Our new Poet-In-Residence
Every now and then we find a voice that sings (or screams) to us. Those voices that show us something new - whether beautiful or repulsive - voices from out there that somehow resonate deeply. Voices we just 'get'. When that happens we graciously ask that they join us for a time. To live and scream along with us. These fellow thinkers and dreamers are our Poets-In-Residence. And today it's our great pleasure to bring you Ameer Azad.
We met Ameer at a poetry event a few months back and were immediately struck by his amiable, quiet and reserved nature. Polite, welcoming, warm. When he got on stage, something altogether different broke free - a poet of dark delight. Gooey, brutal words that scraped and grated like Bukowski's first hack-up of the morning.
After listening to Ameer perform, we checked out his Instagram and were thrilled to see that he creates 'nasty' little illustrations to accompany his potent work. We say 'nasty' in the best possible way - similar to his words, his drawings evoke feeling of anger and unease. They are wild, weird scratchings and they are accompanied by a deep, yet harsh voice. Like a barfly baritone. This combination creates something 'more' - a persona, and a new world which that oddity inhabits. It breaks out of Instagram, it breaks out of our reality... it's just off, out there, someplace else and we want to be there like we want to be in a horror film.
We were sideswiped by Ameer's talent, so we had to bag him for our very own. At least for a little while. But what a while that will be, as we bring you a curated selection of Ameer's brilliant work over the coming weeks.
And so, with great pleasure, we give you Ameer Azad...
THE SECRET FATE OF ALL LIFE
Oh child of noble family
Listen without distraction
There are Mustangs
doing donuts
on the dancefloor
Beside 30ft sound systems
arcade machines
Macho men
reach for metallic mini’s
in cages
convulsing secret mosh pits
Concussing forehead to forehead amid
Curb stompers
Crab walkers
Insurance agents
Seizing neon skin spanning the airtight club
under the influence of intense desire
Enacting every degeneracy conceived by the brain
Hobnail boots squashing faces!
Platform heels squashing faces!
Both naked and deranged
Red light pins, moving their hearts
to violence mode
Drawing from a hotbed of intense jealousy
A substance too potent for human minds
Where children are born
and raised
and buried
Commercialised cannibalism
Quenching the mouths of older things
Facial muscles mimicking the last guy
Involuntary expressions via random stimuli
Toting inverted mandalas
Repeating the same phrase over and over
At the furthest height of their voices:
“THE SECRET FATE OF ALL LIFE.”
Wasn't that something else? But it doesn't end there...at HQ, we're not people to let a good opportunity for a natter pass us by, so we managed to sweat some extra content in the form of an interview below. So let's hand it back over...
Ameer, welcome to TheNeverZine and thank you for being our Poet-In-Residence. We'll start as we always do... may you please tell us about your creative journey?
Well, I began seriously writing around the age of 18. I had an interest before but I was such a lazy bum I never followed it up. One of the reasons was that I watched a bunch of videos by authors on how to write a novel - tips and tricks and all that. I didn’t know how, so I wanted to find out. There were all these rules about how to outline or express characters and themes, it was all too stuffy. But then, in school I heard about Jack Kerouac and the other beatnik authors who, while understanding the general rules of writing and language in a classical sense, broke it down and messed around with it. It made writing actually seem fun and not a drag that these other people were telling me. I was able to see writing as an incredibly wide spectrum and opened my eyes to people like James Joyce - the most famous destroyer of tradition.
The struggle that every first time writer has is confusion on what to write about. I thought about crime, fantasy, surrealism but all of the stories I came up with fell flat. However, I have a love for dark comedy: Trainspotting, In Bruges, the Coen Brothers’ movies, and growing up, both my parents had a very acerbic, dark sense of humour which was passed down to me. So, since that came fairly naturally to me, I decided to start off with that. But I still didn’t have a story! Another thing is that one of those pesky writing rules stated that you should avoid writing directly about your own life, which is quite ironic due to the old saying that all writers are writing about themselves. It wasn’t until I discovered the Japanese author Osamu Dazai, famous for the I-novel genre, which is autofiction in a way, where I found the gold in that. He was a deeply depressed, destructive person and wrote in a way that was unsparing about his life and his flaws in a very matter of fact, deadpan manner and I hadn’t seen anything like it. The last thing I wanted to do was go on about what an interesting person I think I am; writing about myself was another barrier for me. But seeing his writing, I began to understand this unique mechanism for exploring life through writing that was almost cruelly honest. A gory, messy operation. All autobiographical fiction is navel gazing in some way, no matter the subject matter. The key, I learned, was to keep strictly to writing what was ‘true’, and must always have a genuine intention. If I find that it becomes self indulgent, in both fiction and poetry, I delete the line. And that has been my philosophy going forward. For me to write anything of remote value (to me), it requires a balance of: stupidity, humility and arrogance. Only then do I feel proud of my work.
