Meet Kausam R. Salam 

Coming Together with Poetry

I often think back to when I was five or six and wrote down my earliest nightmare about a black wire on an open field. I don't know if that wire was a barbed wire or a simple black thread upon the horizon. In my mind, I was alone and had to climb over it or climb under it, but I knew I had to do something. When my eyes opened, I wrote and wrote in my child's handwriting; words scrawled all over the page, tall letters and fat dots--this energy let me know everything, even nightmares have a solution. Poetry was a solution, sometimes a resolution about unexplained phenomena; it was the first cause of my communication with those around me. Fragmented words and hushed syllables came out of a little voice that was expected to answer the adults around me.

As I grew older, I heard so much music--poetry was sung to me at breakfast, old lyrical songs in Persian, English, Urdu, and even German--the human voice had the power to move me to tears and joy at the same time. Grandfather's poems my father sang aloud, explaining their translation in English. Irish songs and Afghani songs had nothing to do with me superficially; yet their melodies enchanted me. Then I read A Child's Garden of Verses, a colorful first book of children's poems by Robert Louis Stevenson. This was my first conscious birthday gift from my parents.

There were more chances to listen to poets of various languages recite their poems on the weekends. Akka (my father) would take me on the subway to Manhattan's Metropolitan Insurance Company where the only "insurance" talk was a group of poets who were given a life-guarantee that their voices would be heard--the Bengali poet sang his lines, he who lost both home and family to a dictator enemy who destroyed humanity to shreds. Another poet sang in Urdu about her identity and her personal value in a humorous, satirical way. Then, some poets recited their ideas in English; others nodded and achieved "hal qal"--a kind of heightened sense of...well highness...over nothing but mere words, for alcohol was never served here. Thus, poetry came to mean a universal language, like music, that no one could divide or separate from despite those who lived for cultural divisions. Poetry and unity came together for me.

In college, poetry became my reclusive nature, and I celebrated the Ozarks with childish romantic lines. I listened to Derek Walcott and Lahna Diskin and Miller Williams give their recitations and felt a strange kinship that drove me away from traditional book learning and into the heart of people's hearts. A certain comparative literature professor named John Locke, yes that was his real name, let me write notes in poetic form and offered bonus points for poems related to each class. Then, he'd invite the fragile, overly sensitive students in his office for a chat where he kept clean white towels folded up as in drawers of hotels, in case someone couldn't take his criticism anymore and had to have a good cry. Sadly, I cried and kept taking his criticism. One time he called me an "airy fairy" who kept her face in the air instead of "over here."

As a teacher, many years later, I discovered John Locke was killed by a favorite graduate student, shot right in the heart, and died instantly. Poetry and violence came together for me on that day. I met a descendant of the American poet, Holmes, who proudly taught a creative writing course. He allowed experimentation and celebrated a blend of styles. Then, a severe director-poet told me not to apply for an MFA, that an easterner couldn't possibly write for a western and southern audience--"stay with the education major, honey...you'll be safe that way." Then poetry and criticism came together for me.

Later when I read more of Billy Collins, I remembered Miller Williams' criticism of this dynamite poet. And poetry and praise came together for me.

As I taught at a rural school in Cisne, Illinois, the Spanish poets Neruda and Machado came into my poetic consciousness. Dreams and reality came together for me.

In the inner city, Galena Park, my Flushing-Queens-jump-roping childhood came back to me. I read Tupac Shakur--whose poems influenced my student, Gerald, "Big G." Poetry and perception came together for me.

I couldn't stop thinking through every new idea without the lens of poetry. Every important conversation became a poetic entry in my journal, and poems became my personal oral tradition as I communicated with my students and my own children.

Today I can't imagine a life without poetry in the same way I can't imagine a life without the contemplation of God.

Andrew Blackman

As a child, I wrote stories to express the things I could never seem to say out loud. In the quiet of my room, alone with a blunt, heavily chewed pencil and a scrap of paper, I felt free. If I made a mistake, I could rub it out and get it right the second time, or the third. I shaped the words with my small, chocolate-stained fingers, and the results pleased me. So different from spoken words, which seemed to come out of their own accord, often jumbled or inaccurate, and could never be rubbed out.

These days I have a laptop, and my fingers are stained with coffee rather than chocolate, but otherwise my writing process remains remarkably similar. 

