4B — Thursday, February 19, 2015
the b-side
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

By ADAM DEPOLLO

Managing Arts Editor

When Tarfia Faizullah fell 

in love with poetry, she wasn’t 
enamored with the fictive beauty 
of metaphors or the craftsmanship 
that goes into forming perfectly 
metered 
verse. 
Rather, 
she 

was entranced by its ability to 
illuminate the world around us 
on its own terms — in her case, 
literally so.

“I really loved Emily Dickinson 

when I was growing up,” she said. 
“I was sitting in the library and 
reading her poem ‘A Certain Slant 
of Light’ and it was, I think, early 
afternoon, and there was a slant 
coming through the blinds onto 
the page and I was like ‘Whoa! 
That’s a certain slant of light, that’s 
amazing.’”

She was also fascinated by 

the act of transcription, by the 
possibility 
of 
having 
others 

speak through her voice and her 
pen. In its earliest incarnation, 
that fascination looked a lot like 
plagiarism.

“I 
didn’t 
understand 
that 

writing 
something 
out, 
like 

copying it into my notebook and 
showing it to somebody, isn’t the 
same thing as writing your own 
original composition,” she said. 
“I got caught by my teacher, and 
at first he was like ‘Wow, you’re 
such a good poet,’ and then he was 
like ‘These are from that book that 
you’ve been copying poems from,’ 
and I was like ‘Yeah,’ and he said 
that wasn’t the same as writing 
your own poems.”

But Faizullah has since learned 

the difference, and her first book 
of poetry, “Seam,” might be the 
long-delayed product of those 
early studies in the often fuzzy 
lines between art and life, made 
all the more visible in the case of 
translators and transcribers.

Published 
by 
Southern 

Illinois University Press in 2014, 
“Seam” is built around a series of 
interviews Faizullah conducted 
with 
birangona, 
women 
who 

were raped by Pakistani soldiers 
in the Bangladesh Liberation 
War of 1971. The collection was 
published while she studied there 
as a Fulbright scholar in 2010. The 
poetry — formally diverse and 
devastatingly immediate — does 
much more than simply recount 
the 
stories 
she 
heard 
while 

traveling and meeting women 
in Bangladesh. Her interview 

subjects disagree with her, refuse 
to answer her questions or, rather, 
respond to the questions they want 
to hear. She interrogates herself 
as an interviewer, as a translator 
of the birangona’s experiences 
and as a Bangladeshi-American 
steeped in the same tragedies – but 
at a distance, as in “Interviewer’s 
Note, vi.”: “I want / that darkness 
she stood against / to be yards of 
violet velvet my mother / once 
cut me a dress from. Rewind. 
Play. / Rewind.” And, ultimately, 
it’s an opportunity for Faizullah 
to reflect on, learn from and take 
pride in her own work.

“Sometimes I feel that I could 

have done it better, and sometimes 
I feel that I haven’t told as full of a 
story as I could have. But mainly 
I’m just proud of it. I’m just proud 
of what it has been able to do – just 
really surprised by what it has 
been able to do,” she said.

Since the publication of “Seam,” 

the larger poetry community has 
also recognized what Faizullah 
and her work can do. The book won 
a number of prestigious awards 
for 
first 
poetry 
publications, 

including the Great Lakes Colleges 
Association New Writers Award 
and the Crab Orchard First Book 
Award, and her other works as a 
poet and academic has won her 
a Pushcart Prize, a Ploughshares 
Cohen Award, a Dorothy Sargent 
Rosenberg prize and a number 
of 
scholarships, 
grants 
and 

fellowships. 
She 
collaborates 

with composers, rappers and 
photographers, 
works 
as 
an 

editor for a number of notable 
publications, regularly performs at 
poetry slams and formal readings, 
and currently finds herself at the 
University, serving as the Nicholas 
Delbanco Visiting Professor of 
Poetry as part of the Helen Zell 
Writers’ Program. But Faizullah 
is first and foremost a poet, and 
she hasn’t taken the time since 
she finished “Seam” to rest on her 
laurels.

“I just kept writing the whole 

time,” she said. “I have hundreds 
of poems that will probably never 
see the light of day, because for 
me, writing poetry is just a daily 
practice. And I don’t mean the 
actual act of sitting down and 
drafting – I just mean sort of 
moving through the world with 
the eyes of a writer.”

The name of her next book, 

“Register of Eliminated Villages,” 
derives from a list of destroyed 

Kurdish villages and is set to be 
published by Greywolf Press in 
2017. In it, Faizullah plans to return 
to the themes of global violence she 
explored in “Seam.”

