Interview with Darius Atefat-Peckham

Darius Atefat-Peckham’s poem “This is Not the End of the World” was published in Bluestem’s Fall / Winter 2020 issue. Darius is an Iranian-American poet and essayist. His work has appeared in Texas Review, Zone 3, Nimrod, Brevity, Crab Orchard Review, Cimarron Review, The Southampton Review and elsewhere. In 2018, Atefat-Peckham was selected by the Library of Congress as a National Student Poet, the nation’s highest honor presented to youth poets writing original work. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora (University of Texas Press).

Could you explain a little bit about Deep Are the Distances Between Us (out May 2023 with CavanKerry Press) and how that project came to be? 

Yes, I’d love to! Thank you for asking. I’ve written about this at more length in the Foreword to the manuscript, but basically, I discovered Deep Are These Distances Between Us in a bin saved by my grandmother of all my mother’s documents and correspondence. My father had worked on and sent out a version of this manuscript in the years just following accident, but for a number of reasons it wasn’t the right time for the book to come out. Many years passed, and I began to write and read more seriously, which led me to attend Interlochen Arts Academy and Harvard, where I studied poetry. Growing up, I absolutely adored and treasured my mother’s first collection of poetry, That Kind of Sleep, returning to the poems time and again as I tried to get a sense of the person she was—she died when I was three, so my memory of her was mostly of her absence. For obvious reasons, then, the discovery of a second book of poems absolutely floored me, especially since the first poems I found, a sequence of three poems near the middle of the book beginning with “I: To My Unborn Son,” were the only poems I knew of that were written to and for me. After reading it in full, I decided I’d try get the manuscript published, which led me to the most poignant experience of the process for me: since there didn’t exist a digital copy of the manuscript, I had to retype each poem. This not only proved a productive editing technique, but was the first time in my life I’ve felt truly spiritually in communion with my mother, her hand quite literally guiding mine as I inhabited and learned from her poetics. And this goes without saying, but she was and is an absolutely brilliant poet. Engaging in this way with her work revealed so much about her to me (in fact, I recommend every writer do this with their favorite poets—this is an exercise we do in Jorie Graham’s workshop, and it’s unanimously a favorite among students) and also helped me in differentiating her poetics from my own, which I’ll talk about in more detail later.

Your poem "This is Not the End of the World" appeared in our Fall / Winter 2020 issue. What do you remember about how this poem came into the world? What's its origin story?

“This is Not the End of the World” was written during the pandemic, and so it was a poem that was very aware of physical bodies in space with one another, and maybe even more importantly, their distance from one another. My love language is and has always been physical-touch—I love big hugs, so big that Dad used to admonish me, embarrassingly, “Gentle touches for the people you love”—but the pandemic (and pandemic-era literature and poetry) also taught me how to hold in other ways. A different kind of touch. Like I say in the poem, “through all this, I’ve learned only that distance is impossible” where “all this” comes to span not only the pandemic but my entire life, and the lives of those who came before me, or that existed concurrently but were lost to me. I wanted to reenvision and redetermine that “loss.” I’ve found that the human race is stubborn, and we will always learn another kind of touch, whether it be through prayer, dreams, or, as Ross Gay asserts, through sight and “Beholding” (a book-length poem I was obsessed with over the course of the pandemic) in diasporic contexts. I think this revelation, informed by the poets I love and admire, helped me evolve in my grief, in the process of editing Susie’s book, and helped me have healthier relationships with my beloveds and with myself. It taught me that poetry can be an ecstatic form of communion. Of course, there are also some darker tonal textures in the poem, of violence and harm and patriarchy, all of which I was thinking a ton about as I wrote poetry during the isolation period.

You've published a lot of work since you first came onto Bluestem's radar (from our "slush pile"!) We notice that you return a lot to writing about family in your poems. Do you feel you've changed the way you approach this subject in your work over the past several years? Do you feel it remains a central theme in your writing?