The results, of course, are different. My ideas have changed radically since I was eight. Rather than being obsessed with the unfairness of teachers or parents, I am now obsessed with societal injustice. Instead of grumbling about having to clean my room, I grumble about who will clean the planet. I have been influenced by literature from around the world: Jorge Luis Borges, André Brink, Kazuo Ishiguro and others. I have had formal training, too: a history degree from Oxford University, a master’s in journalism from Columbia, three years as a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal in New York. I have learned much from all of these sources and have watched myself improving as a writer.

But now, as I enter my thirties, I have decided to return to my childhood instinct that the truth is best told through fiction. I have moved back to London, taken a break from journalism, and written a couple of novels and a drawer full of short stories, one of which was recently published by Leaf Books. In the novel excerpted on this site, I try to express the sense of smallness, both geographic and psychological, that I felt on returning from America to Britain. I imagine a couple of Londoners, inspired by Jack Kerouac’s Beat classic “On the Road,” setting off on a road trip, only to discover that the horizon of Britain in 2008 is not so broad as that of fifties America. I also explore the two countries’ fascination with each other’s mythology, a subject that has informed much of my work recently.

No matter what I write about, though, my main aim right now is to recapture the freedom I felt as a tongue-tied eight year old letting rip against the world with his grubby little HB pencil.

Jerry Ryan

I started writing seriously in the early 90s. I enjoyed an unplanned sabbatical from my job and went back to school. I took a writing course, “Writing the Natural Way” using the book by Gabriele Rico. It was like someone let the genie out of the bottle. I haven’t stopped writing since. The clustering technique unleashes the hidden treasures locked in the right side of the brain and gets them onto paper. It’s a technique I use in writing fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, poetry, and business letters.

I found that writing was the cheapest form of therapy I could find. Fiction writing allows me to test characters with ethical flaws in situations that test those ethics. Sometimes I know what the characters will do. Often, they surprise me and insist on doing something I hadn’t planned for them to do. That’s when writing is really a kick.

As you can see from my submission, I love cycling. With over 30 years and 35,000 miles in the saddle, I've had my fair share of cycling experiences. The idea for writing about cycling came from friends constantly calling with questions about buying a bicycle, what accessories to have, where to ride, how to fix.... you get the idea. The result was a series of articles written for novice to intermediate cyclists and enjoyed by all those who bicycle and love to read about cycling. They say “Write what you know.” It’s true.

I wrote constantly and submitted work for about three years before I hooked up with Windy City Sports. That seemed to be the key to becoming more successful. When someone pays you regularly for what you write, you’re a writer, not just a dilettante. I still enter competitions and still meet with more rejections than acceptance, but I keep plugging away.

I write poetry to work through life issues, to stay in emotional touch with feelings often repressed in daily life. My day job isn’t that satisfying on a gut level. Poetry fills a need that other forms of writing don’t.  I’ve been fortunate to win a few poetry competitions along the way.

Poetry became a tool to prime the pump for ideas for my other writings. I found I enjoyed the denseness of language and economy of words inherent in a poem. Poetry is a discipline that I now enjoy for its own pleasure.

I started entering writing competitions as a way to test the waters for my writing.   As an unagented author, I found it was difficult to get short stories and poems published. Competitions are a great place for your work to be judged by people who will give your work a good, critical read. When you win a few, it helps your bio when you submit elsewhere.

Competitions usually have judges who are sincerely interested in finding work that they would love to publish. Many contests are run by university fine arts programs that are looking for good new work, as opposed to the literary and commercial markets where your story or poem is one more manuscript plucked out of the slush pile and read by an overworked and underpaid editorial assistant or intern.

I entered a competition from Next Stop Hollywood that called for short stories that might lend themselves to film or TV projects. From over 600 submissions, 15 were selected for inclusion, one of mine among them.  "A.K.A." is a love story and a crime story involving two ex-DEA agents and an exotic dancer, a drug deal gone wrong, and mistaken identity. The prize included publication in the St. Martin’s Press anthology (http://nextstophollywood.org), a small cash advance, a split of royalties with the other authors and the publisher, and best of all, some nice participation if the stories are optioned and/or produced.

I try to write every day.  With a full time job, that’s not always easy.  Anne Lamott, in her book Bird by Bird wrote about not waiting for the Muse to move you before sitting down to write. If you sit down to write every day, the Muse will know where to find you.  I’m trying, Anne, I’m trying.

I would recommend joining a good writers' group that offers support along with a high level of critique, a group that allows you to read your work aloud. It’s amazing how your best work stands out, and how your less than stellar effort show up when you hear it out loud. It’s easy to spot the bumps in your work.