“What the music of the poem needs”: An Interview with Lory Bedikian
by Abraham Kedong Ali
Prairie Schooner Graduate Research Assistant Abraham Kedong Ali recently spoke to Lory Bedikian about her collection Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body, winner of the 2023 Raz/Shumaker Book Prize in Poetry. Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body was published by University of Nebraska Press in 2024.
Abraham Ali: Jagadakeer is such a striking title, both visually and sonically. Can you discuss your process of selecting this word and how you envision it functioning within the collection?
Lory Bedikian: Thank you, yes, it is a beautiful word. The working title of the book was once “Apology to the Body,” however this changed after my father passed away at the end of 2018. This loss affected me deeply and infiltrated how and what I was writing. I began working on the poetic sequence which closes the book, “Jagadakeer: In Remission” and after developing the sections realized that the word “Jagadakeer” had to precede “Apology to the Body.” As I mention in the sequence “Jagadakeer” is a compound word of the Armenian language and means “fate” or “destiny.” It is quite intriguing because “jagad” means forehead and “keer” means letter, so it can be defined several ways: the letters on the forehead or the writing on the forehead, etc. It seemed to be the word that could string this collection together. So much of the work deals with the fate of losing parents, the temporal proximity of their passing, the analyses of how illness at times feels a predestined matter and how even the plight of countries, war, the refugee experience all can be viewed under the microscope of a possible predetermined fate or predestination. The poems sometimes are interrogations of events. Was it decided at birth that one would be diagnosed with a disease? Does a wife follow her husband to life’s end with a sense that it’s her turn to die?
AA: The poem “Ode to Their Leaving” explores war, loss, migration, and intergenerational memory. From your perspective, how do these themes contribute to the broader narrative of exile and historical reckoning in the book?
LB: The book confronts how immigrants come to a new land, new life, and are forced to learn an entirely new way of being. My father was from Lebanon, my mother from Syria, and though we are all of Armenian descent, the places they were raised, Beirut, Aleppo stayed with them, haunted them, informed their moods, influenced their decisions. The poems are ways to excavate their undocumented biographies, their unsaid and unwritten memoirs, while bringing to light the impact their stories had on the daughter. Also, the poems hint at the historical issue of growing up in a patriarchal household, how a race of people being silenced can sometimes be compared to how women have often been silenced. The poems offer a place to acknowledge and examine what it was like growing up aware of political oppression and at the same time the constraints which made young women feel as though they were part of a subordinate group.
AA: One of the most powerful aspects of poetry is the way it inhabits silence—the things left unsaid, the weight of what is missing. How do you think about silence as a poetic tool, and are there moments in the book where you deliberately hold back from saying something?
LB: Absolutely. So often the white space, the shorter line works as a way of performing speechlessness. There are many poems where writing “more” would have suggested that it’s easy to discuss what is happening in that moment. For example, the poem “Fragment” seems like merely a grace note, a short glimpse at mourning, however it was a clipped or curt response to the death of my parents, the mistrust of people and things left to confront or deal with. The speaker even reaches out to tell the spirit of Muriel Rukeyser that she’s afraid to disclose what she really would like to say with “[Muriel, I’m afraid].” In the poem “Flare-Up: Week Eleven, Twelve” the speaker watches the beloved and their children while on a beach and the lines are shorter, measured, controlled. There are questions more than answers. And it is quite deliberate when I write “And who is they?” and instead of answering, the poem then says “Guess who they are” which implies that the speaker either has not been granted this freedom to speak up or has not allowed herself to expose certain truths. Silence is either a shield, a puzzle piece, or a commentary.
AA: In “The Tooth is Dead,” your comparison of tooth loss and the loss of a father is very captivating. The poem hinges on a moment in which the speaker contemplates the language we use in the context of death and grief. How did you arrive at that moment of fixation on language?
LB: My father was always intrigued with language, the languages of the world, learning and embracing the etymology of words and was obsessed with the compound words of the Armenian language. He collected dictionaries, always referred to a thesaurus and started conversations asking people if they knew the meaning of a word or its significance in the bigger scheme of things. It is either genetic or the outcome of his parenting that I have always been fascinated with wordplay and the architecture of poetry. It just seemed so absurd that a tooth could be referred to as “dead” and that a person is said to have “expired” when they die. Sometimes it just begins with one moment, in this case the tooth and then through associative thinking the mind realizes there are connections with teeth and fathers and language and sculptures and it becomes magical. Language suddenly allows us to find resemblances and pathways to thoughts that are attempting to sift through the grieving process.
AA: In poems like “When Your Mother Dies During a Pandemic,” “History,” and “Father dreams of Gibran,” you engage with archival material and family memory, but you also allow for invention and poetic interpretation. How do you balance the role of the poet as both a historian and a storyteller?
LB: It depends on the poem and its voice or purpose. With a poem like “Father dreams of Gibran” I allow myself to play, for example, with the date 1932, mentioning it twice, alluding to the date’s historical and personal significance, but at the same time I tell stories I’ve heard and I invent most of the rest. In this poem, like most of the poems of this book, there is a negotiation and an arrangement made according to the needs of the speaker. The poet can be only a historian, only a storyteller, or both simultaneously. It depends entirely on what the music of the poem needs and if there’s an urgency for one over the other. Lyricism relies on the sounds of a story, the voices in history, whether they are personal or cultural. What I decide to use as a poet will determine if a poem feels like an ode to a moment in history or a monologue which tells a long-forgotten story. When I’m writing poems that engage with familial memory and myths, I know that the poem needs to negotiate and arrange the pieces according to the type of lingual music needed. And, of course, poets are so many things: historians, storytellers, magicians, musicians, archaeologists, architects, etc.
Lory Bedikian’s collection The Book of Lamenting won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Her second book Jagadakeer: Apology to the Body won the 2023 Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize, published September, 2024 from the University of Nebraska Press. Bedikian’s poems received the Neruda Prize for Poetry in the 2022 Nimrod Literary Awards. Her work is included in the anthology Border Lines: Poems of Migration, KNOPF, 2020 and her manuscript-in-progress received a 2021 grant from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.
Abraham Kedong Ali is a master’s student in Creative Writing. He holds a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Jos and an undergraduate degree in English literature from Ahmadu Bello University Zaria. Additionally, he has a postgraduate diploma in education from the National Teachers’ Institute.