How Fazza's poetry changed after he became a father — the shift nobody noticed

[00:00:00]There is a moment in every poet's life if they become a parent when the poetry changes. Not in an obvious way. Not like they suddenly start writing children's books or dropping the complexity that made them interesting.

[00:00:15]Something subtle than that.

[00:00:17]A shift in what the poems are reaching toward, in what they consider worth writing about. In the emotional register underneath the words. Faza had that moment. [clears throat] And almost nobody noticed because when you're following his story for the relationship drama, the poems about shaker shaker, complicated marriages, the viral moments, you can miss the other layer entirely.

[00:00:41]The layer where a man who has spent his entire adult life writing about longing and loss and love just out of reach suddenly starts writing about something completely different, presence. That's what fatherhood did to his poetry. It introduced presence into a body of work that had been almost entirely about absence. And today that's what we're looking at.

[00:01:07]To understand the shift, you first need to feel the baseline. Faza's poetry before he became a father is almost entirely oriented toward what is not there. The person just out of reach. The connection that can't be fully had. The love that persists despite or maybe because of its inability to resolve cleanly. Even his poems about the desert, about horses, about the landscape of the Emirates, they carry that quality, a reaching, a looking toward. A man who is always in some fundamental way looking at something on the horizon that hasn't arrived yet. The emotional grammar of pre-fatherhood Faza is future tense and absence tense.

[00:01:51]I want, I miss, I reach, I long.

[00:01:54]Beautiful writing, genuine feeling, but oriented entirely outward and forward toward something not yet possessed. And then his children arrived. And for the first time in his poetic life, something was simply there, not longed for, not out of reach, just present, warm, his.

[00:02:12]So, what exactly changed? Let me be specific.

[00:02:16]Because I don't want to just say he started writing about his kids, that's too vague. The shift happened in four specific ways. The tense changed.

[00:02:26]Pre-fatherhood poems, future tense, conditional tense, the tense of longing.

[00:02:31]I would, if only, one day.

[00:02:34]Post-fatherhood poems about his children, present tense.

[00:02:37]Simple, declarative present tense.

[00:02:40]You laugh. You grab my hand. You are here. Present tense is the tense of possession, of having, of now.

[00:02:47]That's new in his work. The scale changed. His pre-fatherhood work reaches toward enormous things. The scale of love and loss and longing tends toward the epic, desert distances, horizons, the infinite sky. His fatherhood poems are small, deliberately, beautifully small. A small hand, a laugh in a specific room.

[00:03:08]A child falling asleep on a specific shoulder. He learned to write small, which for a poet who had always written large, that's a significant development.

[00:03:18]The direction changed.

[00:03:20]Pre-fatherhood, his poems reach outward toward someone else, toward a connection that exists at a distance.

[00:03:26]Post-fatherhood, some of his poems turn inward, or rather, they look down at the small person beside him, at his own role, at what he is to someone who needs him to be something. That's a new angle in his work, and it humanizes him completely. Let me show you what I mean with actual examples. Here is a poem from before, from the longing period, The Familiar Father.

[00:03:52]Distance is not measured in miles.

[00:03:55]It is measured in the specific quiet of a room where you are not. I have been measuring that quiet for longer than I want to admit. That's the father everyone knows. Absence, distance, longing. Now here, from after his children arrived, you don't know yet how loud you are.

[00:04:14]You laugh without planning it. You fall asleep mid-sentence, and the sentence doesn't matter, and nothing has ever mattered less, and I have never been so glad to be in a room. Feel the difference. I have never been so glad to be in a room.

[00:04:30]That is not the man who writes about empty rooms and measured distance. That is a man who is for the first time in his poetic life completely and joyfully located in a room with a child who laughs too loud and falls asleep mid-sentence. Present tense, present place, present person. That's the shift.

[00:04:50]So, why did nobody notice this shift? I think the answer is pretty simple.

[00:04:55]Because everyone was watching the other story. The marriage drama, the viral poem, the departure, the reconciliation attempts, the big public emotional events that generated enormous amounts of content and conversation and analysis.

[00:05:11]The fatherhood poems were just there, posted occasionally, appreciated by his followers, liked and commented on, but not placed in any larger frame, not connected to the evolution of his creative voice.

[00:05:26]Because when you're following a a love story, you're not looking for a different kind of love.

[00:05:32]You're looking for the romantic love, the complicated love, the love that has drama and distance and beautiful grief attached to it. The love that is simply a father glad to be in a room doesn't fit that frame, so it got overlooked.

[00:05:48]Which is a shame, because it might be some of his most important work.

[00:05:53]Here's the most interesting question about all of this.

[00:05:56]Did fatherhood change the longing? Did having children, having this experience of simple, present, uncomplicated love, did that shift the romantic grief at all?

[00:06:07]And the honest answer is partially, in some ways.

[00:06:11]Not completely, because the longing poems didn't stop after his children arrived. They coexisted. The same feed that had I have never been so glad to be in a room also had the midnight posts and the desert photos and the the poems about distance and absence. Both existed simultaneously.

[00:06:30]Which actually tells you something important about how emotional life works.

[00:06:36]Having something fully Having a love that is simply present and real and uncomplicated doesn't automatically dissolve the longing for something else.

[00:06:47]Doesn't automatically heal the grief for what you couldn't fully have.

[00:06:53]The two things live alongside each other. The gladness to be in a room with his child and the 2:00 a.m. poem about the person just out of reach. Both real.

[00:07:03]Both his. Both happening in the same life. That's not contradiction. That's just being human.

[00:07:11]With more than one thing going on at once. So, what do the fatherhood poems tell us about him that the romantic poems don't?

[00:07:19]They tell us he's capable of presence.

[00:07:22]And I know that sounds like a small thing, but given what the romantic poems suggest, the perpetual reaching, the love that exists at a distance, the divided attention, the fatherhood poems are genuinely significant counter evidence.

[00:07:38]He can be present. He knows how to be in a room fully when the person in the room needs him to be there. When it's a child who fell asleep mid-sentence, he's there.

[00:07:48]Which means the absence in the marriage wasn't inability. It was division. He was divided between what was and what he wished could be, between his present life and a connection from his past that never fully repeats with him.

[00:08:04]But with his no division, they don't require him to choose between them and someone else. They just require him to be there.

[00:08:14]And he is completely, joyfully, present tense there. I want to end today on something that I think deserves to be said clearly. Of everything we've covered in this series, the grief and the longing and the complicated marriages and the failed reconciliation attempts and all of it, the fatherhood poems are the most hopeful thing.

[00:08:38]Not because they resolved the romantic story. They don't. But because they show that inside a man who has been oriented toward absence for his entire creative life, there is a capacity for presence that is genuine and full and not divided. His children got that version of him.

[00:08:58]The version that laughs at a child who laughs too loud, that notices a child falling asleep mid-sentence and thinks nothing has ever mattered less and I have never been so glad that father exists alongside all the other versions we've covered. And that to me is worth noticing.

[00:09:17]The shift nobody noticed might be those most important shift of all. How Fado's poetry changed after he became a father.

[00:09:24]The tense changed. The scale changed.

[00:09:27]The direction changed. And somewhere inside a body of work built built almost entirely on longing and absence, a man learned to write about being glad to be in a room.

[00:09:39]That's the shift nobody noticed. And it might be the best thing he's ever written.

[00:09:44]If this gave you a new way of reading him, share it. Subscribe if you're not already here.

[00:09:50]See you in the next one.

[00:09:52]My ideal