A Warm Welcome from The Words: Introducing Sarah Ghazal Ali
by Sarah Tachau ’27
The most recent addition to the English Department faculty, Professor Sarah Ghazal Ali, began teaching her first classes this semester. Specializing in poetry, her courses include ENGL 150: Introduction to Creative Writing and ENGL 280: Crafts of Writing: Poetry; Form and (In)fidelity. Professor Ali is a winner of the Sewanee Poetry Prize, and her work has appeared on Poets.org, The American Poetry Review, Pleiades, and The Kenyon Review, amongst several other publications. Her past year has been monumental, from the release of her debut collection of poetry, Theophanies, a 2022 Alice James Award Editor’s Choice, to the birth of her baby girl. Amidst the turbulence of September, we sat down with Prof. Ali to chat about her adjustment to Macalester and recent creative inspiration.
How’s your first semester at Macalester been so far?
So far so good. My previous experience was at large research universities, so Macalester as a SLAC is very different. I was an undergrad at UC Santa Cruz, and then completed grad school at UMass Amherst, where the student bodies were around 30,000 students. So it’s interesting to come here having this archetype of a student in my head that’s very similar to what I was like as a student, where it felt like my professors didn’t have enough time for me. I framed things coming here like, “I need to encourage students to talk to me, and to not be scared, and to come to office hours.” But because it’s a small liberal arts college, everyone already has that mentality ingrained in them. That’s been refreshing. Students here have surprised me with how engaged and excited they are.
You mentioned the small size of Macalester compared to other schools you’ve taught at, have there been any other adjustments or surprises?
I’m recognizing people much faster than I thought I would. I haven’t learned everyone’s names yet, but it’s been nice to feel an immediate sense of familiarity. I just moved here from California, and for reference, the high school I attended there had a larger student body than Macalester. I’m used to just keeping my head down and making my way through and that’s not how things are here, which I’m loving. I feel like a real person who has some space to breathe and to actually get to know students and colleagues. Also, when I taught at UMass Amherst as a graduate instructor, I was only teaching one class. Now I’m teaching two different classes for the first time, and it has been an interesting exercise resetting my mind between them.
On a personal note, I think the biggest adjustment has been moving away from family because I have a toddler, and both sets of grandparents are back in California. It’s our new normal to do this on our own for a bit and see how it goes, at least until I can convince my family to move out here. But it’s been working out so far.
Is there any activity in your classes this semester that you’re especially excited about?
I’m really excited about Crafts of Writing: Poetry; Form and (In)fidelity, because I only have six students. I have some big ideas about holding class in the Idea Lab to make visual poems and a field trip to the Minneapolis Institute of Art to learn ekphrasis. If there were too many students, it would’ve been difficult to move around logistically, but six students is the perfect amount. I love teaching Intro because almost no one is an English major yet, so it becomes a personal challenge to convince everyone that creative writing matters, even if they don’t want to be an English major or take any other creative writing classes. It’s really exciting to see someone realize in real time, “Oh, this actually isn’t painful… I don’t have to close read a poem to death to understand it.”
Can you share some of these methods of engaging with poetry for people who may not consider themselves poetry fans?
There are two for me that prove pretty useful. The first is to get students out of the close reading mentality and instead into a noticing mentality where the focus is less on, “what does this word mean?” or “what does the poet mean by this line?” but instead “what do you notice about the reaction you’re having to what you just read?” It’s about flipping the experience back to the reader to encourage a practice of noticing. A poem is a finite experience; you’re reading a poem for however long it takes to read that poem, during which time you’re sitting in someone else’s brain. So ask, what was the poet trying to make you experience, in the limited time that they had? What do you feel and why do you think the writer wanted you to feel that way? Framing the conversation like that tends to be more useful. I’m also getting students to see they don’t need to be poets after they take the class, but I want them to make the connection that poetry has value outside of capitalism. We’re constantly being told to consume things to a great, apocalyptic level. Poetry as a practice makes you slow down the way you digest language and sit with each individual word. I want students to make the connection that being able to break language down to its parts is a skill that’s useful for them in every aspect of their life, beyond the classroom, beyond college, and beyond the poems I’m asking them to write.
Are there any creative influences you were consuming over the past year?
What was really exciting this past year was that my first book came out in January, and I got to have a book tour. I spent a lot of time in person with contemporary writers, and I feel like I’ve gotten to know my peers and the ecosystem of writers publishing today a bit better. When I read in New York, the venue paired me with two other writers, one of whom was Diana Khoi Nguyen, who was an influential poet to me when I had just started grad school. It felt full circle to get to read with her, and other writers I had heard of but had never really gotten to know in any formal sense. Poetry feels very alive to me after this past year, because I’ve spent so much time with living writers’ work. I’ve also been reading a lot more fiction; I read Sula by Toni Morrison for the first time, and I can’t believe it took me this long to do so. That book is amazing. I also recently read A Thousand Times Before by Asha Thanki, a speculative novel about the partition of India and Pakistan, which was unique and a great read.
Are there any regional differences you’ve noticed, after moving from California to Minnesota?
The biggest thing for me is the absence of good sushi. I’m really struggling with that! If you like sushi and know of a good place, please tell me. Otherwise, it feels a little unsettling to be away from water, as I haven’t made it out to a lake here yet. I know that once I do I will feel a little more grounded. I grew up on the East Coast, and I have lived on the West Coast for the past twelve years, other than bouncing around for school, so I feel the most like myself near an ocean. I think I need to turn myself into a lake or river person.
Are there any classes you’d like to teach in the future?
In the spring I’m teaching a class on the engine of obsession. So, looking at poets who have published a book that’s exemplary of obsession in a certain way, especially through repetition. How do poets keep returning to the same subject or the same image or the same painting, and just endlessly rewrite it, while keeping it fresh and alive? I love repetition, so it’s an opportunity to convince other people to love repetition, too. I’m also hoping maybe next year, or another year, to teach a class in a similar vein, but instead looking at revision as a practice and revising the same piece over and over again. The idea is that students will come in, write one draft of a poem, and then we’ll spend the whole semester returning to it, every week rewriting that one poem, and seeing what happens at the end of the semester. Do you end up with 15 completely different versions of that poem? Does it end up being a sequence of some kind? Are you building a larger narrative? What happens when you keep going back to something and saying, “actually, I’m not interested in finishing it. I’m interested in living in this world, and just seeing what comes out of that experiment.”
The Words would like to thank Prof. Ali for taking the time to chat! English students and faculty are encouraged to attend her belated book release party and celebration of Theophanies on Tuesday, October 22, from 5:00-6:00pm at the Briggs House.