Q&A with Poet Leila Chatti | Arts Collective
The COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective is an online, 4-week fellowship program that allows creative writers, visual artists, and musicians to explore, illuminate, and grow through collaborating on interdisciplinary projects. Learn more about the Arts Collective here.
Each week, we hosted live-streams featuring guest performers in writing and music, and allowed fellows to ask them questions about their experiences. We’re now publishing the transcriptions of these interviews on our blog. This is Week 3, featuring poet Leila Chatti.
Leila Chatti was born in 1990 in Oakland, California. A Tunisian-American dual citizen, she has lived in the United States, Tunisia, and Southern France. She is the author of the debut full-length collection Deluge, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2020, and the chapbooks Ebb (New-Generation African Poets) and Tuniya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. She holds a B.A. from the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University and an M.F.A. from North Carolina State University, where she was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. She is the recipient of grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and fellowships and scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, The Frost Place Conference on Poetry, the Key West Literary Seminars, and Dickinson House. Her poems have received prizes from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, Narrative’s 30 Below Contest, and the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, among others, and appear in Best New Poets (2015 & 2017), Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, Narrative, The Rumpus, and other journals and anthologies. In 2017, she was shortlisted for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. She currently serves as the Consulting Poetry Editor at the Raleigh Review and lives in Cleveland, Ohio, where she is the inaugural Anisfield-Wolf Fellow in Writing and Publishing at Cleveland State University.
Purchase Leila Chatti’s recently released full length collection Deluge from Copper Canyon Press HERE
Leila Chatti’s poem “Upon Realizing There Are Ghosts In The Water”, broadside courtesy Kalamazoo Book Arts Center
CAC: How are you doing today?
LC: Good! I am at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Residency for Poetry. It’s really wonderful. It’s very interdisciplinary, so there’s writers, artists, composers. We haven’t done any collaboration, but I just had brunch and talked with everybody. We talked about process and things that we’re creatively inspired by, which I feel like is feeding each other. We’ll say, “Have you heard this composer? Have you heard of this poem?” I’m learning a lot of how others'’ processes work, and also what inspires them.
CAC: Firstly, could you talk us through several of the poems you just read? What were some of the inspirations that lead to these pieces and what were you trying to tackle with these pieces?
LC: I remember exactly where I was when I wrote “Muslim Girlhood”. I was sitting on my best friend’s couch in San Francisco, and it was the morning that they announced there was going to be a Sesame Street character with a hijab. And I was really excited about that, because in my childhood I watched Sesame Street and there was not a character with a hijab. I had a good ten seconds of being very excited, but then below that was of course the horrible comments, right? Of people being very...ugh...evil. And so, I was very upset that this moment for me of joy had been immediately squashed, like I couldn’t have a full minute of feeling excited about some character. So I decided to write “Muslim Girlhood” about what it was like to grow up Muslim in the U.S. – that’s why something like that can be a big deal when there’s not really good representation. A sort of like, “F-U” poem.
“My Mother Makes a Religion” is true. My mother is raised Catholic. She’s sort of lapsed, and so that was a sort of a study and celebration of my mom and peoples’ faiths.
With “When I Tell My Father I Began to Pray Again”, I would just say that everything I’ve ever written this is true. One summer, my father and I went to one Tunisia, as usual, and he and I were sitting outside as it was very dark, and just talking about faith. My dad was very religious when I was young, and has stepped away from his faith since I’ve been an adult. But I’ve had the opposite reaction, where I was very religious as a child and then I stepped away, and now I think I’m coming back. Prayer is such a routine thing in Islam, because it’s daily, multiple times. And we just had this real conversation about prayer. It was very important to me, and I wanted to capture that conversation.
“Motherland” was written about three days after the election of President Trump. My mom called me. I was living in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and she was very scared and wanted me to come home so we could all leave. She wanted to leave the U.S. My mom is a very rational, calm, not-dramatic person, and so her fear was really startling to me – not because it was unwarranted, but because she was expressing it, since she never really expressed a lot of fear. I stayed up that night talking to her on the phone, and then I wrote this poem about my mother’s fears about what this country was turning toward, or what it was revealing about itself that was there the whole time.
