KAREEM TAYYAR’s most recent book, Keats in San Francisco & Other Poems, was published by
Lily Poetry Review Books in 2022, and his work has appeared in a variety of literary journals,
including Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner and Alaska Quarterly Review. His poem, “Two
Poets,” received the 2022 Atlanta Review International Poetry Prize, and his novel, The Prince
of Orange County, received the 2020 Eric Hoffer Prize for Young Adult Fiction. In 2020 he was
awarded a Glenna Luschei Poetry Prize, and in 2019 he was a recipient of a Wurlitzer Poetry
Fellowship.

Elena Johnson: Congratulations on having two poems published in EVENT 52/2, and thanks so much for mailing me a copy of your latest poetry collection, Keats in San Francisco & Other Poems (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022). 

Quite a few of the poems in this collection refer to or describe dreams, as does the poem, “The Book of the Mountains,” above. And even the poems that aren’t specifically dream-based have an oneiric quality. Do you recall your dreams often? And do they frequently become source material or inspiration for poems? Do you find there’s a relationship between dreaming and the creative process?  

Kareem Tayyar: This is a wonderful question. The simple answer is that I very rarely remember my dreams, which I think I have come to compensate for in two ways: by daydreaming often, and by providing my poems with the type of otherworldly, dream-like qualities you have articulated. My guess is this is one of the central reasons why I love writing poems; it’s an experience that enables me to inhabit fantastical landscapes for extended periods of time.

EJ: Something else that struck me as I read Keats in San Francisco was that there’s a fair amount of magic realism in these poems, which I don’t come across often in contemporary poetry collections. Multiple moons, for example, and someone waking to find feathers on the floor “…that matched the type of bird I’d been in my dreams.” Has there always been a hint of the magical in your work, or has that changed over time? 

KT: The short answer is that there has always, to my mind, been an aspect of the magical in my work. However, as the years have gone on that quality has become significantly more pronounced. Perhaps it’s that, as I’ve grown older, it’s been a way to keep my inner child alive? This is a possibility that has occurred to me more than once. As for your observation about my poetry being magic realist, that’s something I’m conscious of as well. There are a variety of reasons for this, but I believe that the main reason is because many of the films I loved most growing up – among them E.T., Field of Dreams, The Milagro Beanfield War, L.A. Story, The Best of Times, Heaven Can Wait, and The Natural – embraced, to varying degrees, magic realist sensibilities that I found to be deeply moving in ways both imaginative and spiritual.

EJ: The title poem, “Keats in San Francisco,” isn’t the only one in this collection to feature a deceased renowned writer/artist in an unexpected location or situation: “Andy Warhol in Iran” is another such poem, and in “John Berryman” and “Edna St. Vincent Millay,” the poem’s speaker interacts with these writers – in Washington Square Park and by a poolside, respectively. They form a sort of series, woven through the book. How did these poems come about? Did they arise from a conscious exercise in juxtaposition? 

KT: In many ways, the poems you’ve referenced in this question are versions of the magic realist sensibilities we discussed above. The artistic figures who show up in present-day “locations or situations” are all people I would have liked to have met, conversed with and, in the case of Millay and Warhol, partied with. Clearly, the specifics of time and space have made such desires impossible everywhere but in the dream world of poems, so writing those poems was a way for me to live out, on certain levels, those particular fantasies. Further, in writing those poems, my hope was also to humanize these figures in ways that, especially for a towering individual like Keats, has become almost impossible. When one comes across his work in anthologies, for instance, he is often treated as a mythic figure, which often creates a distancing effect between the reader and his work. So my hope is that a poem like “Keats in San Francisco” humanizes him by placing him in a somewhat mundane, contemporary setting. That’s the goal, at least.

EJ:  In two of the poems in this book, you address yourself by name, toward the poem’s end, in the style of a ghazal. In both cases, I sense some melancholy over deciding not to pursue a career as a musician. For example:

Kareem, let’s face it: poetry is what you chose
when you realized you’d never be a great musician.
But maybe things will be different in the next life.

(“Reincarnation Blues,” p. 46)

There’s also a whole section of poems about music and musicians, and a poem about playing guitar and singing country songs all evening. I’m guessing that you are, in fact, also a musician. Did you intentionally choose poetry over music, at some point?  Is poetry truly any easier? And do you think you would choose music in the next life?

