‘Found Poetry’ a Key to Local Writer’s New Collection

Dilruba Ahmed’s second book of poems, “Bring Now the Angels,” has been published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Photo: Mike Drzal

“When I talk about writing, I get very excited,” Ruba Ahmed says. 

This is evident even over the phone. When I asked Ahmed last winter if I could interview her when her second book of poems came out, I’d imagined us talking face to face, perhaps at Hobbs Coffee, where I’ve often spotted the 13-year Swarthmore resident with her laptop. But the coronavirus outbreak has made that impossible.

Her book “Bring Now the Angels” was published on April 14 by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which has published such poets as Sharon Olds, Ross Gay, and Richard Blanco. We spoke recently by phone about the poems, her teaching, and how she got to Swarthmore, with her kids occasionally audible in the background.

It’s an odd time to have a book of poems come out. Public readings are canceled, and bookstores are shuttered. Yet this is a moment when some people are turning to poetry. Poems are posted on Facebook pages and circle the internet in email chains. “Part of what’s appealing about poetry in a moment like this,” Ahmed says, “is that moment of recognition. Even if it isn’t a feeling of total consolation, a poem can provide a feeling of connection.”

This new collection fits the moment. Loss is its subject. “A big chunk of it is about my father’s battle with multiple myeloma,” says Ahmed, who wrote throughout his three-year struggle but had trouble finding language that felt emotionally true. “Then, about a year out from his death, something inside me just dissolved.” Most of the poems from the first half of the book were written then.

Experimenting with form unlocked that work. 

In Ahmed’s first collection, “Dhaka Dust” (Graywolf, 2010), the poems are mostly first-person lyrics and narratives. They overflow with images, colors, and scents. Rickshaws in Dhaka are “ablaze with red flowers, / Heineken boxes, a Bangladeshi star with blue eyes, / peacocks.” In another poem, set in a field, “frog eggs churned / to tadpoles. Grass / stained our jeans.” The poems are urgent with desire, with questions and invocations. Many read like missives: to a mother, a child, a friend, a city.

For the subject matter of “Angels,” however, straightforward, traditional forms seemed unable to hold the emotion she wanted to convey. To write these poems, Ahmed put aside thinking about what she was trying to say and concentrated instead on the demands of new forms. This opened her mind. “There’s a kind of distraction that productively preoccupies me, so I end up surprising myself.”

The poems in the new collection look different. Some are just a few scattered lines — almost feathery — while others are built of prose paragraphs rather than stanzas. Some poems repeat words and phrases almost frantically, insisting, beseeching. In others, words allude to something not quite on the page, language struggling to conjure what it cannot quite describe. 

Some poems use “found language,” lifted from health questionnaires or Google’s auto search complete function. For Ahmed, this approach worked “like a pick for unlocking a door. It gave me a way of tackling material in new ways.”

One of these, “Local Newspaper, Floating Photographer, Father’s Day Edition,” borrows its structure from a former feature in the Swarthmorean that posed the same question to different people. The poem begins:

Describe your father. 

He is a lid I cannot open.

Describe your father.

What language is broken enough?

For 13 stanzas, grasping fragments answer the same banal yet terrible question.

A Bangladeshi-American Childhood

Ahmed’s childhood can be thought of as a series of fragments. When she was growing up, her father taught at various colleges in south central Ohio and western Pennsylvania. These were small towns, largely isolated and rural. Different kinds of small towns from Swarthmore. “In Swarthmore, we have a strong sense of togetherness,” she says. “That’s not something my family really experienced in any of the towns that I grew up in.”

A Bangladeshi American growing up in rural Ohio, Ahmed often experienced a sense of dislocation. She cites a poem by Agha Shalid Ali, “In Search of Evanescence,” that begins, “When on Route 80 in Ohio / I came across an exit / to Calcutta.” 

Ahmed explains, “That poem really captured the feeling of growing up in an immigrant family separated by rifts in time and geography. A ghost existence. A ghost homeland. Family members who lived far away and remained strangers to my sisters and me. We’d have an occasional crackly phone call or these blue aerograms that arrived periodically in the mailbox with handwriting I couldn’t read. There were doors and exits and avenues all around us to places and experiences we couldn’t access.”