“After Reading DJ Khaled Will Not Perform Oral Sex On His Wife Despite Demanding That She Must, I Consider My Relationships”. There was a thing that he said [concerning this views on the sexual dynamics between male and female romantic partners] that very much upset me. It’s obvious why a lot of it was upsetting, but I was trying to figure out why it was personally upsetting and troubling me a lot. I wrote my way through my feelings and my associations to uncover what was bothering me and what it meant about women’s lives.
The other three [poems] are from Deluge. The Deluge poems: a lot of them do feel like they just came down. I know that may sound a little ooo woo, but I think they came from somewhere else. Certainly “Prayer” and “Annunciation”. “Confession” I wrote sitting at Dorianne Laux’s kitchen table I studied with her briefly after graduate school. I was sitting at the table and re-reading the Koran and I encountered that passage where Mary is giving birth and I had not remembered that there was a description of the scene. I was really surprised by that. I don’t think that people really realize that Mary and Joseph are in the Quran, and certainly not that Mary is actively giving birth.
CAC: When did you begin writing? Why did you choose to focus on poetry?
LC: I began really young. It’s probably cliché to say, but, I was just talking about this recently with a friend of mine, I started writing poems when I was five. As soon as I learned how to write, I was writing poems. I’m lucky that my parents kept some of those old journals, which are really funny. Publish that collection!
I liked poetry because I really liked sound, and poems allowed me to put sounds closer together and to prioritize sound as opposed to prose. As a kid, I was also in Quranic school, learning to recite the Quran. The Quran is sort of rhythmic: it’s not poetry, but it’s similar in that it’s powerful and it relies a lot on sound, and that merged with me as I was learning to read and write in English. To me, sound became like, “Oh! I wanna do this! I want to write something that has this power!”
I started writing poems, and then when I got older and learned of other options, I still preferred poems. I think I just liked that I could move very quickly in a poem. I didn’t have to build in transitions. I could be sitting in my room, and suddenly I’m in childhood, or suddenly I am on the moon, or whatever. Poetry is a lot of freedom of imagination of movement, and even of language play. You can really get away with whatever you want on the page.
The Quran is sort of rhythmic: it’s not poetry, but it’s similar in that it’s powerful and it relies a lot on sound, and that merged with me as I was learning to read and write in English. To me, sound became like, “Oh! I wanna do this! I want to write something that has this power!”
Spring Fragment—from Cordite Poetry Review; Annunciation—from The Georgia Review
CAC: So here’s a new one: what’s your process? How do you begin and work through a new poem?
LC: Yeah, that’s a good question! I was blocked for the past year and a half, so I’ve had to reacquaint myself with my process. What I’ve really learned is that for me, I need to listen. A poem almost always starts as a little whisper of something. That’ll be the first line. Or, sometimes, it’ll be a feeling that sort of bubbles up for a second, and it’s my responsibility to notice that and to put myself in a position where I can follow it.
For a long time, I was ignoring those cues for myself. I would think something was interesting, or a line would show up. but I would immediately squash it down. I’d be like “No – that’s not interesting,” or “that’s obvious,” or “I don’t have time to write this poem.” I’m re-learning how to listen to the voice that’s trying to get my attention, and to put aside everything else to follow it where it wants to go. But in a more practical sort of way, I read. I read all the time. On a good day, I’ll read two books a day; I start in the morning as soon as I wake up. I make myself tea and I sit at my desk and do Morning Pages, a process where you write, freehand, three pages, without editing and without thinking. You just go as quickly as possible, and it’s a way to clear out the thoughts that would distract you from the creative process and get rid of the noise. I keep a computer near me at all times because I’m a computer-writer, and I also have a notebook. I take a lot of notes while I’m reading, while I’m walking around. I really advise doing that, because sometimes just flipping through that I’ll be like, “oh yeah, that was a real interesting thing that I encounter once, and it would be nice to write that poem.”
What I’ve really learned is that for me, I need to listen. A poem almost always starts as a little whisper of something. That’ll be the first line. Or, sometimes, it’ll be a feeling that sort of bubbles up for a second, and it’s my responsibility to notice that and to put myself in a position where I can follow it.
