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Christopher Merrill has published six collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. His writings have been translated into nearly forty languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include a Chevalier from the French government in the Order of Arts and Letters. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries. He serves on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, and in April 2012 President Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities
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On the Double Ninth Festival, a Chinese holiday observed on the ninth day of the ninth month on the lunar calendar, families wearing sashes of dogwood leaves and berries climb mountains to drink chrysanthemum wine—a ritual designed to ward off misfortune. Chongyang (Double Nine) is based on the philosophical theory of yin and yang, yin being the feminine or negative principle of the universe, yang the male or positive principle—the duality (light and dark, fire and water) that lies at the heart of existence. Nine is a yang number, and in this system of complementary forces, where everything possesses yin and yang elements, the conjunction of two yang numbers carries the risk of danger, which may be mitigated by ritual, as well as the promise of longevity, if danger can be avoided. Chongyang is thus a matter of concern and a symbol of both possibility and completeness, the perfect life being “a little less than enough,” according to Taoist thinkers; hence the number nine, not ten, is cause for celebration.
There are two versions of the legend explaining the birth of the rituals observed on Chongyang, both involving a man named Huan Jing. During the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220 AD), he went to study the art of magic with a Taoist said to be immortal, Fei Changfang, who might teach him to slay the river monster that brought pestilence to his village every fall. They were climbing a mountain on the eighth day of the ninth lunar month when Fei stopped in his tracks to warn Huan that disaster was imminent. In one telling of the story, Fei urged him to hurry home, make for each villager a red bag adorned with a spray of dogwood leaves, and lead them up the mountain holding cups of chrysanthemum wine. When the monster appeared at noon, the fragrance of dogwood and chrysanthemum (used in Chinese medicine to drive away evil spirits and cure the sick) distracted it long enough for Huan to cut it down with a sword given to him by Fei. In another telling, Huan took his family up the mountain; upon his return that evening, he found his chickens, sheep, dogs, and ox dead of pestilence, the animals having taken the place of his family thanks to his decision to heed his master’s instructions. (No other villagers survived.) The custom of climbing a mountain on Chongyang became an official festival during the Tang Dynasty (618-690, 705-907), giving rise to a tradition of Double Nine poems, the most famous of which was composed by Wang Wei (701-761) on the theme of exile, translated here by David Hinton:
9/9, Thinking of My Brothers East of the Mountains
Each year on this auspicious day, alone and foreign
here in a foreign place, my thoughts of you sharpen:
far away, I can almost see you reaching the summit,
dogwood berries woven into sashes, short one person.
In the fall of 2001, my best friend, the poet Agha Shahid Ali, was dying of brain cancer. His vision was skewed, his memory was dissolving (the events of 9/11 he referred to as “that thing that happened in New York”), and yet until his final days he could recite reams of poetry, including the whole of Milton’s “Lycidas,” an elegy of nearly two hundred lines for a drowned Cambridge classmate. This caught the attention of the neurologist, Oliver Sacks, author of Awakenings and other best-selling books on the workings of the mind, who examined him to better understand the poetic imagination. I read Sacks’ notes on the case, within days of Shahid’s oncologist determining that nothing more could be done for him, and in the midst of my grief I marveled at the endurance, and vitality, of the connections my friend had forged in poetry.
Shahid defined himself as a triple exile—from his native Kashmir; from India proper; from Urdu, the language of his childhood—and exile was the theme, secret or overt, of his poems, drafts of which he would read to me over the phone. We called each other almost daily for close to twenty years, sometimes talking for hours—telling jokes, trading stories, commiserating about love and politics, comparing notes on what we were reading or writing. I came to recognize in him a certain restlessness that signaled the imminent arrival of a poem, which he would describe before writing down a word, explaining its source—in a dream, an image, a formal imperative—and how it might develop. Then he would read me successive drafts, demanding an authentic response.
“Be honest,” he insisted, expecting me not only to identify problems but to offer solutions. And if I pointed out an awkward phrase or an image that was vague he would say, “Oh, darling, I know it doesn’t work. Give me another line. Please.”
He readily incorporated my suggestions, amending them as need be to suit his ear, which was alert to livelier tones than mine; when I noted that as much as a third of one of his books could be attributed to me, he laughed. “It’s all poetry,” he said. His was a Platonic idea of writing: it did not matter how a poem came into being, only that it found its way onto the page.
While I was covering the Balkan wars, he told me, repeatedly, that next I had to write about Kashmir, over which India and Pakistan had waged three wars since the end of the British Indian Empire in 1947. He planned to write a novel about a man born at the exact moment of Partition, which plunged Kashmir into its current geopolitical netherworld; the imagined events in the life of his protagonist, who bore a strong resemblance to him, would intersect at decisive moments with the history of his homeland. Shahid rewrote the opening paragraph many times, and in our last days together, at his brother’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts, it occurred to me that his life itself was a novel rich with incident, joy, and grief.
