Ahsen Jillani
By Ahsen Jillani
“You have an Ivy League college, Berkeley, Southern Cal, University of Virginia here,” my dad’s secretary told me on the phone. “It is time to transfer.” I paused for a minute. “But I have a girlfriend,” I said softly. That ended the conversation. Karen left, of course, but I continued to spin out of control at discos with the prejudices of the Iran hostage crisis still lingering in the early days of the Reagan era.
The college newspaper was the only salvation where I trained or influenced many young people who went on to have careers in publishing, literature, and journalism.
I landed a nice white-collar position as the editor of a financial/legal paper locally. Then I quit it all and followed my first wife to Virginia because her lesser paying job demanded an immediate transfer.
Three years later, I returned divorced and remarried working blue collar in a printing company because the George H.W. Bush economy hadn’t yet experienced the trickle down from the Reagan yuppie and isolationist culture.
This set the stage for malaise that felt more like being dunked in a jar of mayonnaise. Ignorance is always our friend and often a bedfellow of stupidity. “Hey, I work for a printer. I can start a literary magazine.” I was too naïve to know that art had nothing to do with reality at any level. I kind of started a publication called The Charlotte Poetry Review, with zero money and zero plans, but a hefty dose of irrational exuberance.
This venture was a lot like jumping out of the bushes in a marathon near the last mile and acting like you are about to win it all.
There actually was a literary community here in Charlotte but they were mostly dormant since the 1970s. Plenty of groups got together and workshopped their writings but nothing was mainstream. CPR and the mother company, Sandstone Publishing, were just plain weird. The magazine was free because we insisted that local merchants advertise with us, and we put out a very expensive monthly money-pit and distributed 1,000 copies around artsy spots around town.
Soon the CPR readings exploded on the scene and local and regional poets were featured at smoked-filled pubs and coffee shops to listen to the winners of our twice-yearly poetry contests.
Soon, we announced a book publishing venture that got listed in top national magazines and became one of the biggest contests nationally for a few years.
Shoeboxes full of mail came daily, and while I worked 14 hours shifts trying to pay the rent and for my newest addiction, literature, my wife processed the material with an infant daughter in tow.
We featured local visual artists on the covers so the readings and events spread to art galleries, bookstores and ultimately we were proclaimed responsible for a renaissance in literature. Our books and magazines were being sold in national box stores. The venture, however, was hemorrhaging money, both with the magazine and the book publishing disasters. Slowly, I started to be embraced by the underbelly of the art world.
I got cynical as the boss started garnishing my already dismal wages to pay for printing the books. What I was getting instead were aggressive writers who thought they could make the NY Times Bestsellers List if they only had 5,000 books in the inventory.
Academics wanted to give me admissions to their colleges with lucrative teaching arrangements on the side. Other publishers came to events to read their works and told me to submit anything I wanted to their magazines or a full manuscript for a book.
The quid pro quo hints finally made me realize that I was now in the large intestine of the beast. This was not dog eat dog – this was tiger eat chihuahua (with me being the chihuahua). So, five years out, I realized that this idealistic dream I had was a lie. You agreed to move in those circles and fit into the wine and cheese gatherings listening to mediocre poetry and clapping loudly, or they chewed you up and spit you out in the cheap merlot glass.
The philosophical side of the business of art was bothering me more and more as well. I somehow always saw the art of creation as a solitary endeavor. You didn’t unfurl a canvas or sit in front of a blank sheet of paper and think, “Let’s see… what does the audience want according to current trends?” Art to me was an obsession and not a social event. It changed you internally. It calmed and tamed the demons. It was not about how many books you sold or how much your most recent painting went for.”
Today, I just write. These poems below the Saathee readers are the first to read. They simply helped me pull together and untie the knots that have been tying my feet for years.
I’m no Van Gogh or Coleridge – people who were constantly haunted; people who couldn’t quite finish – and just call it a day…
TREE
Time reads differently, when I put the chainsaw
Down, rest on the stump that last connected life
To dirt, and touch this fresh-cut clockface of pine,
The terrifying but now peaceful foot of a fallen
Bull elephant, still returning to earth, as it knew,
As it promised in the hushed still night, in the storm,
In the season of love; in the season of pain.
Yesterday is just a story, the light ring of spring
The dark circle of sleep, and here, where my eye
Touches, mysteriously, no spring … no spring.
I’m counting backwards. I’m counting years.
“I loved you once. But I was stupid then.”
“You should walk to increase circulation.”
“Quit drinking and meditate more.”
Am I firewood, am I furniture?
Is an insensate termite or a consumed lover
Returning me home? It is maybe spring
I am reading the time of a downed dinosaur
In a dead forest, sawdust at my feet.
STORM
In this listless storm
Warm fog
A squirrel burying an acorn
Earlier a lone gray fox
The doe – perhaps widowed – with a fawn
Under that ligustrum shrub
Where a frantic bird screams
In blackness all and every night
Did I turn off the stove?
Is my account overdrawn?
After removing bread and blackberries
Is the car trunk still open as drizzle starts?
Did I ever love? Did I ever love?
I can’t remember.
Ahsen Jillani a former editor and publisher, is originally from Islamabad, Pakistan, and now lives in Mint Hill, NC. He owns Must Media, a PR firm focused on political and corporate clients. Contact: aj@must-media.com.
