With 30 years of experience and various awards to his name, Faisal Mohyuddin has established himself as a poet and an artist. His first poetry chapbook was published in 2017, followed by his first full-length collection, The Displaced Children of Displaced Children, in 2018. His second full-length collection, Elsewhere: An Elegy was published in 2024. Much of his work has also been published in journals such as Poetry Magazine, Poet Lore, and Chicago Quarterly Review.

Also an educator, Faisal currently teaches English at a high school in Chicago, as well as creative writing at the School of Professional Studies at his alma mater, Northwestern University.

By Malaika Zahra

ACWP: With Elsewhere: An Elegy being published last year, you are now the author of three poetry collections. Could you take us through the conceptualisation of each of them? What were the creative processes like and how did they differ for each collection?

Faisal Mohyuddin: The chapbook, The Riddle of Longing, and The Displaced Children of Displaced Children were kind of happening simultaneously, they were not meant to be two different projects. So, I don’t know if I had a specific idea for those two when I started; I was just writing poems. All the poems in The Riddle of Longing are in The Displaced Children of Displaced Children. For me they seem very connected. One was published in October of 2017, and then the full-length book was published in April 2018, so just seven months apart. The first poem I wrote in April of 2000, so eighteen years before the book came out, and the last poems I actually wrote a few months before.

A lot of my family is from Pakistan. People don’t talk about Partition, they don’t talk about what it was like to go from India to Pakistan. A lot of the poems deal with wonder, and trying to figure out what are the stories of my family history that have never been told. I was always too afraid to ask questions. I was inventing—through poetry—some stories, some understanding, a lot of wonder about history and belonging, and what we inherit that we don’t even understand that we’ve inherited.

I’ve published a lot of poems in journals, and I took out all the ones I thought were the best. A lot of them are about displacement and longing and history. Other poems were about teaching, other poems about just goofy things. So that first book was just a collection of eighteen years of writing and what I thought was the best.

The second one, Elsewhere, is about poems I was trying not to write. I lost my dad in 2015, and once the first two books came out, I thought I didn’t want to write on grief anymore. But the poems kept going, no matter what I was writing about. Somehow, I would meander and end up dealing with grief. I had a friend who lost both of his parents in the same year, and he said, “If everything you’re doing is taking you towards grief, you have to confront it more directly.” So, Elsewhere was written more concentrated—I’m writing a grief sequence. It begins with me trying to not write about this, then becomes, “I am absolutely going to write about this.” It’s a mature book with a narrower focus. I felt more comfortable saying that I was only going to focus on this narrow set of concerns. For the first one I was very unsure, learning how to do everything as I was writing, so it’s more disjointed. But it does feel more true to me as a person.

The cover of Elsewhere features your artwork, “My Father’s Songs.” Could you tell us more about this painting? Would you consider it a neat representation of the poems in the collection?

I’ve been doing visual art longer than I’ve been writing—now I just draw or paint when I have time. That summer, I graduated from my Masters programme in writing one week after my dad passed away. I just had my son four months before that, and I thought, “I spent all this time away from the most important people in my life just to write!” And writing is very solitary. When I’m drawing, I can sit with family around me, I can talk to people. So that summer I said, “I want to be creative, but I don’t want to write. I can’t write right now, it feels too isolating.”

I have two friends who are artists, and they did the artwork for my chapbook cover. One of them had a show coming up in a gallery and asked me if I wanted to be part of it. I would have to produce fifteen new pieces between June and September. I painted maybe ten paintings and made eight drawings, and all the pieces got framed, but the one piece that didn’t make it was “My Father’s Songs.” And to me it felt strange, because that was the piece I made specifically inspired by grief. I didn’t feel that disappointed, but I thought it was interesting.