Like anyone, he fictionalized parts of it. He hid his homosexuality from his parents, with whom he was very close, until he was in his thirties; dyed his hair jet-black at the first sign of grey; whited out his birth year—1949—on the title pages of the books he lavishly inscribed to me. It is a fact, though, that he died on the anniversary of his late mother’s first seizure from the same form of cancer that afflicted him, 8 December 2001. State law prevented his family from following the Muslim custom of burying him within twenty-four hours, on a Sunday, so he was interred on Emily Dickinson’s birthday, in a cemetery down the road from the house in which she wrote: “If I could bribe them by a Rose/ I’d bring them every flower that grows/ From Amherst to Cashmere!” These lines furnished the epigraph to his prose poem, “‘Some Vision of the World Cashmere’”; from her metaphors he learned to map a land of “doomed addresses,” articulating a vision of the world that won him a place in American poetry. Another Dickinson line, “A route of Evanescence,” inspired the most interesting pages in his book, A Nostalgist’s Map of America. It also described the arc of our friendship, which from the beginning was shaped by his wit, playfulness, and generosity. Thus at his invitation I celebrated my fortieth birthday in Amherst, the town where I was born, by giving a poetry reading for his creative writing program at the University of Massachusetts, at the conclusion of which his students presented me with a cake.
I am drawn to extravagance, perhaps because I am reticent by nature, and no one in my life was more extravagant than Shahid. He was fond of quoting Oscar Wilde’s remark to a customs official that he had nothing to declare but his genius; he knew by heart all of Faye Dunaway’s lines in Mommie Dearest; his deadpan impersonations of TV commercials--Fill it to the rim, with Brim, he would say—delighted everyone. When at a dinner party a woman asked if she could lean on his shoulder to speak to a friend seated on the other side of him, he replied, “As so many others have.” And when his first visit to us in Santa Fe was delayed by a near disaster, his plane making a crash landing just after takeoff, he said his last thought before impact was that we would not have a drink together that night. He arrived the next day just before I left to teach a workshop at a community college, and Lisa was anxious about entertaining him alone: their initial encounter, at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, had not gone well, because he had designs on me. (He had remarkable success in seducing heterosexual men.) He was asleep when I returned, and Lisa was thoroughly charmed, Shahid having explained in considerable detail the complications of sleeping with a well-endowed man. She felt as if she had a new sister. Later he told her his secret regimen for keeping his skin smooth: just before the end of a shower, he would smear baby oil over his entire body and stand there in the steam. When Lisa tried it, she broke out in hives.
“Because you are a white woman,” he laughed.
There was a bit of the magpie in him, alert to anything that might be turned into poetry—a casual remark, a joke, a word. For example, this sentence from Thomas De Quincy’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: “It was a year of brilliant water.” Not long after telling Shahid that I would use it as the epigraph to a book titled Brilliant Water, he made it the epigraph to his poem, “In Search of Evanescence,” which in addition to lines from Dickinson included titles of paintings and excerpts from the letters of Georgia O’Keeffe. Weaving different voices through his poems, in the manner of one jazz musician quoting another, Shahid created his own form of brilliant water, a phrase that became our favorite trope. He mined the writings of others to trigger his imagination (we planned to write a book together titled The Blond Assassins, a Dickinson phrase that eventually showed up in his ghazal, “Forever”), and a partial list of writers appearing in his late poems reveals the breadth of his literary tastes: Mandelstam, Yeats, Gibbon, Hopkins, Shakespeare, Apollinaire, Hafiz, Trakl, Auden, Faiz, Ghalib, Darwish. Quotations provided the scaffolding for his final book, Call Me Ishmael Tonight, a collection of ghazals in which he paid homage to American poetry by braiding lines from other poets into his own work. This was Shahid’s gift to his adopted homeland: to use the language so well that it acquired a new light.
At the age of twelve he moved with his family to Muncie, Indiana (his father earned his doctorate at Ball State University), where he perfected his English by watching television. For his sixteenth birthday he received from his father a leather-bound journal, with the inscription: “Another notebook for the same game. Spontaneous self-expression must now turn into studied attempts at conciseness and discipline.” He spent the rest of his life obeying that imperative, taking degrees at universities in Srinagar and Delhi, State College, Pennsylvania and Tucson, Arizona, then teaching at writers’ conferences and universities across America. In the classroom he was at once rigorous and droll: he could spot promising seeds in otherwise uninspired exercises; he liked to turn a poem inside out, reading it from the last line to the first, in search of its secret heart; he could not bear shoddy work. He once quipped that a bad line should be put up against a wall and shot—a joke that takes on weight when you consider that he was mindful of the number of people executed in the last century in precisely this fashion; for the relationship between art and politics was uppermost in his mind. And his playfulness served a larger purpose. When a student begged him to raise his grade, Shahid agreed, on condition that he sing for him all the verses of “Achy Breaky Heart.” Which the student did, in a cracking voice.
His own readings were a kind of standup tragedy, dark poems punctuated by hilarious asides. He would stop mid-poem to pose for a photograph, exclaiming “I love to be photographed,” or to castigate someone in the audience for daring to leave early. More than one embarrassed person returned to their seat after Shahid said, “Are you leaving me? Don’t leave me!” Once, when an overflowing crowd forced some to sit on the floor by the lectern, he crowed, “I love to have white people sitting at my feet!” What stayed with listeners, though, was the exquisite tension between his casual asides and the seriousness of his work. He was a darkly humorous poet, who famously wanted to publish poems in journals beginning with all the letters of the alphabet; lacking a Z, he tried to convince the editor of ZYZZYVA, which would only consider submissions from writers living on the West Coast, that as a citizen of the Pacific Rim he belonged in its pages; his only reservation about becoming a contributing editor to Tin House was its name—he already had his T. Couldn’t the publisher consider a name beginning with a Z?
