Dragon Soul Press had a chance to interview Rizwan Akhtar, an author featured in the Soul Ink: Volume Two anthology!

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1) Introduce yourself!

Hello! I am from the historical city of Lahore, now part of Pakistan, once the United
India. I love roaming the city, though blind urbanization, and migration from the
surrounding smaller places, have fractionally tainted Lahore’s glory, the ancient charm
is inimitable and intact.

I also like to feed birds; it is like provisioning my mind hungry for ideas. Similarly, I take
a meditative delight in watering trees and plants bearing the heat waves of long
summers the city endures with resilience. As I hold the garden hose it often spurts water
near the faucet making me bring a new rubber gasket for the female end. Sometimes I
wrap the male threads of the faucet with Teflon tape. This tells me everything needs
attention hence the notion of poetic form. I revere for silence, which comes in patches,
as the city relentlessly gurgles with noise and dust.

2) What prompted you to begin writing?

Well! I discovered literature written in Urdu, and other regional languages during my
school days, and I used to read a lot of folkloric fantasy and crime fiction from children’s
perspectives. Gradually, I became exposed to English and European literature.

Romantics struck me and being an adorer of nature Wordsworth captured the earliest
phase of my imaginative vulnerability. The rivers, trees, and birds had a calling for me
until I realized that the parched soul would quench on words. Thus, sheepishly I began
scribbling maudlin verses seeking a cocoon of solace This was a fairly short period of
an impressionistic love for nature. Violence, urban tragedies, and material injustices
provided a callous and more hardened view of nature now environmentally abused.
I have written about my birthplace Lahore with exuberance and nostalgia but have also
written about other cities, especially Europe, therefore my work is informed by an
eclectic embodiment and amendment.

I used to jot a lot of misty-eyed love poems only to destroy them. With time an emotion
that found familiarity with my poetic life was romantic love enshrined in the genre of
Ghazal. Confessedly, a feminine halo grew around me, and the language I employed
also began to reflect this psychological mood. The eponymous figure of the beloved in
ghazal, with all its historical, aesthetic, and erotic might, a treasure yearned for and
pursued, morphed into diverse patterns.

3) Do you have a favorite story or poem you’ve written? What’s it about?

It is difficult for a poet to discriminate with his work. There are many poems that I love to
read again and again and going back to one’s creative effort is an existential need. One
poem that I would love to talk about is “A Ghazal Travels to an English Editor’, originally
published in Planet: The Welsh International, but is also included in my first collection
Lahore, I Am Coming (2017). The poem depicts the prospects of ghazal, a poetic genre,
rooted in the Indian cultural ethos lying in front of an editor of a magazine of English
poetry, rummaging through the pile of submissions. The editor pauses and imagines the
possibility of the symbiosis of East-West aesthetics. For an editor versed in the Western
tradition of poetry, the form of the ghazal is ‘connotatively distanced’, but one that
echoes in ‘tube stations/ in front of an open audience’. Therefore, he decides to publish
the poem, a piece that appreciates the form of ghazal written in free verse. By this
hybrid form, it travels ‘across the English Channel’ navigating geographical and
linguistic barriers thus creating a circle of global admirers.

A recent poem ‘An Occasional Muse’ published in the British magazine Shearsman
which I like to recount because the poem questions and challenges the idea of muse or
inspiration in poetry. Often, we believe that the figure of a muse is a constant inspiration
and an interminable figure but I believe there can be a ‘flimsy’ muse. A person passing
by, a face-extending smile, or a particular color can capture imagination instantly
eviscerating all laws of formalism, Simply, a casual unintended encounter causes
formidable ripples.

4) What is your writing process like?

It’s mysterious. The simple fact is anything can trigger the process. A word, a sound, an
image, a concrete experience, everything around, if captured, cannot escape the trap
laid by language. But, I think my writing process is also capricious. Sometimes, ideas
incubate and, at times they spill ridiculously. I believe I am haunted by phantom
relationships, flashbacks of unknown faces, and an unpredictable connection with time.
I also think my poetic process is strongly space-oriented. For example, Lahore Fort is a
historical place, built by the Mughals, which I visit frequently, and adjacent to it is The
Dancing Girls Bazar. This is a landscape of aesthetic experience, of my childhood,
holding on to a romance with the past. But I also believe in the end poetry is
unobtrusive and nonetheless needs labor of love.

5) Where do you draw inspiration from?

Again, there is no single source of inspiration. I guess everything is connected,
therefore every object and every subject holds some mystery. But reading also helps.
The psychological aftermaths of reading a book, or any information, coming randomly,
awakens the slumbering soul. As I have said earlier, I am fortunate to have dabbled in
literary treasures of varied linguistic and cultural backgrounds therefore I am moved by
all may it be a haiku, a villanelle, a ghazel, a Shakespearean monologue, even so
Nietzschean and Hegelian paradoxes. Nietzsche’s favorite poet was Byron but the
former’s English was non-existent. So, translations also inspire. Thankfully, I have a
moderate knowledge of Arabic. Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry teeming
with the piercings of exilic trauma speaks to me.

6) How many projects do you have planned over the next few years? Tell us about
one.

Currently, I have two projects in the pipeline. I have one manuscript of my
second collection ready. Another is a collection of ghazals written in English.
Lately, I have also written a short story but haven’t sent it for publication.

7) Who is your favorite author / what is your favorite book?

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Among poets Amir Khusrow,
Muhammad Iqbal, Tagore, William Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, and Ted
Hughes.

8) What is one goal you have for your writing future?

More and more poetry.

9) What do you hope readers enjoy most from your work?

I hope the readers admire the magic of language. “Silence’’, if they could identify. Only if
someone would also say what the Irish poet Heaney says that the poet has been able to
keep ‘the wick of self-respect from dying out’.

10) Where can readers learn more about you?

I am on Facebook, and here is my website.