Over the course of time, it broke. I cut cardboard cylinders on it and covered them with paper and plastered them onto a canvas, and I cut holes in the canvas as well. It’s a three dimensional piece, and a couple of cylinders have broken off. I never even displayed it at home, it was just sitting in a closet. Then when I was doing the cover design, I submitted all of this artwork, most of it not my own, and then the publisher went to my website and suggested some of my own artwork. I sent her all these pieces—not that piece—and then she, on her own, found that piece. The title of the book was something different, so we were trying to work with a different theme. It used to be about grief as captivity, to grief as a need to go elsewhere. There’s so much about a father’s voice and a father’s songs in the poems that it just made sense.

I had thought about putting my own artwork, and it was a really nice experience for me to not have planned it that way, but for it to have happened.

Would you say that your poetry and visual art are separate mediums for different ideas, or do they have creative overlaps?

I think about this a lot. One overlap for me is that a lot of my drawings include text in them, or I do words and names, almost like a graffiti style. When I’m doing visual art, I’m thinking about what words can be woven into the piece. In Islamic art, so much of the calligraphy is language, but it’s visually so beautiful.

When I’m writing, I’m not thinking in an artistic way, so I don’t think it goes back and forth in a conscious way for me. The one thing that’s really hard with writing is measuring progress. If I’ve been working on something all day, I don’t know if I’m further along the process or not. With drawing or painting, I have three hours of progress that I can see. So there’s this feeling of accomplishment that drawing and art gives me that poetry doesn’t always. And it’s one of the things that makes drawing sometimes a nice break from writing.

On that topic of progress, when would you say that a poem is finished? How do you know that your poem is complete?

It is one of the hardest questions to answer, and it is different for every person. Sometimes it’s a feeling. It’s so hard to say how. When I’m working on a poem, at some point I get this understanding that I know what this poem is really about. Sometimes it’s on the way. As I’m writing, I start leaning in that direction. When the last line is written, there’s this feeling like “Yes!”. I can’t always quantify that in words.

When I was putting the final draft of Elsewhere together, because it’s such a singular sequence of poems, I knew that I wanted the last words to echo some of the early words. I had these design concepts of what’s happening on each side of the (poem’s) structure. The whole book is perfectly balanced with the number of poems and the sequencing and the visual layout on the page. But it’s hard to know sometimes. There’s so many poems that I go back to and think, “I want to revise that again!” But then I just let it go.

Let’s talk about poetic form. From acrostics such as “The Faces of the Holy” to the interview style of “The Opening”, form is often a striking element of your poetry. How do you think your experimentation with form has developed through each collection?

Early in my writing, I wasn’t thinking about form at all. I looked back at some of my older poems, that have more variety in line and stanza length. It was almost intuitive. But in Elsewhere, there’s this repeated pattern that’s really deliberate. I also looked at some of the later poems in Displaced Children of Displaced Children, where I was really thinking about structural design.

There’s one poem in that collection, the longest one, called “Denaturalization: An Elegy for Mr Vaishno Das Bagai, An American”. It’s about Vaishno Das Bagai, an Indian immigrant in the 1920s who lost his citizenship. It’s eight sections long, and I knew from the beginning that I wanted each section to have a different form. There’s so much history and story there, so if every section looked the same, it would feel hard to navigate. I think variety is more of a priority for me now.

Acrostics are my favourite form. I feel like I haven’t succeeded yet at writing another interview poem like “The Opening”, but for some reason, that poem just happened that way. I’d written another poem like that a few months before, but I don’t have speaker tags on that one. Structurally, it’s just couplets.

I was also wondering why you choose this specific form (the haiku) when you’re writing about topics such as Palestine. What inspires you to use this form?

The world has been watching what’s happening in Palestine for a long time. In the US, it’s extremely difficult to talk about it. But my whole writing life has been about writing against silence. Even in my family’s partition experiences—there was so much violence in South Asia. To not talk about those things is really dangerous for healing, peace and liberation in future. I’m not saying there should be no restrictions or taboo, but for me to not say anything about Palestine did not feel sincere. I had these feelings that were so massive that I was paralysed as a writer. And then one day I asked, “What’s the smallest poem in the world?”