One day at lunch in Venice, California, he gave me a copy of Xavier Villaurrutia’s poems in translation, Hieroglyphs of Desire; inspired by the sleek women in bikinis rollerblading by, he wrote on the title page that here “we again learn, on the boardwalk, that some hieroglyphs of desire move on wheels.” In a used bookstore in Syracuse, when he discovered a signed copy of his Walk Through the Yellow Pages, which he had presented to a married couple, he bought the chapbook and sent it back to them with instructions never to sell it again.
Shahid took seriously his role as godfather to our oldest daughter, Hannah, who was born during my first semester of teaching at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Massachusetts, not far from his converted flat in Northampton’s former jail. (Jail was one title he considered for the book of poems he published as Rooms Are Never Finished.) He brought gifts for her from the silver emporium in New Delhi; asked after her in every phone call; drove through the snow for her christening in Pennsylvania, colliding along the way with another car and denting his Nissan Stanza (chosen for its name, not its performance). After the service, Lisa asked him if as a Shiite Muslim he felt uncomfortable assenting to the tenets of Christianity.
“Not at all,” he replied. “I take it all very metaphorically.”
Which did not mean that he had a cavalier attitude toward religion. Incidents from Islamic history triggered his imagination, his poems were rich in references to the Koran (which in his last years inspired in him a kind of devotion), and his respect for religious ritual, in any denomination, was profound. Poetry was for him a form of prayer and petition to the gods of desire, who rewarded his unconditional faith with splendid works on love and loss.
When Hannah was little, I figured that as an adult she would realize how lucky she was to have Shahid in her life. But she seemed to grasp this even before the gravity of his illness dawned on her, around the time that I accepted a position at the University of Iowa. My in-laws moved with us to Iowa City (Lisa’s father was also dying of brain cancer), and within weeks of our arrival Shahid came to recite his poems for the International Writing Program—a memorable event in a city rich in literary history. He stayed with us through the weekend for Hannah’s fifth birthday—which fell, providentially, or so it seemed, on the day her grandfather died. A hospice chaplain led a memorial service around his deathbed (Shahid did not attend), making a graceful transition from praising Hannah’s “Papa” to the happy prospect of her birthday party, which took place later in the afternoon at the skating rink. Shahid was there, and Lisa and her mother, and Hannah’s friends from pre-school. One parent asked me to take her infant daughter for a skate, and as I glided around the rink with her in my arms my heart was breaking. In memory of Lisa’s father, my staff gave us an apple tree, which did not survive the winter.
On the night before Shahid died, Hannah covered the walls of my study with her drawings, carefully taping pictures of houses and animals to every empty space, intuiting that in a dark time I needed the consolation of art. In the morning, after receiving the grim news from his brother, I took Hannah to the rink, and for forty-five minutes we skated hand in hand, as she sketched out in elaborate detail her next birthday party. We would need to get a trampoline, and dig a swimming pool in the back yard, and bake at least two cakes, because one of her friends had severe allergies. I waited until we were in the car driving home to tell her that Shahid was gone.
“I know,” she said. In the rear view mirror I could see that she was thinking. Then: “How long will it take for him to get to Heaven? Faster than a car? A plane?”
“Even faster,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Then I can talk to him, like I do with Papa.”
I was surprised to hear that she spoke regularly with her late grandfather, and when I asked her what they talked about she replied, “He just wants to know if I’m happy.”
Shahid would have approved, buoyancy being for him the best response to self-pity; as he wrote, “for whose world is not in ruins? whose?” When an Indian student complained to him about feeling alienated from his classmates because he was different, Shahid laughed. “Of course you’re different,” he said. “Celebrate that difference.” He fashioned a poetics out of difference, liberating himself from the shackles of staid thinking. Before his mother died, he liked to say that he refused to suffer for more than thirty seconds over anything; with her death, though, came a more complex vision of the human condition, which corresponded to his deepening engagement with English and Urdu literary traditions, politics, and religion.
Central to his poetic development was the friendship he struck up with my distant relation, James Merrill. If the free-verse extravaganza of Shahid’s first book, The Half-Inch Himalayas, had introduced an exotic mixture of wit, imagery, and historical awareness to American poetry, now under Merrill’s sway he became a sophisticated formalist. In A Nostalgist’s Map of America, The Country Without a Post Office, and Rooms Are Never Finished, he wrote in a variety of forms, preferring syllabic to metrical verse because he could not hear stresses in English. The sound he created, an exuberant music that was slightly ahead or behind the beat, swelled in his trio of canzones. This medieval Italian lyrical form, hendecasyllabic lines with a demanding rhyme scheme, is extremely difficult to write, and Shahid’s prowess in the form prompted Anthony Hecht to remark that he deserved a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. The third one, “The Veiled Suite,” was completed on the weekend after he learned that he had lost his battle with cancer. Its origins lay in a dream from the eve of his first biopsy, in which he was visited by a figure for Death: “‘No mortal has or will ever lift my veil,’/ he says. Strokes my arm. What poison is his eyes?” Shahid could not remember the beginning of the line he was working on—his assistant had to keep reading it back to him—and yet the poem is completely coherent. It is also terrifying. How he accomplished this is a mystery as great as the last riveting lines: “I’m still alive, alive to learn from your eyes/ that I am become your veil and I am all you see.”
