"I Love Books that Feel Like You’re Sitting with a Gemini" Noor Hindi on DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW.
wust el-balad #9
The illusion that poetry is not a business is one of the greatest tricks of the poetry business. The relative smallness of the poetry market (especially compared to its massive cousin, fiction) often sustains this illusion of non-commercial purity. We are not like the other financialized and capitalized art industries, so many poets and editors frequently seem to be begging to say. In such a landscape of trickery, it behooves us to have poetry that confronts the state of poetry, that looks at where the money and the power is. This medium we claim to love isn’t going anywhere good if we don’t start with such a confrontation. Noor Hindi’s debut book, DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW., strives to do just that. Wedding the eye of the reporter to the lyrical scrutiny of the poet, the collection demands more out of writing itself, and in turn gives us language to demand more for ourselves––from the spaces in which we write, for starters. I had the pleasure of speaking with Noor about MFAs, the state of journalism, and our mutual love for chaos––among other things. Below is an edited and condensed version of that conversation.
HAZEM: For starters, I wanted to ask you about the title and how it came together.
NOOR: I really struggled with the title for a long time. I don’t know why. Maybe I just didn’t want to finish the project. To me, a poem isn’t finished until I title it. I often come up with the title for a poem before I even begin it. So, typically, I know a poem isn’t good or finished if I don’t have a title, yet. And I just could not come up with a title for the book, even though I really loved it.
Then my friend kept jokingly saying that I should name it “Yellowets,” as a joke off of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. It was a joke, but I ended up becoming obsessed with the color yellow in that way when you’re sometimes writing and get into this phase where you can’t stop doing this one trick. I also kept getting stuck on the word “dear,” like whenever I didn’t know where to go in a poem, I just addressed something or someone and it would help me get out of it. Then the first poem ended up including the phrase “Dear Mother” and I just knew that had to be the structure for the title.
I had also just read Jackie Wang’s The Sunflower Casts a Spell to Save Us from the Void, and that book was so good—the title is just a fucking banger. Man, I wish that was my book title. I think titles are really central and important to their books. I was so happy when my editor asked me if I wanted mine to be in all caps. I said yes because I wanted it to scream, like it was directly addressing God.
HAZEM: I know, just from our friendship, that it was quite a process getting this book out. What was it like working with Haymarket on it?
NOOR: Maya Marshall, the book’s editor, read and edited it like no one had ever done before. She really understood what I was going for. She was so diligent and precise, and was just such a good reader. And was really, really patient because I came in without an agent—obviously, most poets don’t have agents—and she just advocated for me, and taught me how to advocate for myself. Working with her has been really great. The process with Haymarket has been generally pretty easy.
They were especially great in helping me navigate the unique difficulties of a first book. So much happens between when the book is accepted and when it is published, and so much happened in my own personal life during that period. It feels like way more time lapsed than actually did. And just in general, by the time you’re ready to publish the first book, it feels like those poems have become old, and there’s now a desire to look at them with such fierce critique. Of course, I do see a lot of the book’s mistakes, and I’m very honest about them. But I’ve also been trying to be very compassionate towards myself. This is why people publish second and third and fourth books.
HAZEM: Throughout the book, the speaker is consistently confronting the writing space, the workshop space. Tell me more about the recurrence of that motif.
NOOR: Here’s my advice for anyone moving into an MFA program: no MFA program is good. No MFA program is going to land you a job. No MFA program is going to make you money. And no MFA program is going to “decolonize,” in the truest sense of the word. Part of what I was trying to talk about in the book is how when you become a writer, professionally, you still become part of a system, whether it’s the workshop space or reporting. I was asking: how does one navigate the traumas, both personal and collective, of those systems? I went to an MFA that was predominantly white, cis and straight. I think there was one other Palestinian in the program. The program was also weird because it was the only one in the country that’s a consortium, so it was actually spread out over four different universities.
