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Write First, Ask Questions Later:
Saba Pakdel interviews Ayaz Pirani

There is a running analogy, a recurring motif, alluding to combat sports and kickboxing in your poem “Featherweight,” as the title, too, suggests. What nuanced understanding would you intend to convey via this formal and conceptual parallel?

When you are POC you have to take a lot of punches. You’re going to get knocked out. You spend a lot of time in the black, which turns out to be a wonderful place. I like to find the ironies of when being a POC helped me, like in the poem. In my story “Being There at The Lyric” from Death to America, a young POC boy doesn’t get molested in the back row of a theater. It turns out, the suited perp is racist. The man tosses the boy out of the fire exit, and in that way the boy escapes. There’s a lot of these kinds of ironies around, especially in the little niches of POC life. I like to dig them out.

Conceptually, “Featherweight” highlights a sense of nostalgia for the speaker’s childhood alongside the serenity of wish-making. The poem utilizes similar opposing binaries by placing “an ice storm” with “a burnt pizza crust,” a silence with a slammed shut door, a knockout with time travelling, and even the feather with weight. Is it possible to understand this poem as an invitation to see beyond “the trick of the light” by imagining a world past opposing binaries that is, nevertheless, “too big” to imagine?

I think it is possible, Saba, and I guess I kind of hope so. I do have a slight didactic streak in my writing. I’ve long admired guru-poets like Kabir and the various Pirs who wrote the ginans in the Indo-Pak Ismaili tradition. In their poems, there’s always a lesson, usually fleeting, personal, confirming what you already know.

The use of “I” pronoun in your writing attunes your work to a personal and intimate note for the reader. At the same time, there is an abrupt detachment, distraction, and departure of a sort between the speaker and their surrounding within the zone, mind, and space of the poem. For example, the speaker is in their own thoughts when they get “knocked out” and violently taken “back to the street” of their past. What would this chasm do to your readers, in your mind? Would you like them to get back on the course of the poem or be left on their own searching for “Something out there [that] is too big to embrace”?

You know, Saba, when I write in the first person its always in the POC position. And my teachers, the poets and Pirs I read and also listened to as a child in the local Jamatkhana in Kitchener, Ontario, often wrote in the first person and often referred to the quandary of being alive. Their pains were very personal pains. Perhaps I also feel required to take the first person in my poetry, to make sure my writing is credibly particular, since no one can know my life except the one that lives my life. Well, I think that POC position calls for jarring the reader a bit, perhaps jarring myself as well.

You write across genres with poetry, short story, and novel publications in your body of work. What is your decision making process like once you translate a given idea into a genre of your choice? What qualities, features, and specificities would determine an idea should turn into poetry as opposed to, for instance, prose?

Saba, I suppose I would take exception to the idea of turning a given idea into a genre. I suspect form is too strong for it to work that way for me. The idea and the form are the same thing. When I write a poem, my thoughts only get to do what a poem is capable of doing. I like that because it’s so hard. I suppose poetry is the first thing I turn to. I like to think in lines and write out lines. I like one-liners and punchlines. I usually write first and ask questions later. I find most things are already what they’ll be.

What are you reading these days? What do you consider your go-to and essential texts, especially since the beginning of 2026 with the body of events that you have personally witnessed / experienced?

I’m about halfway through the Jon Anderson biography of Che Guevera. It’s not something you read all the way through, in one go. The cult of personality is pretty strong and your vision gets soft-focused. I’ve been rereading The Book of Interruptions by Khashayar Mohammadi and Priscila Uppal’s Traumatology and The Anstruther Reader by Jim Johnstone. I would say I’m still enjoying David Barrick’s Nightlight. I’m looking forward to Tanis MacDonald’s Tall, Grass, Girl. For essential texts, a few books are always on my table: The Glowing River by Jack Myers, Life Without Speaking by Mary Ruefle, and Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein.

What’s next for your writing? Are you currently working on any projects?

I’m working on a new manuscript of poems called Extra Virgins for the University of Calgary Press. I’m piqued by the ethical position of the Anti-Martyr, for whom no ideology or conviction could be so firmly held that they would give up their life and destroy others. The poem “Featherweight” is part of this manuscript and this theme. I guess I find everything I do idiosyncratic and local, peculiar even. So I find it hard to believe in things that are beyond my backyard. I certainly could never give up my life for someone else’s idea. I’d rather take a punch if I had to, because there is also the small chance of catching a touch of enlightenment. That’s what I’m trying to say in the poem.

 

 

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