But for all the formal dexterity on display in his canzones Shahid will be remembered most for his efforts to bring the ghazal into English. “The ghazal,” he said, “is pronounced, “ghuzzle.” And the average American poet’s inability to say the word correctly upset him almost as much as the widespread belief that a ghazal could be written without obeying its formal imperatives. So he took it upon himself to properly introduce the form in lectures and essays on its history and virtues. He cajoled over a hundred poets to write what he called “real ghazals in English” for an anthology, Ravishing Disunities, which inspired more poets to try their hand at the form; assigning exercises in writing ghazals became a staple of poetry workshops; editors of literary journals inundated with ghazal submissions have Shahid to thank for reshaping our literary landscape, in the same way that in the sixteenth century the Italian sonnet’s arrival in London irrevocably changed English poetry. Impossible to imagine Western literature without the sonnets of Wyatt, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and others. Someday the same may be said of ghazals, starting with Shahid’s posthumous collection, Call Me Ishmael Tonight, which braids together lines written by his American friends with his own inventions, in homage to the poetic tradition of the country to which in his last decade he formally pledged allegiance, becoming an American citizen.
The ghazal dates back to seventh century Arabia, coincides with Islam’s rise, and figures in many literary traditions, including Farsi, Turkish, Urdu, Pashto, German, and Spanish. (Shahid loved Garcia Lorca’s ghazals). It consists of a series of autonomous couplets, which may be comic, tragic, romantic, political, or religious in subject and tone, all lashed together by rhyme, refrain, and meter. In the opening couplet the rhyme is repeated, establishing the scheme to which the poet, Shahid liked to say, becomes the slave. He translated Urdu’s quantitative meters into syllabics, as in his best-known ghazal, which opens: “The only language of loss left in the world is Arabic—/ These words were said to me in a language not Arabic.” In its closing signature couplet, the poet names him- or herself: “They ask me to tell them what Shahid means—/ Listen: It means ‘The Belovéd’ in Persian, ‘witness’ in Arabic.” These lines, inscribed on his gravestone, supplied the title for the Indian edition of his selected poems, The Belovéd Witness.
Contrapuntal and convergence were two of his favorite words: his salacious wit stood in counterpoint to the puritanical thinking that in his view stifled American life, while literary and spiritual traditions from around the world converged in his work to create a new vision of our walk in the sun. He was a true cosmopolitan: that is, someone deeply rooted to a particular place—Kashmir—who felt at home wherever he found himself. He took pleasure in the number and range of places where we met, from Santa Fe to San Antonio to Seattle. I can hear him now, waking us in the morning, singing first a raga and then a song by Dire Straits. What he lacked in musicality—he could barely carry a tune—he made up for in enthusiasm.
In Shahid’s last months he liked to listen to The Band’s cover version of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.” He would sit by the window in his brother’s living room, the air swelling with music; only his family knew that he sang to take his mind off the pain. He was ever the courteous host, asking his steady stream of visitors if they had been served lunch or tea. Would they like to hear something different? Did they want to dance? The lyrics that never failed to make him weep—“I see my light come shining/ From the West down to the East”—describe the trajectory of his life and work, a dazzling arc linking America and Kashmir. He brightened our poetry by persuading us to write ghazals—lights shining from the West down to the East.
Six months before Shahid died, a mutual friend suggested that we make a ghazal chain for him, to which nearly two hundred poets contributed couplets. The opening couplet has a curious history. I was in Maui taking care of Merwin’s place, which Shahid and I facetiously referred to as the Promised Land, and one day, brewing a cup of tea during a long phone conversation with him and finding only honey to sweeten it, I intoned, “There is no sugar in the Promised Land.” He seized on the poetic potential of my joke, and we laughed like mad men playing around with lines to close the couplet. The refrain we came up with—“Swear by the olive in the God-kissed land”—was not a perfect rhyme, which pleased him all the more. (He once rhymed “Utah” with “blue tar,” a rhyme that depended upon his Indian accent.) He insisted that we each write ghazals opening with this couplet, but to my regret I could not bring myself to finish it while he was alive. In his poem for me, “Land,” which appears in Call Me Ishmael Tonight, he reverses the rhyme and refrain, reinforcing the idea that nothing is perfect, even in the Promised Land. He was always a realist. The ghazal chain for him closed with his signature couplet: “At the moment the heart turns terrorist,/ are Shahid’s arms broken, O Promised Land?”
There was an ice storm the night before his funeral, and in the morning the sunlight glittered off the icicles hanging from the trees in the cemetery, where his family and friends gathered. The bearded imam recruited to perform the burial service kept losing his place—a public display of incompetence that would have sent Shahid into paroxysms of laughter. Adjacent to his grave was the headstone of a veteran from World War II. “Shahid’s dream has finally come true: to lie next to a man in uniform!” someone quipped, bringing a note of levity to a somber occasion. After the service, I went to a party at his brother’s house, where the mood darkened by the hour; at nightfall, driving to my hotel, I decided on a whim to visit Emily Dickinson’s grave; pennies and a sprig of holly had been left in her honor, and it was consoling to think that some of Shahid’s future readers might one day travel to Northampton to do the same for him.
Cornus officinalis, also known as Japanese cornel, cornelian cherry, and medical dogwood, is used to treat reproductive issues, liver problems, back pain, impotence, and vertigo. But it cannot alleviate grief. For a long time after Shahid died, I would reach for the phone to call him whenever I heard a good joke or story—a reflexive gesture that day by day rekindled my grief; what surprised me was that the pain caused by his absence did not diminish. All the world was strange to me—“a foreign place,” as Wang Wei wrote in his Double Nine poem—in which I was always “short one person.” Eventually I finished the ghazal that he had commanded me to write, invoking the root meaning of my name in the signature couplet, which offers a question in reply to his final question: “Will this Christ-bearer find his only friend/ In the Promised Land—in blessed Shahid’s land?” Whatever the answer may be, I relish the light he bestowed upon my life. The dogwood berries and branches woven into my imagination have acquired color and texture with the passing of my poet-teachers and friends—Joseph Brodsky, William Matthews, Leslie Norris, Brewster Ghiselin, Mark Strand, Tomaž Šalamun, and, dearest of all, Shahid.
