Reviewed by Cherise Benton
Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies
by Kazim Ali
Tupelo Press
December 2018, Paperback, 126 pages, ISBN-13: 978-1936797998
I am a nosy person greedy for knowledge, so despite its intimidating jacket copy, I was drawn to Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies by Kazim Ali. What could Yoko Ono’s “open-ended formula for musical performance in a forest at daybreak” have to do with prose maps and calligraphies, let alone quantum physics? What’s a prose map? Isn’t calligraphy just fancy cursive? Why is the cover art the reflection of a frozen body of water? How do you shove all of that into 115 pages of multi-genre hybrid texts?
Even worse, CAConrad’s blurb calls Ali “[a] true genius poet even when writing prose, even when standing still and breathing.” I, however, am but another cliche immodest in their preoccupations with flowers and moons; surely this was written for Other Poets more sophisticated in their subjects and craft. I am glad to report that I was wrong—in fact, I So true, bestie-ed my way through the entire collection: “My ambition to know outstrips my math” (110). Hard same.
Kazim Ali is a literary artist and polymath who so delights in language and possibility that he created a chrono-synclastic infundibulate safe space wherein physics are presented in a way that makes the moon even lovelier to poets and presumably presents poetry as lovely to physicists. Ali learned “how to use [his] breath to experience [his] body and the external world with deeper focus and deliberation.” This skill empowers him to deftly liaise between the abstract and the concrete, the mythic and the personal. Ali demonstrates that poets and mathematicians use “some of the same intuitions and techniques” and that “physicists . . . are essentially dreaming” (47). For example, “Time is ordinary, invented and defined by poets and scientists. Every poet, even those who have not studied physics, suspects that time is a fiction, that it is not real, at least not in the way that we think of it” (7).
Ali was a child astronomer in “the cold Canadian north,” and likely would have become a professional adult astronomer, but he “came up hard against higher math that [he] could not understand and so [he] did not continue” (96). Fortunately for us, poetry found him and offered another way to study the universe; “Why would what happens to a collapsed star make a difference to me? Because this seems analogous to the question of what happens to the soul when breath leaves the body?” (98)
In Love That Dog by Sharon Creech, Jack learns that “any words / can be a poem.” Silver Road smoothly complicates that premise. It’s made up of eight cantos of alternating serif and sans-serif texts that may or may not be essays, poetry, place-based journal entries, and literary criticisms. There are pieces that look and quack like poems and others that dare you to categorize them. It exemplifies how our constructs of what makes one text prose and another verse are as arbitrary and qualified as our constructs of gender, borders, and the start date of a new year.
The first piece is a one-page, essay-shaped, sans-serifed introduction to quantum physics, but the entirety of that paragraph is: “Quantum mechanics says that space is granular, made of pieces, and not only that but there is no infinity—nothing infinitely small, nothing infinitely vast. Cold comfort.” One is left to wonder if the lines actually wrap or if the pages are particularly narrow.
“January is a Month with Two Faces” is the second text, ideally placed to ground us in the concept of possibility. It is even more essay shaped; long lines of serifed words extend from margin to margin. Chains of conventionally punctuated and capitalized phrases coil into indented paragraphs. This is where Yoko Ono comes in: Secret Piece is a musical score with instructions like, “Decide on the one note you want to play. Play to the following accompaniment: The woods from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. in summer.” This eccentricity could be easily dismissed as flighty or pretentious, but Ali encourages us to think about what actually rankles: Secret Piece contradicts our expectations for how music should be written and consumed. The notes are so specific that they abstract themselves. It is art that “depends not on rules or learning but on the focused perception of any untrained solitary listener” (4). The instructions for those vaguely specific, transient sounds have been displayed as visual art in their own right. Secret Piece is so open to interpretation that audience participation is neither optional nor genre-specific. It’s a hybrid text that contains multitudes and invites us to participate in someone else’s whimsy.
This orientation expertly paves the way for Silver Road’s alternating texts and major themes; bodies, places, and forms—perceptions and presentations. There are also etymologies, Indian and Greek mythologies, the intersections of queer and religious identities, and a Tralfamadorian disdain for linear time. This broad range of subjects intertwines in what I can only describe as particularly graceful stream of consciousness:
In an effort to understand the mind of God, the sands of time, I read yoga philosophy; I read loop quantum gravity theory; I read poetry. Sometimes I think the three are the same. If space-time folds on itself and ends where it started then maybe the Rig-Veda was right—that the universe of existence has no source—it does not end—
Not that time spirals impossibly onward but that there is no “time”: that like light, which Einstein claimed exists in the same always-present moment of the Big Bang, we are all always present in the one moment of every moment in our lives. (30)
Nothing and no one has to be confined to just one thing. I encourage readers with liminal interests, eclectic tastes, and/or open minds, as well as the nosy and unserious, to decide for themselves the answers to the rest of the jacket copy. Silver Road is a rich example of imaginative writing’s genre- and discipline-inclusivity and a demonstration that creative nonfiction is more than just memoir.
About the reviewer: Cherise Benton is an aspiring farmer living in Northeastern Ohio, where she cooks a lot, writes sometimes, and tries to cooperate with her therapist.