Avia Tadmor + Farnaz Fatemi on The Hive Poetry Collective
An Interview with Avia Tadmor on “Song in Tammuz” by Sally Bliumis-Dunn
Sally: What sorts of hungers/questions did you imagine the language of poetry might answer?
Avia: I’ve been continuously fascinated by how language allows us to chart the perimeters of the questions hovering about our lives. Perhaps these are questions we didn’t know we could ask– having been taught not to. Or perhaps we’ve been taught to ask different questions, to which there are more readily available and widely accepted answers. And so the same way that “a poem often knows more than the poet,” for me, one of the great gratifications of spending time in language has been the questions it has enabled me to arrive at, despite the discomfort at times. For me, these questions are always evolving, but throughout the years, many of them have revolved around the notions of home, longing, displacement, love, and distance.