There are two versions of the legend explaining the birth of the rituals observed on Chongyang, both involving a man named Huan Jing. During the Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220 AD), he went to study the art of magic with a Taoist said to be immortal, Fei Changfang, who might teach him to slay the river monster that brought pestilence to his village every fall. They were climbing a mountain on the eighth day of the ninth lunar month when Fei stopped in his tracks to warn Huan that disaster was imminent. In one telling of the story, Fei urged him to hurry home, make for each villager a red bag adorned with a spray of dogwood leaves, and lead them up the mountain holding cups of chrysanthemum wine. When the monster appeared at noon, the fragrance of dogwood and chrysanthemum (used in Chinese medicine to drive away evil spirits and cure the sick) distracted it long enough for Huan to cut it down with a sword given to him by Fei. In another telling, Huan took his family up the mountain; upon his return that evening, he found his chickens, sheep, dogs, and ox dead of pestilence, the animals having taken the place of his family thanks to his decision to heed his master’s instructions. (No other villagers survived.) The custom of climbing a mountain on Chongyang became an official festival during the Tang Dynasty (618-690, 705-907), giving rise to a tradition of Double Nine poems, the most famous of which was composed by Wang Wei (701-761) on the theme of exile, translated here by David Hinton:
9/9, Thinking of My Brothers East of the Mountains
Each year on this auspicious day, alone and foreign
here in a foreign place, my thoughts of you sharpen:
far away, I can almost see you reaching the summit,
dogwood berries woven into sashes, short one person.
In the fall of 2001, my best friend, the poet Agha Shahid Ali, was dying of brain cancer. His vision was skewed, his memory was dissolving (the events of 9/11 he referred to as “that thing that happened in New York”), and yet until his final days he could recite reams of poetry, including the whole of Milton’s “Lycidas,” an elegy of nearly two hundred lines for a drowned Cambridge classmate. This caught the attention of the neurologist, Oliver Sacks, author of Awakenings and other best-selling books on the workings of the mind, who examined him to better understand the poetic imagination. I read Sacks’ notes on the case, within days of Shahid’s oncologist determining that nothing more could be done for him, and in the midst of my grief I marveled at the endurance, and vitality, of the connections my friend had forged in poetry.
Shahid defined himself as a triple exile—from his native Kashmir; from India proper; from Urdu, the language of his childhood—and exile was the theme, secret or overt, of his poems, drafts of which he would read to me over the phone. We called each other almost daily for close to twenty years, sometimes talking for hours—telling jokes, trading stories, commiserating about love and politics, comparing notes on what we were reading or writing. I came to recognize in him a certain restlessness that signaled the imminent arrival of a poem, which he would describe before writing down a word, explaining its source—in a dream, an image, a formal imperative—and how it might develop. Then he would read me successive drafts, demanding an authentic response.
“Be honest,” he insisted, expecting me not only to identify problems but to offer solutions. And if I pointed out an awkward phrase or an image that was vague he would say, “Oh, darling, I know it doesn’t work. Give me another line. Please.”
He readily incorporated my suggestions, amending them as need be to suit his ear, which was alert to livelier tones than mine; when I noted that as much as a third of one of his books could be attributed to me, he laughed. “It’s all poetry,” he said. His was a Platonic idea of writing: it did not matter how a poem came into being, only that it found its way onto the page.
While I was covering the Balkan wars, he told me, repeatedly, that next I had to write about Kashmir, over which India and Pakistan had waged three wars since the end of the British Indian Empire in 1947. He planned to write a novel about a man born at the exact moment of Partition, which plunged Kashmir into its current geopolitical netherworld; the imagined events in the life of his protagonist, who bore a strong resemblance to him, would intersect at decisive moments with the history of his homeland. Shahid rewrote the opening paragraph many times, and in our last days together, at his brother’s house in Amherst, Massachusetts, it occurred to me that his life itself was a novel rich with incident, joy, and grief.
Like anyone, he fictionalized parts of it. He hid his homosexuality from his parents, with whom he was very close, until he was in his thirties; dyed his hair jet-black at the first sign of grey; whited out his birth year—1949—on the title pages of the books he lavishly inscribed to me. It is a fact, though, that he died on the anniversary of his late mother’s first seizure from the same form of cancer that afflicted him, 8 December 2001. State law prevented his family from following the Muslim custom of burying him within twenty-four hours, on a Sunday, so he was interred on Emily Dickinson’s birthday, in a cemetery down the road from the house in which she wrote: “If I could bribe them by a Rose/ I’d bring them every flower that grows/ From Amherst to Cashmere!” These lines furnished the epigraph to his prose poem, “‘Some Vision of the World Cashmere’”; from her metaphors he learned to map a land of “doomed addresses,” articulating a vision of the world that won him a place in American poetry. Another Dickinson line, “A route of Evanescence,” inspired the most interesting pages in his book, A Nostalgist’s Map of America. It also described the arc of our friendship, which from the beginning was shaped by his wit, playfulness, and generosity. Thus at his invitation I celebrated my fortieth birthday in Amherst, the town where I was born, by giving a poetry reading for his creative writing program at the University of Massachusetts, at the conclusion of which his students presented me with a cake.
