Tonal Drawings Written in Poetic Form? - An Interview with Asili Ya Nadhiri

Abstract

Asili Ya Nadhiri is a representative of contemporary African American avant-garde poet. In the past years, he has been experimenting with "Tonal Drawings Written in Poetic Form," a new genre based on Nadhiri's sustained study and thinking about music, human speech, visual arts, sciences, and human spirituality, which offers a response to the sound poetics of African American poetry and casts a new light on the form and its evolution of poetry in the era of information technology. Professor Wang Zuyou, entrusted by Foreign Literature Studies, during his visit in the United States interviewed Nadhiri. According to Nadhiri in this interview, the core value of his creation lies in that any human production that does not encourage a greater morality is of minimal benefit to humanity, to fulfill which he appeal to a conceptual blending of music and drawing (visual art) by means of imitating jazz and its sense of time or tempo, and using nonstandard English spelling to achieve a different sense of sound.