01
Censorship Made Me a Metaphor Engineer
A heron passed the review office in 1999 where my brother's name could not. The poem worked because the image was audited, not because it was clever.
The Reading Room
What the room is reading this week. Long-form work by people who write for a living and people who write to stay sane.
02
The Sentence You Cannot Write Teaches the Most
I knew the exact sentence I could not write about my father in 2001. Everything else in the poem exists because that one sentence had to stay missing.
03
Constraint Is Not the Enemy of Meaning
I believed for thirty one years that a censor was holding my sentences small. Leaving Iran removed him and my writing got worse for two years, not better.
04
What the Ghazal Knows About Repetition
A ghazal I memorised at eleven ends every second line with the same three words. By the final couplet they mean nearly the opposite of what they meant first.
05
Every Poem Is a Negotiation With Silence
A student wanted her poem to say everything about her grandmother. I asked her to choose, in advance, which forty percent she was willing to give up.
06
The Difference Between Subtlety and Cowardice
A colleague once complimented my most cowardly poem for being lovely. I did not correct him, because the poem's ambiguity was built to protect me, not to accuse anyone.
07
Write the Poem That Survives Being Quoted Wrong
A stranger tweeted four words of mine out of order, missing the negation that reversed their meaning. The poem survived the misquote because I had built it to.
08
Ambiguity as Load-Bearing Structure
One line I wrote in 2008 was read as a prayer by a censor and as its precise inversion by my closest friend. Both readings were correct at once, by design.
09
Why I Do Not Trust the Word Freedom in a First Draft
I used the word freedom eleven times in my first month writing without a censor, and cut all eleven, because none of them were carrying a single fact.
10
The Line Break Is an Argument
I spent four hours moving one word, pain, across a single line break. Where it landed changed what the poem claimed was true, not how it sounded.
11
What Survives Confiscation
Airport security in Tehran took my only copy of eleven poems in 2003. Twenty years later, the nine I could reconstruct from memory taught me what a poem actually needs to survive.
12
On Writing Around a Word
I banned the word loss from a workshop for a whole semester. Every poem had used it twice and none had earned it, and the ban taught the room what the word had been hiding.
13
The Reader Who Reads Between Lines Reads Harder
A reader in Tehran told me a pigeon in my poem was clearly the Central Bank governor. It was a pigeon. But her extra labour was not wasted, it was a resource I had not designed for yet.
14
Form Is Where Feeling Goes to Be Believed
A student's free verse grief was more accurate than her strict syllabic version. The class believed the strict one anyway, and she was furious with me for pointing out why.
15
Memorisation Is a Storage Format
I recited my grandmother's poem correctly for thirty one years before finding the printed original and discovering one word was wrong. My memory had not lost the poem, it had compressed it.
16
The Political Poem Fails When It Explains Itself
I added a couplet naming the prison, the year, and the law to a poem an editor worried was too subtle. It sold more copies. I still think it was the worst thing I ever published.
17
Rhyme Is a Memory Device Before It Is Music
Nine year olds who could not describe a rhymed poem as pleasing could still produce its missing words on cue. Rhyme was never mainly about sound, it was a search filter.