I am drawn to extravagance, perhaps because I am reticent by nature, and no one in my life was more extravagant than Shahid. He was fond of quoting Oscar Wilde’s remark to a customs official that he had nothing to declare but his genius; he knew by heart all of Faye Dunaway’s lines in Mommie Dearest; his deadpan impersonations of TV commercials--Fill it to the rim, with Brim, he would say—delighted everyone. When at a dinner party a woman asked if she could lean on his shoulder to speak to a friend seated on the other side of him, he replied, “As so many others have.” And when his first visit to us in Santa Fe was delayed by a near disaster, his plane making a crash landing just after takeoff, he said his last thought before impact was that we would not have a drink together that night. He arrived the next day just before I left to teach a workshop at a community college, and Lisa was anxious about entertaining him alone: their initial encounter, at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, had not gone well, because he had designs on me. (He had remarkable success in seducing heterosexual men.) He was asleep when I returned, and Lisa was thoroughly charmed, Shahid having explained in considerable detail the complications of sleeping with a well-endowed man. She felt as if she had a new sister. Later he told her his secret regimen for keeping his skin smooth: just before the end of a shower, he would smear baby oil over his entire body and stand there in the steam. When Lisa tried it, she broke out in hives.
“Because you are a white woman,” he laughed.
There was a bit of the magpie in him, alert to anything that might be turned into poetry—a casual remark, a joke, a word. For example, this sentence from Thomas De Quincy’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: “It was a year of brilliant water.” Not long after telling Shahid that I would use it as the epigraph to a book titled Brilliant Water, he made it the epigraph to his poem, “In Search of Evanescence,” which in addition to lines from Dickinson included titles of paintings and excerpts from the letters of Georgia O’Keeffe. Weaving different voices through his poems, in the manner of one jazz musician quoting another, Shahid created his own form of brilliant water, a phrase that became our favorite trope. He mined the writings of others to trigger his imagination (we planned to write a book together titled The Blond Assassins, a Dickinson phrase that eventually showed up in his ghazal, “Forever”), and a partial list of writers appearing in his late poems reveals the breadth of his literary tastes: Mandelstam, Yeats, Gibbon, Hopkins, Shakespeare, Apollinaire, Hafiz, Trakl, Auden, Faiz, Ghalib, Darwish. Quotations provided the scaffolding for his final book, Call Me Ishmael Tonight, a collection of ghazals in which he paid homage to American poetry by braiding lines from other poets into his own work. This was Shahid’s gift to his adopted homeland: to use the language so well that it acquired a new light.
At the age of twelve he moved with his family to Muncie, Indiana (his father earned his doctorate at Ball State University), where he perfected his English by watching television. For his sixteenth birthday he received from his father a leather-bound journal, with the inscription: “Another notebook for the same game. Spontaneous self-expression must now turn into studied attempts at conciseness and discipline.” He spent the rest of his life obeying that imperative, taking degrees at universities in Srinagar and Delhi, State College, Pennsylvania and Tucson, Arizona, then teaching at writers’ conferences and universities across America. In the classroom he was at once rigorous and droll: he could spot promising seeds in otherwise uninspired exercises; he liked to turn a poem inside out, reading it from the last line to the first, in search of its secret heart; he could not bear shoddy work. He once quipped that a bad line should be put up against a wall and shot—a joke that takes on weight when you consider that he was mindful of the number of people executed in the last century in precisely this fashion; for the relationship between art and politics was uppermost in his mind. And his playfulness served a larger purpose. When a student begged him to raise his grade, Shahid agreed, on condition that he sing for him all the verses of “Achy Breaky Heart.” Which the student did, in a cracking voice.
His own readings were a kind of standup tragedy, dark poems punctuated by hilarious asides. He would stop mid-poem to pose for a photograph, exclaiming “I love to be photographed,” or to castigate someone in the audience for daring to leave early. More than one embarrassed person returned to their seat after Shahid said, “Are you leaving me? Don’t leave me!” Once, when an overflowing crowd forced some to sit on the floor by the lectern, he crowed, “I love to have white people sitting at my feet!” What stayed with listeners, though, was the exquisite tension between his casual asides and the seriousness of his work. He was a darkly humorous poet, who famously wanted to publish poems in journals beginning with all the letters of the alphabet; lacking a Z, he tried to convince the editor of ZYZZYVA, which would only consider submissions from writers living on the West Coast, that as a citizen of the Pacific Rim he belonged in its pages; his only reservation about becoming a contributing editor to Tin House was its name—he already had his T. Couldn’t the publisher consider a name beginning with a Z?
One day at lunch in Venice, California, he gave me a copy of Xavier Villaurrutia’s poems in translation, Hieroglyphs of Desire; inspired by the sleek women in bikinis rollerblading by, he wrote on the title page that here “we again learn, on the boardwalk, that some hieroglyphs of desire move on wheels.” In a used bookstore in Syracuse, when he discovered a signed copy of his Walk Through the Yellow Pages, which he had presented to a married couple, he bought the chapbook and sent it back to them with instructions never to sell it again.