In terms of how it starts, I need to write it all in one sitting. I don’t return to poems. I like to start in the morning, working line by line, revising as I’m going down the page. By the time I get to the final line, I might make one word choice difference afterwards, but it’s done at that point. Sometimes a poem will take me five minutes if it’s brought down by God, but more often it will take maybe three or four hours of me working through it. The longest it’s ever taking me is 12 hours. That was a very long day. Because sound is so important to me, I would say that’s my primary temperament, as in Gregor’s Poetic Temperament — sound, structure (form), narrative, and imagination (imagery, leaps, metaphor)—and sound is usually how I pivot between moments. And I have to read out loud when I’m writing, so I can’t write in public places; I have to write at home.
CAC: You have lived much of your life as a duel citizen, split between Tunisia and America, and your most recent chapbook Tunsiya/Amrikiya from Bull City Press deals the most explicitly with navigating a multicultural identity. Can you take us through the chapbook’s project, if you think it has one specific enough to point to? And can you speak on how your social position has influenced your poetry?
LC: I wrote Tunsiya/Amrikiya in 2016, as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center. I had arrived in October, but in January of that year, one of my resolutions was I wanted to put together a chapbook. I had been writing enough poems and been publishing enough that I thought it would be a good next step in terms of growth and learning. At first, the chapbook got lost in the wildness of that year. There were the elections, and I got very overwhelmed by it, and then I moved. I was living at Dorianne Laux’s for a little bit in the spring, and then I was overseas and then I came back and then I went to Provincetown. That was the year I was living out of a suitcase just floating around.
By the time it was December I was like, “Oh, well I guess I didn’t write that chapbook. I guess that goal didn’t happen.” But then I really wanted my chapbook published with Bull City. They were always my dream press, and they had their deadline in early January. I decided that I was done sort of moping (after the election happened I didn’t write for months). I was very depressed. I sat down at my kitchen table and I was like, “Let me try to pull something together.”
Originally I had thought that I would have two chapbooks — one would be Tunsiya, one would be Amrikiya – and they would be sisters, but not the same. But when I started trying to look through all the poems, I realized I couldn’t sort them. I was like, “I don’t know if this one goes in Amrikiya or Tunsiya.” Then I realized that is actually what I’m trying to say — that there’s no clean division. Because I am both, I can’t separate my life into clean compartments of, “this is my Tunisian life and this is my American life,” because they’re so overlapping. When I merged the two manuscripts together, I realized it was about my childhood. But I also realized there was a lot of material about the political moment that I was living in, because I had just written works to help myself understand. There were poems about the Pulse Shooting, or about migrants drowning in the Mediterranean, or about the presidential election. I was just trying to make sense of what it meant to be Arab-American and Muslim-American in 2016. Near the end, it became less about myself as an individual and more about reflecting on my position.
When I merged the two manuscripts together, I realized it was about my childhood. But I also realized there was a lot of material about the political moment that I was living in, because I had just written works to help myself understand. There were poems about the Pulse Shooting, or about migrants drowning in the Mediterranean, or about the presidential election. I was just trying to make sense of what it meant to be Arab-American and Muslim-American in 2016. Near the end, it became less about myself as an individual and more about reflecting on my position.
In terms of how my poetry has influenced my social position in general, I didn’t study creative writing as an undergraduate, so I didn’t start knowing that I could do it until around 2012. When I got to graduate school I quickly became aware and nervous about...not necessarily from my peers, but there was often a conversation like, “Oh how lucky to be a person of color because you’ll get published right away.” And kind of a tokenizing, right? It’s this idea that if you write something exotic, then you’ve got a golden ticket into publishing. I was being told to write Arab poems, and the only way I would really be published is if I was writing that, because that’s what made me interesting. That was very hard on my self-esteem, because I’m not someone who wants to just win things unwarranted. I actually stopped writing about my identity, because I was determined to prove that I earned my place. In the beginning, I was sending out poems that could’ve been written by anybody, about love or illness, or whatever. Things that were not specifically Arab or Muslim.
When I started publishing those, I gave myself permission to send out my Arab and Muslim poems. But it makes me sad that I felt like I had to do that. I think a lot of people feel that way: that they didn’t earn their space at the table, even when they do, and it’s not like there’s a glut of Tunisians writing in English. It was frustrating that I had to sort of go through that self-doubt process, but now that I’m sort of like, “to hell with that,” it’s been really nice, because I get to meet so many other people who are from similar backgrounds that hadn’t seen themselves represented. I hadn’t seen my self represented when I was young. I didn’t even know that characters in a book could be Arab. I never encountered and an Arab narrator or anything like that, so it was really freeing to build that space for myself.