“I’m really fascinated by human 

psychology,” she said. “And I’m 
really 
fascinated 
particularly 

by how we respond to violence, 
how we contain it, and how our 
awareness of such broad violence 
all over the world, as well as what 
we see in our daily lives or hear 
about – how that affects us both 
emotionally 
and 
intellectually. 

How do we see ourselves? How do 
we see other people through the 
lens of the possibility of being able 
to do harm.”

She 
considers 
poetry 

particularly well-suited to discuss 
highly charged topics like the 
violence she addresses in her own.

“Poetry is really magical in 

that it’s not prose and it’s not song 
— it’s recitation and it’s oratory,” 
she said. “There’s a reason why 
we think of our politicians as 
orators. And I think poetry is an 
oratory tradition. So I feel like, just 
formally speaking, it’s built to be 
able to convey complex ideas.”

But the discussions Faizullah 

engages in through her poetry 
don’t serve to simply reframe 
issues in an aesthetic light. I asked 
her what she thought about a 
line from one of her first favorite 
poets, Emily Dickinson: “I dwell in 
Possibility.”

“I think one of the most 

powerful things about being an 
artist is the awareness you develop 
of the world as a series of infinite 
possibilities,” she said, “and so 
your life becomes about choices 
and about discernment. I think the 
awareness of those choices can lead 
you to take risks that you wouldn’t 
otherwise, which can lead you 
to 
understanding 
something 

about yourself that you wouldn’t 
otherwise 
– 
understanding 

something about your place in the 
world, too, I think.”

Her poetry, then, transcribes 

and 
expands 
upon 
violence, 

suffering and self-discovery in 
order to present an alternative, 
to show us that, even if we can’t 
forget, the next day need not 
be the same as the last. It gives 
us the same advice she hears 
in Dickinson, the same advice 
she gives to her creative writing 
students at the University.

“Yeah, I encourage them to 

‘dwell in possibility,’ too,” she said.

ARTIST
PROFILE

IN

VIRGINIA LOZANO/Daily

Poet Tarfia Faizullah is teaching at the University as the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor of Poetry. 

MUSIC VIDEO REVIEW

The day before Valentine’s 

Day, leading up to the release 
of the music 
video 
for 

“Style,” Taylor 
Swift posted a 
series of crimi-
nally 
short 

teases of it on 
her Instagram. 
They featured 
a moody Swift 
with 
various 

naturescapes 
projected onto 
her body, devoid of sound. 
Right away, it was clear that, 
visually speaking, the video 
wasn’t going to be what we 
expected. But the same could 
have been said about her video 
for “Blank Space,” which hard-
ly fed our expectations (and 
hardly let us down). So I held 
onto the hope that, in the con-
text of the full video, it would 
all make sense. As it turns out, 
that was wishful thinking.

The video for “Style” is 

completely out of sync with 
the song itself in terms of 
tone, rhythm and aesthetic. 
Whereas the song builds upon 
a pulsating ’80s guitar synth 
leading up to an exuberantly 
brilliant chorus of imagery, 
the video throws palpable 
images out through a drab — 
yet, technically pretty — lace-
draped window. What we get 
is a slow-moving, barefoot 
stroll through a fog-filled for-
est as we watch Swift play 
with shards of a shattered mir-
ror that reflect a shirtless ex-
lover.

“Style” is arguably the best 

song on 1989. It uses timeless 
images of romance and gives 
them a chic, mysterious twist. 
It complicates a straightfor-
ward, yet doomed romance 
and gives it a spark of life. 
Why doesn’t its accompanying 
music video take advantage of 
that? Sure, Taylor’s got that 
red lipstick thing that we like, 

and her anonymous love inter-
est (briefly) wears a white 
t-shirt à la the song’s lyrics, 
but that James Dean daydream 
look in his eyes? Hardly appar-
ent. Long hair slicked back? 
Nope, not happening.

I’m not saying I hoped the 

“Style” video would be a literal 
interpretation of the song, say, in 
the same vein as Miley Cyrus’s 
“Wrecking Ball” was, but it 
should have been higher energy. 

It should have injected the song, 
which I’ve had on repeat since 
October, with some extra flare 
that would have made it just as 
infectious as it was the first time 
we heard it.

Taylor Swift has been on 

a hot streak throughout the 
1989 era. But, with this video, 
that streak comes crashing 
down. She’ll come back from it, 
though. She does every time.