It was the haiku for me. I wrote five haikus on November 1st, 2023. There is so much that a haiku can hold. A true Japanese haiku isn’t about the number of syllables, but I thought if I had an exact number of syllables, and exactly three lines, I’m forced to make decisions about what can go inside this form. I felt much more free.

The responses I was getting were very dramatic. And there’s something about it being so small, that you don’t have to spend a lot of time with it. It just has this quick impact. But I didn’t just want it to be a 17-syllable statement; I wanted it to be poetic. So there’s a lot of rhyme in there, playing with meaning, using repetition through a black font that gets lighter for echoing effects. That was where I felt that this was a tiny form, but I could break or bend it in a way that allows me to do more. If it was longer, I don’t think I could do much with it or sustain it. It’s been very eye-opening for me, how much something that small can accomplish.

How would you describe the relationship between your poetry and your identity? Has this relationship changed over time?

Growing up in the states, there’s two things happening simultaneously on an identity level. My family is Urdu-speaking, and there is so much Urdu poetry that is part of cultural identity. People are quoting poems everywhere—random people, who you don’t see as being literary in their sensibility. They can quote Ghalib, Bin Iqbal. And at the same time, the arts were not really a worthwhile thing to study. I never got that directly from my parents, but for the immigrant there’s a lot of sacrifice of ambition. There’s this conflict around me where we love poetry and it’s so important to who we are, but we’re not going to promote or encourage it for younger people here. Knowing that there was so much poetry in my identity made it feel less of a foreign thing, even though it was un-preferred.

I was drawing since I could even speak, so I did have that creative bend. The other thing is, what became really important to me when I was in college meeting people beyond my own identity was that I wanted to write about who I am, and my own people, my own religion. So I tried to write about Islam. There are so many Muslim poets in America right now, but growing up there wasn’t a single Muslim writer I was reading who was American or Canadian. I remember thinking that I wanted to write about voices, identities that I don’t see. So much of my poetry is also about teaching; the identity of being a teacher in a classroom is really important. I do a lot of poems about other people, to imagine what it is beyond my knowing that I can go closer to through poetry.

Unlike when you first started out writing, there’s been more inclusion of Muslim and South Asian voices in the poetry scene. I wonder if there’s still anything more you want to see in future from these voices?

There’s so many different ways to be Muslim. The more people that are writing about their own expression of faith or family or heritage—I think it’s really important, so no one from outside of that community can say “I understand the Muslim experience” because there should be so many, and so much variety. Even when I’m writing about something else, I don’t necessarily need to say I’m writing as a Pakistani-American; that is infused into what I’m writing about. When I see more people writing, I think that each person contributing their voice is expanding the opening into understanding. I never want to seem like I have the answer. I am a representative of my communities in so many ways, but that variety is still so important.

Another common conversation in the poetry scene is about the “poetic voice”. What are your thoughts and experiences on this? Would you say that your own poetic voice is something that you found very early on, or is it constantly evolving?

It’s much more constantly evolving. I’ve been writing for about 30 years now, and I can go back and look at things I wrote in high school or college; I recognise it as my own in terms of language and voice. If I’m doing a reading, people will say that the way my language sounds is very distinct or particular to me, and I don’t always know how to explain that. One thing I have seen while working as a teacher is that people write differently, and there are so many ways to write effectively.

I don’t know how someone finds their own voice, and I don’t know how I found my own, but I know I’m mimicking poets whose work I’ve felt absolutely held by. Part of the evolution is part of finding writers whose work feels deeply resonant. The more I’m reading, the more I’m being influenced. I sometimes am very experimental and ask myself, “Is this really me?” Sometimes it doesn’t feel authentic, but sometimes I think, “Wow, I would have never done that had I not tried something different.” And that’s also part of the evolution of one’s voice.

Now this might be a bit of a tough question, but what are some of your favourite poems you’ve ever written?

One of them is “The Faces of The Holy”. I do love what I am saying in that poem, because I think it was something that I think a lot about.