We find your poems sticky and gooey, yet coarse and violent… do you seek to inspire these feelings in others? How are you considering audience and reaction when you write?
Yes, I tend to elicit raised eyebrows and awkward looks at open mics. I can’t help it really, it’s just what comes to mind! The last thing I want to do is make people comfortable (in writing). The themes I commonly explore are mental health, violence, fear and sinister methods of control. You see, I had spent a good deal of time in mental hospitals in my late teens so I saw these things firsthand. I get quite sick and tired of the easy messages in a lot of contemporary writing about ‘how I saw the light through the tunnel’. That is for the lucky people, (of which I am). Most of the time I have seen people go through a tunnel and smack right up against a brick wall. Many, many, many people simplify and ignore that elephant, which I personally find disgusting and almost an act of cruelty against such people and experiences. It doesn’t mean being down in the dumps all day either, I am no nihilist. So with my poems, I wish to entrench people in the experiences of doom, because doom is a reality and we must, as humans, understand it beyond a platitude or clinical lens. I’m here for the losers, the scum of the earth.
Another reason for pursuing these themes is to engage the audience almost on a somatic level, sometimes more than the intellectual. I find in physical, gut reactions, the feeling of being contained in a vice about to pop, provides a supplement to a basic analysis and gets closer to what I’m trying to say. Chuck Palahniuk said he had audience members vomiting at one of his readings. To be able to elicit that reaction, from a down to earth place, is something I aspire to.
As I said before, I never want to push the boundary unjustly, to put it there for the sake of it, so that would be my only consideration for the audience. Otherwise it’s open season.
How do you piece together the written word, the illustration and the audio performance in your Instagram posts? Are you thinking of the aural and the visual alongside the text or do you work to a primary input and then hand it over to the next?
Whatever works at the time. Sometimes the words influence the picture or the other way around. The cadence in my performance mostly comes after it’s written, and then I readjust the writing to suit the aural rhythm derived from that.
Is your work reactions or interpretations of past experiences and observations or do you take flight into imagination. Are you looking inward, or outward?
A good bit of both. In poems specifically, I communicate my subjective experience through exaggeration and absurdity, trying to create a cartoonish or even juvenile imagery. So, I’ll try to think both ways, which is quite freeing in comparison to writing fiction. The filter [from experience to interpretation] usually starts with a strong reaction to something, usually one I find difficult to comprehend. But other times it’s just from a line that pops into my head on the bus.
Do you set aside time to create, or can you get into the required head-space as and when inspiration or opportunity arrives?
I have to set aside time! Writing isn’t any more special than any other type of work, so it is work, really. And like everything in life, it’s a bloody chore but I do it anyway for some reason.
Is it for you, or for an audience?
Both again. If you’re writing so you can show people, published or not, then it’s for an audience. What I am communicating is of course subjective to me, but everyone wants to write something of quality, so I have to keep the audience in mind.
Where does it come from and what inspires you?
I’ll try to say this without pretension. It comes from feelings of great pain. And I guess I am inspired by the contradictions within the people I interact with day to day. And the things they are trying to hide.
Who or what have been great influences on your work, outside of your chosen medium
Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground.
Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Isabelle Adjani.
Malcolm X.
Carl Jung.
Friedrich Nietzsche.
Spike Lee.
Julia Ducornau.
Your voice – was it there from the start, or is it an ongoing quest to discover and define it?
Growing up me and my friends did prank calls with different characters we made up, so I enjoyed playing with voices, seeing how voice actors completely changed themselves into something utterly different to them. I have a bit of a background in public speaking, and the general narrating voice I use is from that. I had to hone that over a long while.
How can art help us?
James Baldwin explains it better than me:
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”
Has your art positively helped your mental health in any way?
A bit like I said before, me being drawn to writing is the same as someone being drawn to maths or stamp collecting. It gives me a purpose, you’re accomplishing something and purpose is what gets you out of the dirt, right?
What advice would you give to anyone out there who is starting out on their poetry journey
Stupidity. Humility. Arrogance.
And that's that. Introductions done. You've had a glimpse at this artist and learned a little more about his process. We will be bringing you a curated selection of Ameer's work over the coming weeks. We also invite you to follow him on his Instagram. So smash the button below.
We're constantly on the look out for new artists, creatives and initiatives to feature in TheNeverZine - so if you are, or know someone who is going their own way and doing their own thing on their own terms and would be a good fit to feature please hit that button below and get in contact. By talking to each other, and sharing our journeys, ideas and insights on creativity, art, mental health and resilience we can all create, share and thrive together. Nice thought that.
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