My Method Is I Refuse to Forget

KARAN

These poems are fantastic, Maya — full of texture, intimacy, diaspora joy and ache, and deep emotional intelligence about both form and community. I love that your voice is razor-sharp in how it calibrates vulnerability, camp, and structural critique. Your poems feel like they’ve invited everyone over and thrown the best, sweatiest party on the block — but then, halfway through, they look you in the eye and say something devastating. The emotional shifts are fluid but precise: you go from joy to ache, from light gossip to grief, in half a breath. How conscious are you of calibrating tone in your work? Does it emerge in revision, or is it something that happens instinctively as you write?

MAYA

Tone is something I’ve been playing with a lot lately; I find I’ve been using humor more, especially the sneaky kind - camp, petty, familial - and taking myself less seriously than I used to. This is a bit paradoxical because in many ways the world has become more violent than it felt when I started writing more than a decade ago. But maybe laughter is how I carry sharp things now. I think I’ve been working toward a stronger sense of immediacy and authenticity in my writing, and transitioning between affective states is such a reality of my daily life now that it occurs naturally. My days lurch, so my poems do too. Now, as I revise, I try to experience the piece the way a reader may enter it, with an eye towards softening their entry but still allowing for the breathlessness and disjunction which feels core to my work. I also love CAConrad’s (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals for an entrance into, as they call it, “writing wildly”; as I see it, writing true to the state the poem is trying to evoke. I see this process as both a spiritual and academic one.

KARAN

In “Why Aren’t Y’all Driving Your Friends to the Airport???”, there’s this gorgeous litany of chosen kinship: Huong, Kavya, Nina — each with their own texture of love. The poem feels like it’s archiving the dailiness of friendship as a political act. How do you think about poems as vessels for memory and social record? Is love the data your work preserves?

MAYA

What a phrase! I hope that love is the data my work preserves. I hope all my writing is a testament to the women who have made me possible. I see my poems as vessels, spells, and counter-archives. In one piece in my new book, I write: my method is I refuse to forget. That’s as clear a framework as any. I’m always thinking: what am I preserving that might otherwise be erased, sanitized, or misunderstood? What dailiness deserves documentation?

KARAN

Many of your poems unfold like breathless run-ons — not chaotic, but lushly overfull, as if the line is always holding one more thing than it can bear. You stretch syntax until it frays, and often avoid stanza breaks entirely. What draws you to these long, fluid forms? Do you ever write tighter or more formal structures, or do you feel most at home in this kind of maximal lyric sprawl?

MAYA

I adore sprawl. I grew up very mistrustful of traditional forms, and free verse offered me a blank space within which I could be myself. I wanted to put my own craters and marks in form, to develop my own shapes for my story. I adore experimental forms, for instance the punnett square structures in my last book, because they trick the eye, ask the reader to play. I entered my performance practice through slam, and I think that experience attuned me to the music of enjambment, pause, and breath. It also made me curious about experimenting with traditional forms, especially in the lineage of the formal innovations by poets like Vanessa Villareal and Lillian Yvonne-Bertram who inspire me to play with the overlap of structure and history. Lately I’ve also been enjoying ghazals and sonnets, but I think I still feel most at home in a lyric sprawl. It feels like stretching out on the couch and telling a story to someone who loves you.

KARAN

“I Wanna Be an Uncle When I Grow Up” made me ache — in the best way. It’s so funny and sweet and politically sharp without posturing. And what an unforgettable title! You write: “we’re always fighting something / where our spine / meets the femur.” The tenderness in your gendered language — boys and daughters, aunties and uncles — shows up across this portfolio. How does gender play into your poetics?

MAYA

My poetics spans my experience of gender; about what it means to have grown up often misrecognized as a boy while being indelibly and irrevocably an Arab woman. I find the most resonance when I examine the ways my womanhood has been rendered monstrous, deadly, and reviled, and the ways I feel most girlish at my most cryptid: confusing, semi-mythic, and constantly eluding a clear taxonomy to pin me on the wall with.

KARAN

“What is a country but a borderless sentence” is one of the most beautiful and quiet moments in this whole set. The ways you describe your aunts’ migration, your cousin’s compulsive cleaning, the language tugged from mouths — it’s all subtle and sharp. What is your relationship to language and multilingualism in your poetry? Do you ever think about writing toward Arabic — or is your English already in conversation with it?

MAYA

I think my English is necessarily inflected with my Arabic, which was my first language. I grew up speaking Arabic, English, and French, taking on Spanish as a teenager, and my grammar is colored by this commingling. I find so much beauty in the way my language(s) kiss and interrelate - Jennifer Chang tells us “all language is errant translation”. In all my English writing, the ghost and grammar of the other three languages are always present. Sometimes I think of them as an ensemble cast; they interrupt each other, harmonize, correct.

KARAN

“Phlebotomy of a Noun” is tiny and elliptical, and placed right next to your most maximal pieces, it does something fascinating to the reading experience. It made me think of what Roland Barthes called the punctum — that small, piercing detail that wounds the reader. Are you ever thinking theoretically as you write? Are there frameworks or thinkers who guide you — or do you mostly avoid the craft-talk when in the poem?

