Rahat Kurd
Biography
Rahat Kurd, a poet and cultural critic based in Vancouver, is currently at work on The Book of Z, her second full-length work of poetry. A close reader who draws on multilingual poetics, Kurd studies the ghazal tradition in Urdu and Persian literature. Her most recent essay, “Elegiac Moods: Letters to Agha Shahid Ali” was published in river in an ocean: essays on translation (Ed. Nuzhat Abbas, trace press: Toronto, 2023). The City That Is Leaving Forever: Kashmiri Letters (Talonbooks 2021), a non-fiction exchange of correspondence and poetics between Vancouver and Kashmir during a five-year period of increasing Indian state militarism and repression, was co-written with poet Sumayya Syed. Cosmophilia (Talonbooks 2015), her first book of poems, considers Islamic art and Kashmiri craft practices as formative influences on the poet’s lived experience and outlook.
Poetics Statement
Language is treasure — self-replenishing, inexhaustible, irreducibly human. We safeguard it by spending it. It doesn’t matter how archaic a word might be according to the dictionary you consult — if you write it into a poem today, you keep it alive for the person who might read it next month or five years from now. The sound and weight of the right word, its power to do justice to the expression you require from it, might also help keep you alive, too.
Reading poetry in the multiple South/Central Asian languages intersecting my family history has become vital sustenance for my writing practice. At first I felt determined to retrieve not only the fluencies my parents had each brought on their separate journeys to Canada in the 1960s but to reach back further, even before my grandparents’ time, to the Persian literary tradition that had informed so much of the Urdu, Kashmiri, Punjabi, and related poetics I wanted to study and absorb. I’ve given up the fantasy of reconstructing a formally perfect 17th century Kashmiri Persianate world in my head by now. My effort to hold onto multiple languages will likely remain as imperfect and unfinished as it is rewarding, lively, and frequently hilarious; what matters most is persistence. To grasp even one new word or turn of phrase at a time, to feel the gift of understanding what someone wrote five or seven centuries ago, continually energizes my writing in English: expanding its world-making scope and inclusivity, suffusing it with pleasure, and renewing my clarity of purpose.
Alt text: Kurd has short brown hair and stands outdoors in bright sunlight. She is wearing a red jacket and a cream-beige scarf, with trees and a black fence visible in the background.
Sample of Poet's Work
Twenty Seventeen Ghazal
True rebellion frees just that woman laughter reminds of money.
My nation would arm freedom fighters with that kind of money.
You cannot, cold Accounts Receivable zeroes, take from me
Anything that I will more willingly part withal, except that kind of money.
Threadbare, per poetic tradition, I roam planets and galaxies —
My best work turns cartwheels through the puny mind of money.
In coastal quake, felled tower glass would crush us splinter-bloody.
Wolf at the door; views to die for; give us our daily grind for money.
Let scarcity swindle Rahat; let false economy fleece her to the skin.
She waxes rich with rhyme. They chew the hard prose rind of money.
GHAZAL: ON EID
Aunt Sabiha’s splendid ritual? Urdu verses lavished by email. Tempered black on Eid,
Sabera memes the occasion, hits Reply All: omg mom why are u smoking crack on Eid?
Sultan Ahmet’s minarets poised for liftoff; unrivalled Lotfollah’s creamy pink dome –
Rent a gym, spread a sheet: instant mosques I look back on, when I look back on Eid.
Each year you complain: Hijra, lunatic, mocks solar clockwise in widdershins skips
But your delight shines all twelve months when your birthday falls smack on Eid.
Black velvet backdrops a neon Kaaba. Heavy attar of roses antiques Grandfather’s gun.
Kashmir wails on vinyl. Bring the imam! We love it loud at Dad’s den of slack on Eid.
Cold thicks our plot: a marriage dismantled, as Ramadan mantles seven summers karim.
Speak the blessing: so hollows our fiction! Does a heart or the facade now crack on Eid?
Modest eyes, silent mouths, I’m hungry of ear. My ears crave a female muezzin to praise.
Yalla, ustaza, sing the Takbir! Please God, just once, not some tuneless male hack on Eid.
Broken threads, friendless cities, whole scarred mountain ranges – Rahat’s lost legions.
Why ask for their names? She embraces their ghosts when her arms hang slack on Eid.
GHAZAL: IN THE PERSIAN
What secrets – and from me! – you kept in the Persian!
Rules beg to be broken as I grow adept in the Persian.
That love Faiz refused to give again, Lal Ded refused from the first.
Her fierce solitude sparks panic in every soul, except in the Persian.
Must it always be war when we meet? The times we meet are so graceful –
Your elegant farewells never falter, never ask me to return in the Persian.
I lost Urdu as I lost Kashmir, every time I left my beloved women.
I found a circuitous way back to them, uphill, by stealth, in the Persian.
They ask me, after such bitter loss, what possible consolation?
I tell them dry-eyed in the English: I know how Khusro wept in the Persian.
The spy blunders most where he hoped to impress.
Licensed to kill it in Arabic! The joke’s inept in the Persian.
The warmongers jeer: “Even the Taliban write poetry!”
But my improvised device pulls Sunni closer to Shia in the Persian —
Listen: Shujaat Husain Khan weaves Mōlana in the sitar strings of Hind;
Kayhan Kalhor bows his kamancheh’s deep approval, in the Persian.
As a serene heart? Rahat’s that comfortable in the Persian.
As paradox? Being Rahat’s kheili mushkel in the Persian.
“Twenty Seventeen Ghazal” first appeared in Periodicities Journal in 2023. “Ghazal: On Eid” and “Ghazal: In the Persian” were published in Cosmophilia (Talonbooks, 2015).