Shahid took seriously his role as godfather to our oldest daughter, Hannah, who was born during my first semester of teaching at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Massachusetts, not far from his converted flat in Northampton’s former jail. (Jail was one title he considered for the book of poems he published as Rooms Are Never Finished.) He brought gifts for her from the silver emporium in New Delhi; asked after her in every phone call; drove through the snow for her christening in Pennsylvania, colliding along the way with another car and denting his Nissan Stanza (chosen for its name, not its performance). After the service, Lisa asked him if as a Shiite Muslim he felt uncomfortable assenting to the tenets of Christianity.
“Not at all,” he replied. “I take it all very metaphorically.”
Which did not mean that he had a cavalier attitude toward religion. Incidents from Islamic history triggered his imagination, his poems were rich in references to the Koran (which in his last years inspired in him a kind of devotion), and his respect for religious ritual, in any denomination, was profound. Poetry was for him a form of prayer and petition to the gods of desire, who rewarded his unconditional faith with splendid works on love and loss.
When Hannah was little, I figured that as an adult she would realize how lucky she was to have Shahid in her life. But she seemed to grasp this even before the gravity of his illness dawned on her, around the time that I accepted a position at the University of Iowa. My in-laws moved with us to Iowa City (Lisa’s father was also dying of brain cancer), and within weeks of our arrival Shahid came to recite his poems for the International Writing Program—a memorable event in a city rich in literary history. He stayed with us through the weekend for Hannah’s fifth birthday—which fell, providentially, or so it seemed, on the day her grandfather died. A hospice chaplain led a memorial service around his deathbed (Shahid did not attend), making a graceful transition from praising Hannah’s “Papa” to the happy prospect of her birthday party, which took place later in the afternoon at the skating rink. Shahid was there, and Lisa and her mother, and Hannah’s friends from pre-school. One parent asked me to take her infant daughter for a skate, and as I glided around the rink with her in my arms my heart was breaking. In memory of Lisa’s father, my staff gave us an apple tree, which did not survive the winter.
On the night before Shahid died, Hannah covered the walls of my study with her drawings, carefully taping pictures of houses and animals to every empty space, intuiting that in a dark time I needed the consolation of art. In the morning, after receiving the grim news from his brother, I took Hannah to the rink, and for forty-five minutes we skated hand in hand, as she sketched out in elaborate detail her next birthday party. We would need to get a trampoline, and dig a swimming pool in the back yard, and bake at least two cakes, because one of her friends had severe allergies. I waited until we were in the car driving home to tell her that Shahid was gone.
“I know,” she said. In the rear view mirror I could see that she was thinking. Then: “How long will it take for him to get to Heaven? Faster than a car? A plane?”
“Even faster,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Then I can talk to him, like I do with Papa.”
I was surprised to hear that she spoke regularly with her late grandfather, and when I asked her what they talked about she replied, “He just wants to know if I’m happy.”
Shahid would have approved, buoyancy being for him the best response to self-pity; as he wrote, “for whose world is not in ruins? whose?” When an Indian student complained to him about feeling alienated from his classmates because he was different, Shahid laughed. “Of course you’re different,” he said. “Celebrate that difference.” He fashioned a poetics out of difference, liberating himself from the shackles of staid thinking. Before his mother died, he liked to say that he refused to suffer for more than thirty seconds over anything; with her death, though, came a more complex vision of the human condition, which corresponded to his deepening engagement with English and Urdu literary traditions, politics, and religion.
Central to his poetic development was the friendship he struck up with my distant relation, James Merrill. If the free-verse extravaganza of Shahid’s first book, The Half-Inch Himalayas, had introduced an exotic mixture of wit, imagery, and historical awareness to American poetry, now under Merrill’s sway he became a sophisticated formalist. In A Nostalgist’s Map of America, The Country Without a Post Office, and Rooms Are Never Finished, he wrote in a variety of forms, preferring syllabic to metrical verse because he could not hear stresses in English. The sound he created, an exuberant music that was slightly ahead or behind the beat, swelled in his trio of canzones. This medieval Italian lyrical form, hendecasyllabic lines with a demanding rhyme scheme, is extremely difficult to write, and Shahid’s prowess in the form prompted Anthony Hecht to remark that he deserved a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. The third one, “The Veiled Suite,” was completed on the weekend after he learned that he had lost his battle with cancer. Its origins lay in a dream from the eve of his first biopsy, in which he was visited by a figure for Death: “‘No mortal has or will ever lift my veil,’/ he says. Strokes my arm. What poison is his eyes?” Shahid could not remember the beginning of the line he was working on—his assistant had to keep reading it back to him—and yet the poem is completely coherent. It is also terrifying. How he accomplished this is a mystery as great as the last riveting lines: “I’m still alive, alive to learn from your eyes/ that I am become your veil and I am all you see.”
But for all the formal dexterity on display in his canzones Shahid will be remembered most for his efforts to bring the ghazal into English. “The ghazal,” he said, “is pronounced, “ghuzzle.” And the average American poet’s inability to say the word correctly upset him almost as much as the widespread belief that a ghazal could be written without obeying its formal imperatives. So he took it upon himself to properly introduce the form in lectures and essays on its history and virtues. He cajoled over a hundred poets to write what he called “real ghazals in English” for an anthology, Ravishing Disunities, which inspired more poets to try their hand at the form; assigning exercises in writing ghazals became a staple of poetry workshops; editors of literary journals inundated with ghazal submissions have Shahid to thank for reshaping our literary landscape, in the same way that in the sixteenth century the Italian sonnet’s arrival in London irrevocably changed English poetry. Impossible to imagine Western literature without the sonnets of Wyatt, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, and others. Someday the same may be said of ghazals, starting with Shahid’s posthumous collection, Call Me Ishmael Tonight, which braids together lines written by his American friends with his own inventions, in homage to the poetic tradition of the country to which in his last decade he formally pledged allegiance, becoming an American citizen.