-GIBSON JOHNS

C

‘Style’

Taylor 
Swift

Big Machine 
Records

BIG MACHINE RECORDS

I’ll admit this right off the bat: I read the book before seeing the 

film. I’ll also admit this: I passed out twice in the theater. Does that say 
something about the movie? What was 125 minutes felt like an eternity. 
Lemme break it down.

Firstly, I need to speak to whoever adapted this screenplay. Who are 

you? The innuendos, the symbolism – I don’t think I stopped to breathe, 
I was laughing so hard. Where is the best comedy nomination for this? 
It tickled me more than Christian tickled Ana. Maybe this is a testament 
to my maturity. Each time Christian held out his hand and told Ana to 
“come” – when he whipped out the pea(cock) feather during a serious, 
steamy session – I just couldn’t keep it in (the laughter, I mean).

Anyway, the film just tried too hard (haha) to be sophisticated and 

hyper-artistic. “Fifty Shades” needs to accept that it will never be an 
Academy-worthy film, and it doesn’t need to be such a drama queen 
about it. The dialogue, the delivery, the juxtaposition of dark and light 
– everything dripped with drama and desperate symbolism. Every glare 
pierced through our souls, every touch brought shivers down our spines. 
I died lactose intolerant from the amount of cheese in this film.

—DAILY ARTS WRITER

… im on acid i feel like we live in a snowglobe wouldnt it be nice if 

we could just walk outside and it was nice out its sad living in a snow-
globe but also kind of pretty were in a car ive been awake for like two 
days but im ok with it time moves really slowly when you think about 
it but like im not thinking about it so its actually going pretty fast my 
hair feels really nice were at the movie theater id rather see hot tub 
time machine a hot tub sounds nice vry warm especially a time hot 
tub everything makes so much sense were in the movie theater were 
sitting at the front there are ppl i dont know i feel like we could be 
friends were all here to do the same thing its pretty groovy the movie 
started i like the girls shirt its got a lot of patterns i like patterns shes 
really bad at doing interviews but thats ok im an english major too but 
i like ezra pound more did u know ezra pound is a really handsome 
guy more handsome than the gray guy i think but hes not in a movie 
i feel like everyone is using a lot of words in this movie but nobody is 
saying anything shit thats life man i just got sad i cried a little bit but 
it felt good theyre gonna have sex now i saw nymphomaniac it was 
pretty much the same thing but better why wont the gray man just sit 
still for a minute he keeps walking around everyone is sad they should 
be happy they have such a nice house and hes really good at piano i 
play piano too are we the same guy im pretty sure im into bondage too 
im crying again the girl next to me is asleep i wish i could fall asleep 
theyre in a plane the movie ended someone said this is about vampires 
remember interview with a vampire i really like brad pitt also tree of 
life and mr and mrs smith …

— DAILY ARTS WRITER

What’s the opposite of a sexual awakening? Sexual deadening? 

Sexual closing? All I know is that, after driving through an arctic tun-
dra on Valentine’s Day afternoon and maneuvering my place in line 
so I could say “uh, same thing please” to the ticket-seller instead of 
“uh, the movie with all the weird sex, please,” “Fifty Shades” seemed 
like it was going to be the fun kind of trashy. That was for the first 20 
minutes. Then they had to start having sex, and things got so absurdly 
dull that Buzzed fell asleep in one of the (admittedly very comfortable, 
if a bit squeaky) theater seats next to me. While the fact that Dakota 
Johnson fully actualizes a character who is literally Bella Swan with 
an English degree is quite admirable, Jamie Dornan’s robotic Edward 
Cullen somnambulates through his scenes and does little more than 
moodily play the piano and stare at Johnson’s butt while she dances 
to “Beast of Burden.” The most intriguing thing about him isn’t the 
burn marks on his chest, but rather how the hell he’s so freakishly 
clean-shaven (maybe androids can’t grow hair). Why is he tickling her 
so much? Why are the sex scenes so male gaze-y? Can I call in a friend 
with no journalism experience when I can’t do an interview? (Ignore 
that last one, Jen.) Those were all my questions, but the film’s only 
salient question was asked by Johnson about two-thirds in: “What are 
butt plugs?” If this is the sex adults dream of, I’m fine with never get-
ting past first base again.

—ADAM THEISEN

‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ 

on valentine’s day

sober
high

in this series, three daily arts writers in 

varying states of mind visit the same 

place and write about their experiences.

baked.buzzed.bored.

runk

d

this week’s destination: