Interview With Imran Boe Khan – THE IMPORTANCE OF NOTICING

Imran Boe Khan is an amazing writer and poet. His creative works has been anthologized in writing for peace. He was nominated for the 2019 best of the Net Award for poetry (Best of the Net Anthology works that promotes the diverse, and growing collection of voices who are publishing their work online, a venue) and a winner of the Thomas Hardy Prize. Some of his writings and poems have been published in The Rumpus, FRiGG, Maudlin House, Heavy Feather Review, Juked, The Lake and many others. I had this amazing interaction with him sometime last year. It was so inspiring, insightful and educative. I do hope you enjoy it.

Senyo Inspires: Welcome to my blog and am glad we are able to do this together. To start with, please tell us a little bit about yourself and the work you do?

Khan: Thank you so much for having me. I’m a proud father, husband, poet and academic. If you ask my little boy what I am, he’d also tell you I am a magician and part-time horse.

Senyo Inspires: Does that mean you do poetry and writing as a full time vocation.

Khan: Yes. I’ve been doing this full-time for around 18 months. Not all publications pay, so it has been difficult. But my income is topped up by lecturing and teaching. My wife has shown me so much patience, she’s a constant and wonderful part of this journey.

Senyo Inspires: wow! That’s great, to know you have a very supportive wife. So why poetry and writing. How did this journey begin?

Khan: The journey began when my year-6 English teacher told each pupil in my class to write a simile and present it to our peers. After I presented mine, he made such a big deal of what I’d come up with that it made me want to write more. Since adolescence, I’ve had to write, or at least be creative, for the sake of my mental health. I wrote poetry as a means to self-mastery when I was anxious, manic or needing to deal with an addiction. I used the rhythm of poetry to force my mind away from damaging thoughts. But, in the last two years, I have found peace in poetry at the same time as finding peace in my faith. I am very interested in how religion and culture influence people creatively and I’ve certainly seen my creativity change and develop in line with my faith.

Senyo Inspires: I suppose the teacher really so something great inside of you. Thank God for teachers like him. If you don’t mind, can you please explain vividly when you say “I wrote poetry as a means to self-mastery when I was anxious, manic or needing to deal with an addiction? I used the rhythm of poetry to force my mind away from these things’. And when you say I have found peace, how has poetry helped you find peace.

Khan: I wouldn’t say writing poetry brings me spiritual peace, but it does help me bring order to my brain. I’ve been experiencing the manic and low phases of bipolar disorder since I was a kid, and sometimes my mind can thrash around in places I don’t want it to. When this happens, I think up a rhythm and concentrate on it until there is nothing else. Then, I put words to it and often the rhythm changes but, by then, I’m in a better place mentally and I can turn my inward ruminations into a dialogue between myself and the world at large.

Senyo Inspires: You seem to talk a lot about your faith. Why is that? And how has your faith/religion shaped and influenced your life and poetry?

Khan: The skeleton underneath the flesh of my poems tends to be a composite of my beliefs about God. I was agnostic up until a year or so ago, and spent my life building a confused and troubled image of God. Then, a year ago, the weight of my absence of faith gave way to a quiet gratitude, albeit one that still has some dark spots. This has all fed into my poems, in one way or another. In life, my faith has helped me find peace in what my brain doesn’t have the knowledge to map out, things that used to cause anger and bitterness.

Senyo Inspires: this must have been a tough experience for you. Thanks for sharing. So are there religious symbols that frequently occur in your poetry?

Khan: I would say light and darkness are reoccurring symbols. The dualism in St John’s Gospel has been a major influence in my writing.

Senyo Inspires: So, how has religion change in poetry over the years?

Khan: This is a really interesting question. I’ve been struck by the prominence of religious spoken word poetry on YouTube in recent years. The format of spoken word seems particularly suited to confessional poetry, and poems that are more explicitly personal. YouTube has been a key avenue of expression for this kind of poetry.

Senyo Inspires: Are there any religious poets or poets in general you look up to?

Khan: I don’t find myself searching specifically for religious poetry, although a very dear friend of mine, who happens to be a priest, lent me some books of religious poetry recently. I haven’t found time to read them as of yet. I really ought to read more –I tend to read one book a day but that’s always my three year old son’s bedtime story and he favors stories about ‘Sir Charlie Stinky Socks’ over religious poetry. Perhaps that will change when he is four. The poets that have influenced me the most are Charles Simic and Robert Frost.

Senyo Inspires: Why them? Anything special about them and how have you learned from them and how have they influence your writing?

Khan: I’ve always been stuck by the amount of leverage these poets are able to pull from particular lines, and how they sustain the most wonderfully strange and powerful images.

Senyo Inspires: So how does poetry help you connect to God?

Khan: Poetry allows me to meditate on particular words, images and ideas floating in my head. Ideas around God have been constant in my life, so I often myself trying to reconcile them within my poems. In this way, poetry helps me to consider my own version of spiritual faith.

Senyo Inspires: In three or four words, how would you describe this journey?

Khan: Gosh, three or four words is tricky. I would say ‘sobering, frustrating and meaningful.

Senyo Inspires: Really ! Frustrating? I’m thinking you enjoy writing poetry. So how has this been frustrating and how do you deal with it?

Khan: I’m at my most peaceful when I’m writing poetry, but the practical challenge of earning an income from it can be demanding. Along this journey, I’ve done a number of jobs my sanity isn’t suited to, although the path has become clearer in recent months. More recently, I’ve earned money from the odd lecture, which has helped. During this time, my wife has been wonderfully patient and understanding, which makes dealing with it much easier. If there is any difficulty remaining, cake normally sorts it out.

Senyo Inspires: Over the years, what is the greatest lesson poetry has taught you?

Khan: The importance of noticing. Sometimes, in my younger days I walked past odd scenes and was struck by how funny and surreal they were. But, it would only be much later that I’d be drawn to the tragedy within those scenes. Comedy and tragedy are often not far apart. One of my poems, ‘Witness to Marriage’, speaks of an elderly woman pinning her old wedding dress to the ceiling of a crowded theatre hall during the recent royal wedding celebrations in England. At first, the scene was funny to me but later, having thought about where that dress had been for forty years, it struck me as very poignant and sombre.

Senyo Inspires: What’s in the future for Imran Boe Khan?

Khan: I’ve been talking to publishers with regards to having a collection published in 2020. Aside from that, I am writing a rap song with my little girl, which we are going to perform to my wife sometime in the New Year. I believe there may be a harmonica solo at some stage, once I have learned to play one.

Senyo Inspires: That’s great. We look forward to that. Final words and what advice would you give to young and upcoming writers and poets who aspire to be on this same journey you are on?

Khan: If you are fortunate enough to find someone who is understanding of your need to write, is willing to read your most self-indulgent and painful work and give you the time to write more of it, and who has stuck by you when your family are telling you to get a real job, marry that person if you haven’t done so already.

Senyo Inspires: Ha! I can tell and feel this one is really coming from the heart. Thanks for the time
Khan, and also for sharing all these amazing stuffs about poetry with us. It has been a learning and pleasant interaction. I’m sure many will be inspired, and hopefully we can do this again over a glass of champagne for winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in the near future.

Khan: I’ve enjoyed speaking with you very much. Ha-ha, I hear it’s bad luck to drink champagne after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, perhaps it would be better for us to meet and drink after I win an Oscar for my hard-hitting portrayal of life as an eighteenth century baker who becomes convinced he is a Siamese cat. I’ll purchase the champagne now.

Senyo Inspires: Ok, that would still be awesome. Thank you for your time again and wish you loads of success.

You should visit Khan’s Facebook Page to read some of his works: https://www.facebook.com/ImranBoeKhan/