Saba Pakdel : part five

How important is music to your poetry?

There are words in music. They may not be articulated by means of alphabets that appear in a dictionary per se, but they seamlessly formulate a conversation. The dialogic quality that exists in music does not necessarily realize itself in a listener / composer relationship, but among its own components as well. When you listen to a piece, you’d be reading a polyphonic poem or a play with multiple characters (voices) in multiple mise-en-scène (notes). Poetry, in the same vein, consists of different notes of music not only in the way it uses language patterns and metric systems, but also in the way it is recalled in memory. What poem comes to your mind when thinking of Beethoven’s “Sonata quasi una fantasia” which was actually nicknamed “Moonlight” sonata by German Romantic poet Ludwig Rellstab.  Music and poetry share qualities that make them essential components of a collaboration. I guess what kind of collaboration you’d think of is the way you’d expose yourself to the arts. 

Saba Pakdel : part four

When you require renewal, is there a particular poem or book that you return to? A particular author?

That’s a great question! I tend to read Persian classic poetry although I do not write in that particular form. What matters to me is not necessarily the technicalities, but the perspectives, positionalities, and approaches a poet proposes in relation to phenomena. Persian culture is intertwined with poetry and that fascinates me when a grandparent with no background in literature knows some poetry by heart and reads them to their loved ones. Last time I needed such “renewal,” to use your words, I went over Khayyam poetry. That said, I read modern and contemporary Persian poetry for renewal and other purposes, too. Last summer, my partner and I had a scheduled Simin Behbahani ghazal reading every night. In my last visit to Tehran, I bought some poetry books, including Rasool Rakhsha’s most recent publication, to keep up with ongoing poetry streams in Iran. 

Saba Pakdel : part three

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that the other forms cannot?

I don’t think there is an exclusivity about the genre and that is the very reason poetry is accessible to different writes with a nonlocalized, non-hegemonic, and flexible quality. You can express your ideas in an interdisciplinary manner which complicates the relations and blurs the distinctions between genres and schools / boundaries of thought. The point is what one particular piece of poetry accomplishes cannot even be replicated by another poet let alone another genre. So, I think it is not about the medium as it is about the form that makes one accomplishment different from the other. 

Saba Pakdel : part two

How do you know when a poem is finished?

There’s an idea, particularly a raw one, which requires a certain construction, or you’d call it a form, in order to be presented. I guess the moment that idea gets its very form through multiple edits in time, the poem is relatively finished. However, there’s an argument that a poem is never fully finished because the next one is in a conceptual sense in continuation of your series of works as an author. Well, it’s maybe best to think that the idea is exhausted in one form within the body of a poem, but it may reappear in another form elsewhere. 

Saba Pakdel : part one

Saba Pakdel was born into a family of artists in Tehran, Iran. Growing up in a home of theatre, literature, and cinema, Saba breathed in the quality air of arts from an early age. She completed her BA and MA in English; attended and coordinated literary workshops and poetry readings; published poems, translations, and essays in Persian journals before leaving her home country to Canada in 2017. Once settled, she continued her studies at Simon Fraser University where she worked with Dr. Stephen Collis, Canadian poet and professor. She is currently studying her Ph.D. in English at University of Victoria under the supervision of Dr. Stephen Ross, modernist scholar and professor.

Photo credit: Hossein Pakdel

What are you working on?

My current project is my sweet struggle with the composition of a bilingual book of poetry that gives equal space to both English and Persian languages. The thesis is to use both languages semantically while I strongly intend to avoid exoticizing Persian as an unreadable language in an English environment. The tricky concept here is when a language is unreadable to some, it is ornamental, decorative, and objectified. I started thinking through conditions of possibility for a project as such after attending Summer Writers Session 2021 at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity last summer which included one-on-one sessions with Dr. Jordan Abel and Kaie Kellough. Also, I am currently working on my PhD project which overlaps with the idea of language stuck in a state of in-betweenness in migration theories. Hopefully, the two projects on both sides of research and poetry meet somewhere in the middle to help me with that struggle!