I met Sholeh this winter, after being enrolled in her class for only two weeks. I, unfortunately, dropped the class due to scheduling issues, however in my brief time in her class I was thoroughly delighted by her vibrant presence in the classroom. Sholeh performed and demonstrated techniques of performance and of reading poetry for our class. When I had the immense privilege of seeing her read at Beyond Baroque this weekend, it did not come as a surprise to me that , her performance was eloquent in all of the same ways I remember being taken away by in class.
Sholeh read from her collection Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths. Her collection narrows in on themes of girlhood, womanhood, immigration, Sholeh’s Iranian identity, romance, and language. I had known Sholeh was well known as a poetry translator because of work she had us do in class. Additionally, I knew this because I was familiar with her her translation “Conference of the Birds,” which she read from over the weekend as well. In her collection, Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths, (which I picked up after the reading) themes of language, knowing language, and grappling with being bilingual were consistently at the forefront. Sholeh dealt with these ideas in subtle and nuanced ways, which were powerful in exposing ties language has to intimacy and intimate relationships, such as in her poem “Matrimony”:
The sheer curtain she hangs between
two open windows becomes
the tongue of the wind–
a dialogue between landscapes
But the windows close,
and the curtain falls
into an unbreakable hush. (7)
Though the title suggests, quite literally a “Matrimony,” or marriage, the focus of the poem proved to be around the “curtain” or “tongue” which fosters a dialogue between two “landscapes.” I found that the tension was clearly announced by the liminal, border-space between the two landscapes: the domestic and abroad, and the indoor and outdoor, which could point to the tension between Sholeh’s home in Iran and her experience living in the United States. The tension of living in the US as an Iranian woman repeatedly surfaces throughout Sholeh’s collection. I found this tension to be most explicit in her poem titled “#5” where a woman explicitly calls herself an “alien”
#5
They are drinking scotch on Sunset Blvd.,
a block from the Scientology church,
the tourist trinket shops, and the sex parlors.
She tells him she’s an alien, lifts her arm to show her scar,
The way she flashes her passport at immigration. (25, excerpt)
The poem features well-known LA sites, such as “Sunset Blvd.” and the “Scientology church,” revealing that the scene indeed takes place in the US. When “she” calls herself an Alien, the woman says this to a man who is presumably American. Later in the poem the American man proceeds to run his “finger along [her] carved hairline/ and [whisper], yes, yes” (25). The American man confirms that woman is “alien” to himself, and, collaterally, the US. Sholeh merges the tension of being in a country where she is labeled “other” as interlocked with the tension in romance, seduction, and sex. In “Matrimony” Sholeh highlights tension in being bilingual, or speaking two languages which eventually succumbs to a “hush.” I understood the focus of this poem to be a severing of two different languages from one another, severing a bilingual tongue and thereby confining it to only one language. Sholeh ties her experiences of being intimate with language to widely viewed conceptions of intimacy, such as marriage, highlighting how her collection asserts and vouches for the intimacy of language.