KT: Rather than refer to myself as a musician, I would instead say that I’m a permanently average guitar player. I learned how to play in my early twenties, and have gone long periods in my life where I didn’t play at all. Yet I always find my way back to the guitar, and get tremendous pleasure from sitting on my sofa and playing songs by the artists whose music I’ve loved since childhood: Bob Seger, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Prince, The Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, and John Mellencamp, especially. Would I choose to be a musician in my next life? Yes. But am I glad that in this one I found my way to poetry? Very much so. And it’s a gratitude that seems to grow stronger with each passing year.

EJ: The names of a few other poets appear in the book, including Rumi and Galway Kinnell. And I see the influence of ghazals in your work, as well as a spareness and spaciousness that makes me think of haiku. There’s also a whimsical element to many of the poems. Who are the poets you would say have influenced you the most, over time, or who are some of your ongoing favourites? Which poets or poems are you finding inspiring at the moment? 

KT: I could spend the next several pages answering this question. In terms of the poets who have been my biggest influences going back several decades, the work of Barry Spacks would have to be at the top of the list. Spacks was a poet who spent the first several decades of his poetic (and teaching) career in Massachusetts, but who relocated in later years to Santa Barbara, California, where I was lucky enough to have him as my professor in an American Literature course. In addition to being a remarkable man, his poetry was, by turns, lyrical, funny, wise, bawdy, profound, and playful, and his first book of poems, In the Company of Children, remains one of the very best books I’ve ever read. In addition to his work, some other contemporary poets whose work continues to inspire, engage, and thrill me are, to name a few, Faith Shearin, whose poem “Fields” makes me feel like I’m levitating every time I read it; Li-Young Lee, whose poems about childhood are full of love and tenderness; Kelly Moffett, a marvelous confessional poet whose work combines the intelligence of Anne Sexton and the warmth of Mary Oliver; Fred Voss, the Patron Saint of Blue Collar American Verse; and Jim Harrison, whose Collected Poems has a permanent place on the dining room table where I write. 

EJ: Keats in San Francisco & Other Poems is your eighth collection. Has your approach to poetry, or to putting together a manuscript, changed over time? 

KT: Truth be told, I’m not sure I have much of an “approach” to putting a manuscript together other than compiling the poems I’ve written during the span of a few years and putting a title on it. I’ve never been very good, or very interested, in structure, and so the vast majority of my books should probably best be considered as windows into the work I was doing during particular periods of my life. I wish I had a more interesting answer to this question, but there it is!

EJ: What are you working on these days? And what have you been reading lately, or what music have you been listening to? 

KT: In terms of my own work, I’m continuing to write poetry and short stories, and I’ve begun to write personal essays again, after having not done so for the past few years. However, I’m not really sure what my next book will wind up being. I sense that it’s too early to tell. In terms of what I’ve been reading and listening to, there has been a lot that I’ve come across recently that has moved (and entertained) me. Here are three:

Bluets (Maggie Nelson): I’m not sure I’ve ever read a more unique book than this one, which is an extended meditation on the colour blue while doubling as a chronicle of the writer’s experience of romantic heartbreak. It’s brilliant, sad, thoughtful, and tender, and upon my most recent re-reading of it, it occurred to me that it might be my favourite nonfiction book since first reading Joan Didion’s The White Album.

I/O (Peter Gabriel): This is his first record of original material in twenty years, and there wasn’t another album I encountered in 2023 that inspired such an extended emotional response in me. From start to finish, this is a work of tremendous creativity and meaning, and my guess is songs like “Four Kinds of Horses” and “The Road to Joy” will be significant parts of my life for years to come.

Chasing Trane (John Scheinfeld): I stumbled across this documentary on jazz legend John Coltrane last month, and was awestruck by Coltrane’s belief in the sanctity of creative expression, and its ability to unite and inspire individuals of otherwise disparate backgrounds and sensibilities. The strength of his belief, especially in a world that so often disappoints and devastates us, is something that I’ll never forget, and reminds me that art has such value in our lives, in both large and small ways.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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ELENA JOHNSON is the author of Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra (Gaspereau, 2015), a collection of poems set at a remote ecology research station in the Yukon. She holds degrees in Environmental Studies and Creative Writing, and is a co-editor of Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House, 2021). In 2023, she was a Writer in Residence at the Al Purdy A-frame in Ameliasburg, Ontario.