Orange Alert

Kazim Ali shines a light on the intersections between cultures in these essays on the craft of poetry, offering a hand to poets either geographically or metaphorically outside the mainstream of Western culture. In "Orange Alert," Ali discusses poets including Agha Shahid Ali, Jane Cooper, Bhanu Kapil, Semezdin Mehmedinovic, and Samuel Beckett. Additionally, he looks at intersections between art forms, showing how areas of confluence enrich the literary arts. He considers painters Agnes Martin and Piet Mondrian, musicians Alice Coltrane and Yoko Ono, butoh dance pioneer Kazuo Ohno, and philosophers Slavoj Zižek and Jean Baudrillard. In his interrogations of the way poetry means, Ali links the poetic endeavor to such diverse texts as "Moby-Dick," "Battlestar Galactica," and Marilyn Buck's prison journals. Ali unpacks the mysteries of contemporary poetry by discussing it in relation to other art forms and to contemporary television, film, and electronic media, including the Internet, YouTube, and Facebook.
Whether he is discussing the way cell phones have altered the concept of physical intimacy and introduced new verb forms, or talking about the way Emily Dickinson's mysteries are more clearly revealed in French translation, Ali is at once clear and complex, rigorous and charming, accessible and demanding. Kazim Ali is the author of two books of poetry, "The Far Mosque" and "The Fortieth Day"; two novels, "Quinn's Passage" and "The Disappearance of Seth"; and a memoir, "Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities." He is now Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College and writes a regular column for "American Poetry Review."