to my notebook again). The phrase you quote here is one of the last moments of the book I wrote, right under the wire for getting revisions to Laura Van Prooyen, publisher of Next Page Press, and pushing my page limit as well.
It came about because something wasn’t feeling right about how I opened the second section. I felt like I wanted something more blatant, more in keeping with work I’ve written in the past. Something about it felt too quiet in response to the statement of the Obstacle Card. As I do in revision, I was asking the collection (and the opening of the section), “What do you want?” Here I am, thinking about writing declarations, and instead—shaking my own foundations—it turns out I need to ask questions, implicative questions, back at myself. Turns out they wanted the opening of the section to be even more quiet.
I think the resonance between the processes which brought me to these moments is they both happen through a similar kind of attention: to language, to the world and to their intricate relationship: its tensions, its joys and troubles. My fraught relationship with English, the way it troubles me and the ways I’m called to trouble it.
In terms of process, I carry a notebook everywhere I go, I ask the phone to send me a voice-to-text while driving on my commutes so no-one has to have the terrifying experience of seeing me next to you on the highway in the driver's seat writing in my notebook.
More than generation, I revise the small and large moments of my writing in all the available places and forms. The above, the laptop, emails to myself, scribbles on the pdf or screen-shots of pages I’m working on, just even walking around. Ongoing and recurring, you know?
HQ: I’m in awe of how you used syntax to enhance the mundane, especially sections such as “crack on the lip left by its open door, spill / there and onto the linoleum as they tumble; if you towel / those eggs up, sob-sobbing the whole time, “I can’t do this, I / can’t,” hand and knees to floor, “I can’t,” pour the surviving / yolks.” What, or who, inspires you to ground your work in the everyday experience?
HA: I had started to write a whole thing trying to talk about all the people, non-human beings, art, spirit, etc. that teach me this attention—there’s so many. But your question already carries the way the mundane lives in everything, which also means it has the capacity to reveal them, yeah? If I was to point to one place where I find that inspiration in abundance right now, I'd point to Atang by Patrick Rosal. The whole book, available as a PDF, is in fact designed to be accessed for free and is amazing through and through.
One particular section I'm reminded of by your question is “Lubong,” which happens to also be available directly online at e-flux Journal. I want everyone to read it so I'll quote only a tiny portion out of context: “We have an entire body for carrying. We have an entire body for listening.” The way Rosal gets to that moment and how he follows it is worth the journey, truly. The way the smallest moments remind us of the immensity of our griefs and joys. The way wonder surprises us, word to DJ Wundrkut Eric Cardeno, I’m tempted to argue there’s restoration in even just that.
Though I have often attended to the mundane before, one thing that the initial moment of the pandemic revealed to me, which I must continue carrying, was the essentialness of attending to the small and everyday. Love to my fam and my friends who've witnessed this in me: even as I sometimes railed against it, even as I struggled.
I want to wander; I believe it’s in my bones, and how do we wander when we need to primarily stay in one place? I wandered inside the experiences there. In the case of the lines you quoted above, the imagination, as you pointed out, it's in the syntax. To approach a mundane moment with both less imagination—anytime I tried to add to that moment, the syntax failed me—and more imagination: working with syntax—whether following a rule painstakingly to a certain effect or breaking a rule or pattern to another effect—is a way of asking English to do more than its functionality would usually allow it to do. The everyday is where the restorative accumulates.
Salamat for your attentive reading and questions,
Hari
Full prompt from Christian Aldana (see response to question 2): Write a blessing for your tired body and your troubled mind. A creed, but you are the sacred thing at its center, real, something that can be held. You are ordinary and that is a revelation – to be the standard instead of the exception. Write like there is nothing to measure your tired body and your troubled mind against.
Heather Qin (she/her) is a high school student from New Jersey. She is an alumnus of the Sewanee Young Writers' Conference and the Iowa Young Writers' Studio. Her work has been recognized by the New York Times, the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, Breakbread Literary Magazine, Columbia College Chicago, among others. Heather loves classical music, watching anime, and playing gacha games. Find her @_greenbubbles on Twitter.