You also mentioned “The Opening”. People have asked, “If you only had one poem, which would it be?” and my answer is always the one I say. Everything that I’m trying to do as a writer is in that poem. Again, it’s not my usual structure, but I do feel like every key topic is there in some way.

“Denaturalization”, in terms of capturing something historical that happened, that needs to be talked about more; that poem, I really gravitate to. There’s also a poem called “Allah Castles”. It’s in the most revered poetry journal, so it was a big deal when it got accepted and my colleagues all got together to give me a framed copy of it. I do feel that poem is an important way I think about faith, about being Muslim as there are so many ways of approaching Allah. It’s a phrase my son used when he was five, and so my family and faith is in there, and my own sense of wonder.

The one common thing in all of them is that they’re all about Islam in some way. That also becomes a value of mine, where I want to be able to talk about religion. In my day-to-day world it’s not talked about at all. We avoid the subject of religion and for me, everything is shaped by that. So I think these poems speak to the deeper sense of spirituality. I have a friend who’s a Somali poet in Minnesota who wrote to me, saying he had a lot of gratitude to me for starting the book with Al-Fatiha (in “The Opening”). There’s so many Muslims that are writing but they’re not writing directly about faith. A lot of poems in the book are not about that, but that one—I can see why it means so much to him, because it means so much to me. That’s a special way to think about my favourite or my most important poems.

On the other hand, what about the most challenging poems you’ve ever written?

I’ll go back to “Denaturalization”. That was the one I did the most research for and I knew I wanted to write about it. The story is about an Indian Hindu businessman who in the 1920s, emigrated to the US. At that time, Indians were considered Caucasian. To become a citizen, you had be Caucasian or African American, so he was able to become a citizen. Part of that was to announce your allegiance to India, which at that time was Great Britain. He became very successful in America as well.

Then there was a Supreme Court case in which the rules over citizenship changed and the designation of “Indian” was no longer “white”. There was “white” racially, and “complexion”, dark. He was denaturalized and so heartbroken that he took his own life. He wrote letters to his wife, his sons, and then he wrote an op-ed article to the San Francisco newspaper. I remember thinking that this was an epic story that reverberates throughout time.

That poem is in eight parts and each one is different. The challenge of that was, how do I write something historical without it sounding like a work of history? How is it still going to be poetic? So I was working on it for a long time. When I finished it I realised that he himself never speaks in the poem, so I had to go back and make another section. Seven sections became eight.

Are there any topics and poetic forms you’re hoping to explore in the future, or are there any ways in which you want to challenge yourself as a poet and an artist?

I think about that a lot and I’m still trying to figure it out. This last year and a half of writing haikus has made me think about what’s possible with small things. In Elsewhere, five of the poems are haibun, which is another Japanese form. I bent that form for the purposes of that book, and then I have a poem coming out next week in a journal called “Rubbled Haibun”. It’s about Gaza. All the text is fragmented and it’s not so fractured until you can’t read it, but half a stanza is upside-down and sideways and so there’s this “rubbled” look of the text. I was thinking how I can do more of this, how to visually capture some of the violence I’m writing about. To read this poem you have to turn the book sideways and upside-down, to imagine an actual person’s home there, and people underneath.

I want to write about things that I haven’t written about yet, but I’m not sure yet about what those are. I’m constantly asking myself what that next project, in terms of question or focus is going to be. Some people I’ve talked to say that some poets write about the same things, book after book. Others say that every book is its own universe. So I am looking for something different, which I haven’t figured out yet. I do want something different, subject-matter wise, but it’s hard to write about something else when the things I am writing about are still present and urgent right now.

Thank you for your time, Faisal! It was a pleasure talking to you, and we can’t wait to see what you release next.

Here are some poetry recommendations from Faisal:

1. Adonis
2. Zeina Hashim Beck
3. The God Who Loves You by Carl Dennis
4. Persimmons by Li-Young Lee