I think one thing that’s changed in my work is my engagement with grief, which has certainly evolved over time. At the time that I wrote “This is Not the End of the World” I was challenging myself to include joy in grief, to feel these two things concurrently (influenced by many poems I had read by personal poetry heroes like Ross Gay, Sharon Olds, James Wright, Galway Kinnell, etc.) and reach or turn towards this more complicated thing of hope or love by the end of each piece. This turn was often made obvious by a kind of volta or, within lines, that perpetual associative leaping you’ve rightly noticed, my refusal to dwell in any kind of sorrow for too long and therefore insist upon the complex emotional landscape that colors and informs grief, both affirming that feeling and letting grief “break into blossom” as James Wright wrote in his “A Blessing” – into all its complexity. In many ways, those poems sought a single revelation that might be restated a million different ways: that love and grief are nearly synonymous, and that one can’t be felt without the other. The new work (complied in my senior thesis at Harvard, tentatively titled Book of Kin) allows itself to linger in the grieving process a bit longer, to be haunted in the sense that it accepts the very real death of one’s (in this case, the mother and brother’s) physical body, and allows the poet to feel the heft and weight of that loss, but then can also be a bidirectional haunting in its attempts at reincarnation or reconstitution. Of the soul, of voice and sound, of connection, and through this endeavor, of hope and joy. A survival of sorts. After all, what is a haunting but that which is stubbornly, insatiably, alive? Through this process, I’ve learned a ton about silence and listening within the lyric mode, about polyvocality (including other voices in my poetry and speaking from them as well as from an embodied self), about form as a vehicle for this practice, and about withholding and preserving mystery in my poems. I’m less generous in every poem and try to trust that the “body” of work I am cultivating, I am constructing, is something separate from my body, and thus doesn’t have to represent me entire—that it will usher forth revelation across poems, will speak of and from the silence (instead of merely filling it), will act as a kind of present continuous in a poetic space, an imaginative realm in which I can commune with my ancestors, with my living family, enacting or enabling a kind of continuance.

Another thing we admire about your work is the use of what some might call nonsequitur or what others might simply label juxtaposition. Those leaps from one thought to something completely different are so deft. For example, "This is Not the End of the World" opens:

 In dreams, dreaming, I am slowly and methodically beating a man

senseless. Or trying to. We all are, all the time. I write the best
love poems to the sound

of bird calls.

Can you talk about how such juxtapositions work for you? Are they there in early drafts of your poems, or does your editorial / revising self consciously add them in?

I may have answered this a bit in the previous question, but I can perhaps note here my love of the associate leap and its various uses in my own work. I think one thing that differentiates my mother’s, or “Susie’s,” work from my own is that her language (at least as I see it) is ecstatic in the sense that it allows the prayerful reception or singing of language to guide the more spiritual whirling that happens within the body and mind, and you see this reflected in long, rhythmic sentences that employ the comma as a kind of silent drum-beat—a silence that begets sound—a pivot-point, a kind of whirling in language. Or: an impressionistic cultivation of all that the eye and ear gathers as it revolves. There is a strong Sufi influence in her work, a linguistic dance that is at once self-expression and the acceptance of (and submission to) forces larger than oneself, the belief that one can inhabit, and be inhabited by, the divine. For me, the use of the compressed line, of shorter and more punctual sentences that employ m-dashes, fragments, periods, and differing line lengths, allow a kind of bridge toward new strands of thinking, toward uncertainty—and, yes, a leaping. Maybe this is reflective of my own discomfort about sitting still (to the great exasperation of my parents when I was younger) or maybe it’s just a kind of intuitive knowledge about where one sentence or idea may allow me to travel in the next. I like to think of it as the latter: since my life has been so restricted in terms of travel (I have never been able to go to Iran, whether for familial or socio-political reasons, and then, of course, the pandemic period took up a major chunk of my life) I like to travel in my work. Sometimes these leaps aren’t successful, and sometimes they are, but I think to search for connection in this way, between two seemingly disparate or tenuous entities—and seek an answer to why the subconscious mind places them beside one another—is a worthy and generative practice, in life and in poetry.

Can you talk about what you're working on now, or next? Where is your writing life headed?

I’m currently at work editing and submitting my debut collection of poetry, Book of Kin. It is a book about ancestral memory, intergenerational trauma, and familial grief, joy, love and healing. It was also my thesis at Harvard (which I worked on with my wonderful, brilliant advisor, poet Tracy K. Smith). This fall, I’ll be headed to The Michener Center for Writers at UT-Austin for my MFA, where I’ll be a part of a small cohort of brilliant poets, fiction writers, screenwriters, and playwrights, and where I’ll be able to engage in genres apart from my primary focus of poetry. For my secondary, I’ll most likely write fiction (beginning with auto-fiction and branching out from there) and I hope to write a good bit of creative nonfiction and memoir. Mostly I want to keep feeding my love of learning, my love of being in spaces with other creatives and learning with and from one another. I feel lucky that I’ve been able to be in these spaces my entire life, and can’t wait to continue this pursuit in Austin.