Nisa Malli : part five

How does a poem begin?

My poems usually begin with a half line prompt drifting through my head that I discard later once I’m in the thick of it. 

Nisa Malli : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

Anne Boyer, Anne Carson, Anne-Marie Turza, Elizabeth Phillip, Emma Healey, Gwendolyn Macewen, Karen Solie, Kaveh Akbar, Leah Horlick, Melissa Stein, Sylvia Legris....

Nisa Malli : part three

How do you know when a poem is finished?

When you cannot imagine reading it any other way and no parts of it stick on your tongue. 

Nisa Malli : part two

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?

In poetry, you can be unrelenting. You can hold the reader’s breath for a full page and build and dismantle tension with precise grace. It allows for hairpin turns and pivots, lets you (and the reader’s eye) turn away from something that is hard to see and turn back a line later.

As a patient, when interacting with the medical system, you have to learn the words your doctors will hear best. You’re stuck using their pain scales and the names of recognizable symptoms. In poetry, you can use your own language to render experiences comprehensible and make the reader feel, or at least imagine for a moment, the sometimes unbearable sensations of the body in pain. You can write the fiction of your body. The metaphor doesn’t have to be medically accurate, it just needs to evoke the feeling. If medicine fogs the order things happened in, it doesn’t matter. It can be someone else’s body, and in writing it so you can sometimes write it more clearly.

Nisa Malli : part one

Nisa Malli is a writer and researcher, born in Winnipeg and currently living in Toronto. Her poems and essays have been published in Arc Poetry, Carte Blanche, Cosmonauts Avenue, Grain, GUTS, Maisonneuve, Policy Options, and elsewhere. She holds a BFA in Writing from the University of Victoria and has held residencies at the Banff Centre and Artscape Gibraltar Point.

Photo credit: Alex Tran

What are you working on?

I am working on a book of haunted poems that offer benedictions, incantations, and instruction manuals for sick bodies.