Anis Shivani discusses his poem, “On Where I Grew Up,” published in the Spring/Fall 2005 issue of Flyway:
Why can’t I write about medieval Anatolia, or contemporary Greece or India or Iran, without having experienced those places personally? Why should we relegate ourselves to ethnic and regional ghettoes? After not having been to a place for a while, revisiting it actually dulls its position in the vibrant beehive of imaginative transformation. Natasha Tretheway helped me with this poem and asked if I knew that the Biloxi palms were really as desultory — because stunted and awkwardly placed — as I’d described them? I’d never been to Mississippi at that point. But even if imagination doesn’t confirm experience, why should that be a problem? The Moscow of Bulgakov’s imagination, the Berlin of Isherwood’s, the Oxford of Powell’s, these might only be reflections of heavy bouts of nostalgia, exotic in the most extreme sense of the word. But what’s wrong with that?