CAC: In the “About This Poem” section for your piece “The Rules,” published by the Academy of American Poets, you said, “I spent much of the last year unable to write. When I tried to listen to my interior, what I heard was a cacophony of accumulated voices telling me what a poem should be, what a poem should do — and, more disturbingly, what it shouldn’t… I knew this risked sentimentality, earnestness, and vulnerability, things I had been told to guard against, but I was tired of the rules — I wanted to write the real thing, even if it wasn’t the right thing. So I did.”
Clearly, you believe there is an inherent power to taking risks and prizing the “real thing” over the “right thing”. Do you think a writer's work cannot fully thrive until they reach that moment of risk? Additionally, what advice do you have for writers who struggle to overcome the expectations harbored by the academic audience so those writers may begin writing in the world of risk?
LC: Risk, for me, is the heart and soul of a poem. If you are unwilling to follow the poem to the territory that it wants to go into, then you’re not doing the work. When I know a poem has gotten to the point where it is a poem, as opposed to me playing around, is when I reach a point of new discovery. Unless it’s like, “Oh! I learned something about myself,” or “I learned something about the world,” I’m just retelling something. And once I get to the feeling where something turns or clicks, and suddenly it’s telling me something that I didn’t know before I sat down, that’s when I know this is a poem that should be followed wherever it wants to go. But there’s a lot of poems I write that are dead on arrival, right? But if there isn’t a moment for me where you’re surprised, then the reader is not going to be surprised either. I write to understand things. I'm writing to have the world shift just a little bit. Just the teensiest little difference between when I begin the poem and when I ended the poem. You’re venturing out into new territory. It’s good for poets to play, because if you don’t, you’ll never get somewhere new.
But I think there’s also a difference between risk and carelessness. I do believe that a poem is an argument, and every move you make, you should be able to articulate why you did it. I don’t think you should just be throwing things, and seeing what sticks and what doesn’t, or having the reader sort through. Some people have different opinions on that, but I think a risk means you were in control for 90% of the poem, and then you let the thing go for a second, as opposed to the poem flinging the reader around. I want to trust the poet. I want to leap with the poet, with their voice. You don’t want to see the poet behind the curtain. You don’t want to see the poet trying. I just want to see the poem doing a thing as if there’s no other way the poem could have been different.
A risk is sometimes formal. A risk is putting things all over the page, or taking a receipt, and making a poem out of that. There’s a lot of formal risks. But there’s also intellectual and emotional risks, and those shouldn’t be overlooked either. To say something that is difficult is obviously a risk, and to follow your thoughts to a place that you maybe haven’t seen done before — those aren’t flashy risks, but they’re valid risks, and important.
Angel— From COSTURA
CAC: In an interview with Mass Poetry, you opened up about two uterine tumors you had during your early twenties. In the interview you elaborated in the shame that you associated with the hemorrhages you suffered from as a result, and how from that shame you were able to uncover the “… beauty in it, some artistry, at least a little bit, in the quiet moment before and in my body despite its circumstances…” While trauma is never something to fetishize nor diminish with platitudes like “at least you got some poems out of it,” can you tell us a little bit about the mental process you went through to reframe and utilize your trauma to create the beautiful work you do?
LC: I was sick in my early 20s. I first got sick when I was 22 and I had my final surgery right before I turn 25 (and I’m 29, for context. So about four years out). And almost the entirety of that experience I was at grad school. I went to the hospital the day that my graduate applications were due and so that was quite the day! And then the day before my first surgery I got the phone call from NC State saying that I had got accepted which was the first graduate school that I heard from and which I ended up going to. Then my final surgery happened two days after I defended my thesis—so literally the entirety of my illness. And then I was on bedrest for a month and then I walked at graduation. So I was really sick the entire time I was learning to be a writer. and when I was in my MFA I would literally be at class and then I would go take the bus to Chapel Hill where I would go to the hospital to go see my oncologist.