MFAs are also weird because of where tenure is right now. The was an age where you used to be able to get tenure as a writing instructor pretty easily. You would go to an MFA program, and it was one of maybe 15 or 20, and then you’d finish, and you’d get an academic job, and maybe, eight or nine years later, you’re in a tenure position. And those people, they held on to their jobs—but they were predominantly male and white, and those were a lot of my professors. The others were mostly white women. All three of my thesis advisors were white women. So when I finished the book, and I came to my thesis defense, I had an identity crisis. I realized I’d been writing all these poems for white women. And this was natural in the sense that whoever ends being your editor becomes the voice you hear in your head.
Something that I think really saved the book, and saved me in a lot of ways, was all the Arab-centric writing spaces I found, as well as meeting people like Summer Farah, George Abraham and Fargo Tbakhi. That taught me to look at that voice in my head a little bit more closely. And also, more tangibly, to find the community that I was writing for. Like any program, I think the MFA does a lot of damage, but I also think that what you can take out of an MFA is two-to-three years of focusing on your writing, and I think that’s the only expectation that you should come into an MFA with.
HAZEM: It’s really refreshing to year you talk about the writing MFA like this, because I feel like so often the conversation is stuck between this binary that’s either rose-tinted or fully apocalyptic, whereas I feel like it should be focused more on these kinds of sober perspectives. Moreover, one has to figure out what they’re trying to get out of it. It is, first and foremost, a degree, a position you have at a university.
NOOR: Yeah. And I did get some good criticism from my professors, I really appreciated their feedback. But there was also the knowledge that it could only go so far. A white woman is not Arab. Probably not an immigrant. It’s really hard for people without these perspectives to look at my work critically. I also feel like something really shifted in the poetry world, around a couple of years before and leading up to Trump’s presidency and afterwards, where there was this big celebration of writers who are “marginalized,” which I think lent itself to a lot of celebration of our work without there being criticism, like good criticism. That was already hard to find in poetry spaces, anyway. Criticism is supposed to be how we grow, right? I’d love to see a thoughtful critique of my book by a Palestinian writer, for example.
HAZEM: I think the other issue that compounds this is that a lot of formal poetry spaces, like the university—it’s not simply that a lot of the instructors or the participants don’t relate to experiences different than theirs, but that they don’t actually make the effort to expand their imagination as to what poetry could look like.
NOOR: These spaces just weren’t built for us.
HAZEM: There’s often a really political lack of curiosity in them. I’ve been in writing spaces with people who weren’t Egyptian and didn’t know anything tangible about my experience, but they gave me the most wonderful feedback on my work because they’re actually engaging with it and are invested in pushing it forward. So even if they don’t understand the thing in their hands, their instinct isn’t just “oh, cut this” and “change that,” it’s to ask, to try and figure out what it is the poet is trying to do and what shaped their though process. Their feedback ends up being tailored to the actual piece in question because they’ve actually put in the effort to consider what it is.
NOOR: I totally agree with you. You can’t assume that your cohort is going to be your community. I’m very luck I found people to work with outside of my cohort. It was just constant microaggressions. But I still think that if a program funds you, and you get to work on your stuff for something like three years, you should take it.
HAZEM: I’ve become an evangelist in that regard, just going up to people like “hi, please don’t go into debt for an MFA.” If they’re giving you money though, yeah that could be worth it.
NOOR: Plus, anything you spend about three years doing, you’re gonna get better at it. Yes, it messed me up for some time, but it was still so much fun. Nothing else gives you the experience of doing almost nothing but working on your art for three years.
HAZEM: I always love asking poets who are also nonfiction writers (in your case, journalists): what is the relationship between these two modes of work for you?
NOOR: For me, the relationship between nonfiction or journalism and poetry was always inextricable because, before I was a poet, I was a journalist. I think that’s where the desire to write poems came from. I grew up in the US post 9/11. Our narratives were being written for us, and not by us. When I started reporting, that power dynamic was still very much at play. I even felt it in my own work. When I would speak to people, I felt like a sort of gatekeeper for their emotions and experiences. If you’re a responsible reporter, you try to express what people are saying in the most truthful way possible, but it’s still coming through you because you are the one that’s ultimately writing the story, and deciding what the larger context and argument of it is.