Finding Poetry, and Swarthmore

Ahmed and her husband headed out to the San Francisco Bay Area after college, but they moved back east in 2007. After finishing a project funded by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, she began graduate studies in creative writing. She and her husband visited dozens of houses and neighborhoods before they stumbled upon “throngs of kids riding around on bikes and hanging out together.” That was Swarthmore. “It didn’t take us long to decide to settle down here.”

In California, Ahmed had worked first as an elementary school teacher and then as a project manager at the Carnegie Foundation, taking poetry writing classes on the side. In 2006, she started a master of fine arts program in poetry at Warren Wilson College, one of the  country’s top low-residency programs. She could do her schoolwork largely from home, traveling to North Carolina just twice a year for 10 days at a time. 

Ahmed had always written journals and read poetry, but beginning as an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh, she learned to see what poets were doing on the page. “I hadn’t realized there were actual tools out there that could make me a better writer,” she says. “In my workshops, we were building a repertoire of skills we could use and starting to build a sense of our own aesthetic preferences.”

She uses a similar approach in her own teaching. Her classes are largely participatory. “I’ve always been interested in how we can co-create the class...I’m going to ask a lot of questions. I want to set a tone that makes people feel safe.” 

The Writing Lab

In the past, Ahmed taught part-time at Bryn Mawr College and in the low residency writing MFA program at Chatham University. While working as assistant director of Swarthmore College’s Intercultural Center, she coached the college’s spoken word collective, O.A.S.i.S. (Our Art Spoken in Soul), during informal poetry workshops over coffee at Hobbs. 

Dilruba Ahmed’s poetry workshop

Now, she offers classes in Swarthmore through a newly organized venture called the Writing Lab. The first sessions were held at waR3house3 but have since migrated to Zoom. A mix of poetry and prose writing, they are designed to be accessible to writers at all levels. Most of the students are local, but some have come from as far away as New Jersey. “As we continue with online classes, I’m hoping to work with students from many different places.”

The class sessions always include time to write, and Ahmed writes along with her students. Even on days she doesn’t teach, she tries to make time to write. She has also, in this difficult time, revisited poems “that are either comforting or provide a feeling of recognition about our current moment.” One such poem is “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” by the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, which ends: 

Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

“Zagajewski wrote it after walking through evacuated villages in Poland after World War II. He felt a sense of disjunction between the beautiful weather on the day of his visit, and the evidence of tragedy before him,” Ahmed explains. “Part of what the poem conveys is the feeling of both light and dark. Of recognizing the darkness in the world, but also appreciating the light.”

Return

City, I’ve tried to love your gray-veined streets
that wind through grayer hills, bits of driftwood
stagnant downstream, steel bridges, your concrete.
I’ve paced hollows, your twisting neighborhoods:
trestles tucked away near mills, now quiet,
plastic bags that sprout like strange white flowers,
an orange haze not quite the sun. Cardboard
houses crushed into hills, slow heat, hours

pressing into me. No town of my own,
just this confluence of leaden waters--
Monongahela: slate. Allegheny: bruise.
Bridges lit up in bright spokes of moonstone
seem to point home, but among splinters,
where in each river does the water move?

Dilruba Ahmed

“Return” from “Dhaka Dust: Poems.” Copyright © 2011 by Dilruba Ahmed. Reprinted with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, graywolfpress.org. Originally appeared in North American Review.

This poem from my first book, “Dhaka Dust,” is a version of a sonnet. It’s not a strict sonnet, but it flirts with the form. I’m writing about mixed feelings for a city [Pittsburgh] that holds a lot of history for me...I was trying to get across the feeling of a speaker who’s struggling with a setting that feels both comfortable but also unfulfilling or unsettling.

Final Registry

Tattered voting ballot. Business card smudged
with coffee. Medicare card. Senior center
card. Senior shuttle ID. Power port card
with implant date, reference number,
doctor’s phone. Expired coupon for coffee.
Receipt for overdue book, paid. Torn fortunes
pulled from hollow cookies. Photo
of next of kin. Pizza card, fulling stamped,
10th slice given free. Bonus shopper card.
Library cards from another county. Pharmacy 
savings. Library due dates. Dentist reminder
with calendar sticker. Jotted notes: items
for sale (“Coffee table in decent condition”).
Scuffed faculty ID, permit for parking.

Dilruba Ahmed

From “Bring Now the Angels.” Copyright © 2020 by Dilruba Ahmed. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. Originally appeared in diode.