So that back-and-forth meant that I was never not able to think about it. The symptoms were daily and intrusive so I was thinking about it all the time it was something that was really I really couldn’t see beyond because At the time they thought it was a star, and the life expectancy they gave me was less than 10%. I was so in the immediate—like, “I need to get through this day,”—that’s I couldn’t really think about anything else. Nothing else seem to be really important to me other than my illness. I wrote some poems just to try to make sense of what was happening and trying to have it make sense. I had an experience where an individual told me that no one would want to read those poems because they were too graphic and no one wants to read about menstruation, no one wants to read about uteruses, said feminism is over, and I would be better off writing Arab poems.
So I was really ashamed. I have been writing these poems that felt very important to me because it was immediate, but I was terrified. There’s a lot of writing myths and one of them is that your first book needs to be great, which I don’t believe is actually true. There’s plenty of people who have really lovely lives and careers that have books that don’t receive such a wide audience until later in their lives. But at that age I believed my first book was very important. So when I graduated I was still writing just to sort of make sense of my illness and what had happened to me, but I was like, “there’s no way this could be my book. What kind of audience am I going to have if I’m writing about tumors and Islam and blood? No one’s going to want to read that.” So I went to France after my MFA because I had been so focused on what’s gonna be the deal with this tumor—is it cancer or not? What’s happening? It was not, thank God. But I was so shellshocked that I hadn’t planned anything else. I literally didn’t even know what was out there.
So my partner and I went to France. His family had a summer house there and I hid away in this attic and I wrote. And a lot of Deluge start of being written then. but when I came back I stayed with Dorian, and I was with her and Joe, her husband, and it was the beginning of 2016 so I wanted to put together a chapbook and I had a lot of these health poems, I knew I had a handful, and so I started gathering them and I gave Dorianne Laux’s that cluster, you know, maybe 10-15 or so and I was like, “ I have these poems, I feel like I’m approaching a checkbook length, but I also feel like I’m not done. I actually feel like I barely got started. What do you think I should do? Do you think I should cut some of these and write new ones?” And she looked at it and she was like, “Leila this isn’t your chapbook, this is your book.”
And I was very upset. I made a plan with myself that I was going to send some of these out for publication at places that I like, and if nobody seems interested, then I’m gonna put these away and I’m gonna work on something else. “Confession” is the first poem in the book won the Ploughshares Emerging Writers Prize, which really renewed my confidence that maybe this could be something important.
Maybe half of Deluge was written when I was sick, and so it’s very raw and immediate. While I wanted to understand the literal, medical effects on my body, I also was trying to comprehend the shame that I felt. I was encountering sexism at every turn, from the doctors to my Scripture in my efforts to soothe myself – and in writing. This idea that women shouldn’t write about their uteruses, that that’s not real poetry.
Everywhere I was turning it told me I should be quiet about it. But I didn’t want to. I'm very glad that I continued to work on it because it has made me less ashamed. I remember being very afraid to even talk about the fact that I had blood that’s such a silly thing but I would be very embarrassed.
I do think there is beauty in almost every poem that has ever existed. Poems are usually beautiful objects, either by sound or image. But writing about everything that had hurt me, that was very hard – and giving it little houses to live in has made it so much more bearable. Once I finished a book, I thought, “That part of my life is safely kept somewhere and I don’t have to revisit it.” It was like chipping away at this massive thing and putting it into little boxes until it was manageable.
I can see the lessons I’ve learned and there’s beauty in that.
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Woody Woodger lives in Lenox, Massachusetts. Her first chapbook, “postcards from glasshouse drive” (Finishing Line Press) has been nominated for the 2018 Massachusetts Book Awards and her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, from DIAGRAM, Drunk Monkeys, RFD, Exposition Review, peculiar, Prairie Margins, Rock and Sling, and Mass Poetry Festival, among others. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net. In addition, she has a regular column with COUNTERCLOCK Literary Magazine.
Sarah Feng is a writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. She was a 2018 Foyle Commended Young Poet of the Year and the runner-up for the Adroit Prize for Prose. Other organizations which have recognized her work include Teen Vogue, the New York Times, the Critical Pass Junior Poet Prize, the National Council of Teachers of English, the American Scholastic Press Association, and more. She was Kenyon Young Writer's Workshop '18 and the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship '17. She plays piano and dabbles in charcoals, and she thinks rhythm and light and lyric pulse in every field of the creative arts – if you can call them distinct fields at all. In other words, she has faith in the power of the interdisciplinary arts and their persistence in our memories and minds. She is the founder and program director of the COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective. You can find her here.