I think I came to poetry because I wanted to just express myself and not have anyone else shape or render that. There’s also a tenderness and vulnerability to poetry that is missing in reporting in a lot of ways. As reporters, we use people’s traumas and experiences to tell a larger story, which when done right can be beautiful and powerful. But their story is not presented for its own sake, it’s always because it fits a larger narrative. And what I love about poetry is that when you read a book of poems you can enter that person’s world and they are the only thing that matters. You are seeing it truly through their eyes.
HAZEM: Do you feel like you find yourself identifying more with one medium over the other, or are they equal for you?
NOOR: Right now is actually the first time in my adult life that I’m not reporting, which has been really weird. I felt burnt out with writing after COVID hit, in general. After graduating from my MFA, I started this reporting fellowship and I was reporting on evictions during the pandemic. That really, really messed me up. I was someone who is displaced watching people get displaced every single day. I attended maybe over 100 hours of eviction hearings. So by 2021, I was really, really burnt out and by the Fall, I felt like I just couldn’t do it anymore. Either poetry or journalism actually. I still haven’t found my way back to poetry the way I had when I was doing my MFA, which is why I started stepping into lyric nonfiction. To answer your question, though, it depends on where I am in my life. I would say I generally lean more towards poetry. I was on a crusade for a really long time to get more reporters to read poetry. I don’t think we talked enough about the emotional impact of what we’re seeing or hearing.
HAZEM: This leads very smoothly into my next question, which is about your poem, “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying.” Particularly, the line: “I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.” This idea comes up a lot, wanting poems to just view the moon. Tell me more about that urge.
NOOR: By the time I finally finished my MFA, I was fucking pissed because I was looking at these poems I’d written and realized they were for white people. Also, this is not to applaud myself, but I felt like during my time in the program there was a certain level of stakes to the work I was bringing in. I felt like I was putting my life on the line to write these poems. And then I would remember how somebody would bring in a poem about riding a roller coaster or Adam and Eve fucking, and I’d have to sit there and provide feedback for this work, when it didn’t feel like my cohort was giving the same level of care or attention to my work. There was just a different level to it.
HAZEM: My last question: how do you approach form?
NOOR: For me, it really emerges naturally, and very chaotically. I feel like I’m not myself when I’m writing poems, by which I mean: it doesn’t feel like it’s me in the room. It’s like how when you get in the groove of writing it can sometimes feel like it’s not you writing the poems, but some other being, a deeper one. I feel like so much happens in poetry by accident. There are poems in the book that have a very chaotic form or take up a lot of space, for example, and those I wrote in moments of chaos and disorganization. And then there are the poems that’re a little bit sharper. It was really important to me that those created a sense of abruptness in the work. Form for me is this way of elevating, or driving, the general argument of a poem in really smart and quiet ways. When I’m first writing a poem, though, I don’t really think about all of that. It’s more about just getting the poem out and then the form emerges in the edit.
HAZEM: Do you think chaos can be a kind of form?
NOOR: Oh, definitely. I love chaos. I love chaos so much. It was actually really hard to sequence the book for that reason. I do love books that feel like you’re sitting with a Gemini. I love books with messiness. I wouldn’t actually choose to write a poem that is so well-crafted and sharp that every line break is perfect. That would be a little boring. I’d rather a poem lean into itself and bring out its ugly. I’m thinking about Kim Addonizio now.
HAZEM: Oh, there’s so much wonderful chaos in her work.
NOOR: Yes, her work is just so human. And there’s a vulnerability and access to it. I think it’s different from poems that are super well-crafted. I’m just so grateful for poets who embrace chaos because they’re giving so much of themselves away to the reader.
HAZEM: I understand what you mean. I love poems that are brimming with life, especially ones that feel like candid snapshots of a moment or a day.
NOOR: My favorite poems are ones where I leave them feeling like this bottle of soda that you just shook and then opened suddenly. I just want to feel like something has burst.
Noor Hindi (she/her/hers) is a Palestinian-American poet and reporter. She is a 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow. Follow her on Twitter @MyNrhindi.
Hazem Fahmy is a writer and critic from Cairo. You can find his work here and follow him on social media here.
DEAR GOD. DEAR BONES. DEAR YELLOW. is out now from Haymarket Press. You can find it here, as well as in local bookstores and libraries across the US.