The ghazal dates back to seventh century Arabia, coincides with Islam’s rise, and figures in many literary traditions, including Farsi, Turkish, Urdu, Pashto, German, and Spanish. (Shahid loved Garcia Lorca’s ghazals). It consists of a series of autonomous couplets, which may be comic, tragic, romantic, political, or religious in subject and tone, all lashed together by rhyme, refrain, and meter. In the opening couplet the rhyme is repeated, establishing the scheme to which the poet, Shahid liked to say, becomes the slave. He translated Urdu’s quantitative meters into syllabics, as in his best-known ghazal, which opens: “The only language of loss left in the world is Arabic—/ These words were said to me in a language not Arabic.” In its closing signature couplet, the poet names him- or herself: “They ask me to tell them what Shahid means—/ Listen: It means ‘The Belovéd’ in Persian, ‘witness’ in Arabic.” These lines, inscribed on his gravestone, supplied the title for the Indian edition of his selected poems, The Belovéd Witness.
Contrapuntal and convergence were two of his favorite words: his salacious wit stood in counterpoint to the puritanical thinking that in his view stifled American life, while literary and spiritual traditions from around the world converged in his work to create a new vision of our walk in the sun. He was a true cosmopolitan: that is, someone deeply rooted to a particular place—Kashmir—who felt at home wherever he found himself. He took pleasure in the number and range of places where we met, from Santa Fe to San Antonio to Seattle. I can hear him now, waking us in the morning, singing first a raga and then a song by Dire Straits. What he lacked in musicality—he could barely carry a tune—he made up for in enthusiasm.
In Shahid’s last months he liked to listen to The Band’s cover version of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.” He would sit by the window in his brother’s living room, the air swelling with music; only his family knew that he sang to take his mind off the pain. He was ever the courteous host, asking his steady stream of visitors if they had been served lunch or tea. Would they like to hear something different? Did they want to dance? The lyrics that never failed to make him weep—“I see my light come shining/ From the West down to the East”—describe the trajectory of his life and work, a dazzling arc linking America and Kashmir. He brightened our poetry by persuading us to write ghazals—lights shining from the West down to the East.
Six months before Shahid died, a mutual friend suggested that we make a ghazal chain for him, to which nearly two hundred poets contributed couplets. The opening couplet has a curious history. I was in Maui taking care of Merwin’s place, which Shahid and I facetiously referred to as the Promised Land, and one day, brewing a cup of tea during a long phone conversation with him and finding only honey to sweeten it, I intoned, “There is no sugar in the Promised Land.” He seized on the poetic potential of my joke, and we laughed like mad men playing around with lines to close the couplet. The refrain we came up with—“Swear by the olive in the God-kissed land”—was not a perfect rhyme, which pleased him all the more. (He once rhymed “Utah” with “blue tar,” a rhyme that depended upon his Indian accent.) He insisted that we each write ghazals opening with this couplet, but to my regret I could not bring myself to finish it while he was alive. In his poem for me, “Land,” which appears in Call Me Ishmael Tonight, he reverses the rhyme and refrain, reinforcing the idea that nothing is perfect, even in the Promised Land. He was always a realist. The ghazal chain for him closed with his signature couplet: “At the moment the heart turns terrorist,/ are Shahid’s arms broken, O Promised Land?”
There was an ice storm the night before his funeral, and in the morning the sunlight glittered off the icicles hanging from the trees in the cemetery, where his family and friends gathered. The bearded imam recruited to perform the burial service kept losing his place—a public display of incompetence that would have sent Shahid into paroxysms of laughter. Adjacent to his grave was the headstone of a veteran from World War II. “Shahid’s dream has finally come true: to lie next to a man in uniform!” someone quipped, bringing a note of levity to a somber occasion. After the service, I went to a party at his brother’s house, where the mood darkened by the hour; at nightfall, driving to my hotel, I decided on a whim to visit Emily Dickinson’s grave; pennies and a sprig of holly had been left in her honor, and it was consoling to think that some of Shahid’s future readers might one day travel to Northampton to do the same for him.
Cornus officinalis, also known as Japanese cornel, cornelian cherry, and medical dogwood, is used to treat reproductive issues, liver problems, back pain, impotence, and vertigo. But it cannot alleviate grief. For a long time after Shahid died, I would reach for the phone to call him whenever I heard a good joke or story—a reflexive gesture that day by day rekindled my grief; what surprised me was that the pain caused by his absence did not diminish. All the world was strange to me—“a foreign place,” as Wang Wei wrote in his Double Nine poem—in which I was always “short one person.” Eventually I finished the ghazal that he had commanded me to write, invoking the root meaning of my name in the signature couplet, which offers a question in reply to his final question: “Will this Christ-bearer find his only friend/ In the Promised Land—in blessed Shahid’s land?” Whatever the answer may be, I relish the light he bestowed upon my life. The dogwood berries and branches woven into my imagination have acquired color and texture with the passing of my poet-teachers and friends—Joseph Brodsky, William Matthews, Leslie Norris, Brewster Ghiselin, Mark Strand, Tomaž Šalamun, and, dearest of all, Shahid.