MAYA

I am a big believer in theory as a framework for poetry. My writing is indebted to the thinking of Jasbir Puar, Edward Said, Achille Mbembe, Munira Khayyat, Mejdulene Shomali, and Frantz Fanon. I try to avoid using academic jargon in my work, but I do think my poems aim to have a similar didactic function as a lot of these theorists: to encourage curiosity, anger, and action about the overlapping structures of racism and occupation which shape our daily lives, especially for Arabs living in the imperial core. In Fargo Tbakhi’s invaluable essay Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide, he tells us: “We should betray Craft by replacing it with political thought.” I see my poetry as an extension of my political belief and thought. I think our job as writers today is to make readers feel something sharp and then ask, what now?

KARAN

The ending of “Pleasure is Data” took my breath away. There’s a shift in register where it suddenly cuts deep: “there is no Arab mermaid unaware of the sound of a Crusader’s laugh.” You bring myth, history, girlhood, and eroticism into the same breath — and do so without ever flattening them. What’s your relationship to myth or archetype? Do you think of your poems as reclaiming or inventing new myths?

MAYA

My forthcoming collection, Mermaid Theory, is all about myth, specifically the myth of the first Syrian mermaid Atargatis (who I nickname Gati in this piece). I have been thinking a lot lately about the ways we historicize Arab peoples before they have even passed. What do we lose in this imagining? What is surgically removed? How is the Arab, especially the Arab woman, rendered mythic so she can be mourned instead of protected? I see my poems as working towards a new conceptualizing of myth, of what the myth can tell us when she has a chance to speak/gaze back.

KARAN

Across these poems, pleasure feels like a kind of politics, and beauty feels like a field report. Do you write daily? Do you revise a lot? What helps a poem feel “done” to you?

MAYA

I’ve always wanted to be a write-every-day type of poet. I’m not. Most of my writing occurs in the liminal spaces between work and school; I keep a frankenstein, running Google doc with lines or stanzas I think of as they occur to me (it’s currently 86 pages long, which means I need to go through and play with it). When I have time, but at least once a week, I spend an evening going through my magpie-collected thoughts and work at winnowing the threads I’ve been grappling with into a piece or body that makes sense.

As for done-ness: I think my toxic trait is I never feel anything is truly, fully done. I look at pieces in my first book and have revisions I’d make now. But mostly, I find a piece is done when my gut tells me it is. Bryan Furuness and Sarah Layden tell us “Improvement is erratic, like the flight pattern of a butterfly. With each draft, you’ll make some good changes and some bad changes.” That kind of reflects my approach to revision: experiment, play, blow the poem up, revert all the changes because you hate them, build out three different versions to see how they live on the page, and in a week or three come back and see which version sings best.

KARAN

This is a staple question for us and I’m always surprised by the range in everyone’s responses: There’s a school of poetry that believes a poem or a poet can categorize their work in one of these four ways: poetry of the body, poetry of the mind, poetry of the heart, poetry of the soul. Where would you place your work within this framework, if at all? And do you see your poetry moving in a different direction?

MAYA

I am at my core a poet of the heart, though I adore poetry of the body. I love all things somatic, visceral, and a little bit gross. I write first with my heart, then my gut. I love Natalie Diaz’s approach to writing poetry as a body: “To be able to imagine [language] as a body that you’re touching as you’re working on it or writing it. And then to also know the different flesh bodies it connects you to.” So I’d say, heart first, but the body follows close behind.

KARAN

I can trace a clear line of inheritance from poets like Etel Adnan, Solmaz Sharif, and perhaps Hala Alyan — but filtered through a distinctly American Gen-Z vernacular. Which poets — living or dead — do you turn to most often? Who are your strongest influences?

MAYA

Etel Adnan remains my north star, both for her cutting lyricism and sharp political commitments. My writing also exists with eternal gratitude to the living poets I’ve had the honor to learn from: Safia Elhillo, Fady Joudah, Hayan Charara, Keith S. Wilson, Nate Marshall, and Marianne Chan. I also adore the work of Khadijah Queen, especially her collection I’m So Fine, Hala Alyan, especially her novel The Arsonist’s City (my very favorite novel!!), Hanif Abdurraqib and his The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, Sennah Yee’s How do I Look, Franny Choi’s Soft Science, Vanessa Angelica Villareal’s Beast/Meridian (a central inspiration for my first book), and Jess Rizkallah’s The Magic My Body Becomes. I also carry a candle for the Arab romantics of the previous century: Nizar Qabbani, Iman Mersal, Adonis, and Maram Al-Massri.

KARAN

Would you offer our readers a poetry prompt, Maya — something strange, sensual, or unexpected — to help them start a poem?

MAYA

Write a poem intended as an offering to something or someone important in your life. This could be a personal deity, an ancestor, or a cause. How does your language change when it’s framed as a gift? Use objects. Use smells. What does your body say when words are absent?

KARAN

Finally, we’d also love for you to recommend a piece of art (anything other than a poem) — perhaps a song, a film, or a visual artwork — that you find particularly inspiring or that you think everyone should experience.

MAYA

Atlantics is one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen. It is all about the memory of water, haunting, and the undying memory of loving and being loved. I recommend it to everyone.