An Interview with Kaveh Akbar
Our Editor-in-Chief spoke with Kaveh Akbar over the phone in May, just before the release of Akbar’s anticipated and already critically-acclaimed 2nd full-length collection, Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf). Akbar had recently returned from a visit with friends in Yosemite National Park, where one bee in particular was so fond of the poet it flew into his ear! Sweetness and volatility contend in many of Akbar’s poems, which grapple with the effects of colonialism, empire, and addictions, while also pursuing ways of embodying faith and love.
In addition to Pilgrim Bell, Akbar is the author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, 2017; Penguin UK, 2018). He is also the author of a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry, 2017). Kaveh is the recipient of the Levis Reading Prize, Pushcart Prize, Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Kaveh is the founding editor of Divedapper, a home for interviews with major voices in contemporary poetry. With Sarah Kay and Claire Schwartz, he writes a weekly column for the Paris Review called "Poetry RX." Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson. His poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, PBS NewsHour, The New Republic, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, and elsewhere.
Jason Myers: Can you tell us about your spiritual life, however you might speak of it?
Kaveh Akbar: I spent the last month fasting. I think I overdid it a little this morning coming out of the fast. Ordinarily caffeine is a load-bearing pillar of my daily life and I have been without it for the last month, so this morning I had a double espresso and then a red bull.
I was raised Muslim but there’s a way in which when you say that people assume you came out of the womb holding a Quran, with a full beard. My family was pretty far on the secular side of Islam. We prayed, we didn’t fast when I was growing up. Sometimes we would spend a day eating very little. My mom ate pepperoni on her pizza. It was as interesting to me as church is to a kid who only goes on Easter.
I went through my fairly well-documented going-throughs—hitting a pretty low bottom as an alcoholic addict—and in the process of getting sober I began to reconnect—I don’t even know if that’s fully accurate; I began to connect with Islam in a way I never really had before. It became very useful to me in my living to correspond with a higher power. My concept of that higher power varies widely as it does for most people—dead grandparent, justice, romantic love, bearded man in the sky who gets mad when I masturbate—my fervent belief is that there exists a great number of things in the universe larger than my own ego. The process of sobriety was a process of surrendering to something larger than my own ego. The poems are a useful technology for sounding out that surrender.
JM: What was the process of editing the Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse?
KA: It’s done! The permissions are an endless Sisyphean enterprise; my eyes were definitely bigger than my stomach. The process of curating the texts was thrilling. I taught a class at Purdue called Poetry of the Divine to spend a semester thinking about it and learning about it with the brightest minds I know. I was so invigorated by those conversations with my students that I wanted to continue thinking about it. The idea of representing in any way all poetry that addresses subjects of spirituality and the sacred is completely impossible; you wouldn’t be measuring in pages, you’d be measuring in libraries. I go to great lengths to say “these are just 100 poems from the past 43 centuries that I love and that inspire me.”
Eve Sedgwick has a great essay called “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” in which she talks about how when one puts something into the world one imagines all the bad faith ways it might be received. For what it’s worth, there are a great many volumes of spiritual writings that exist that attempt to represent all of humanity on the divine, and they’re usually 23 guys and Sappho and Rumi. I really tried to make this a truly global anthology, to at least have some attempt to nod to every era; there are centuries where there just isn’t much on the record. Also, finding texts by women and queer people and translations by marginalized writers from some earlier eras and areas is difficult because they have been so historically suppressed, so I was able to commission some translations by women poets, trans poets, poets of color. It almost feels like divedapper, another project I took on to educate myself, and now there’s this artifact of that learning. My materials have been selected, the foreword has been written, and I've written a little thing for each section.
JM: What has your experience of the pandemic been? How has it affected your daily practices: writing, teaching, etc?
KA: It’s been pretty lucky, broadly speaking. I have a job I can do from home, so I’ve been teaching from home. I get to spend each day with my favorite person in the whole world and our three cats. Relatively speaking it’s been ok, I’m not in a position to complain about any of it.
I’ve had family members and beloveds in Iran who have passed away from the sanctions the USA has imposed. I am part of the we, I pay taxes to the government that imposes sanctions that kill my family. As an individual body in a vacuum I’ve been fine, I haven't gotten sick. As a part of the collective human tribe it’s been distressing.
I got my 2nd vaccine a month ago. I went to Yosemite. I got stung by some bees and saw a bear. I stumbled upon a bee farm and as I opened one of the colonies to greet them as a human ambassador of goodwill, I was stung a dozen times on my face. One bee had to be removed from my ear while it was still living. I was fasting and took a bunch of long hikes and so was very thirsty and delirious. Among the highs available to me today, happy delirium is one of the best.
JM: I was revisiting your episode of Vs. podcast and loved hearing about your book-length essay project on wonder. Can you tell us a little more about that?
KA: That was a few seasons of my consciousness ago. I have continued to write essays, I don’t know if I’ll ever publish them but they’re useful to me. In Latin essay means to try, so I’m trying. I am much more interested in the we than the they.
One of the fundamental things I believe about wonder and bewilderment is that they’re not necessarily positive. People assume you’re talking about baby toes, but you can read Gwendolyn Brooks’ “Beverly Hills, Chicago,” a poem that is deeply bewildered as it looks at staggering wealth inequity, in the redlining of Chicago.
It's a profound occasion for bewilderment that we are capable of being so cruel to each other or to the planet when our genetic material is so overwhelmingly identical. People talk about Ross Gay’s work being about wonder; sure, it is, but it’s wonder made wise by grief. People are sometimes uncomfortable talking about the grief in his work, but everywhere in his work I feel the presence of a mind made wise by tremendous loss. That’s an inflection and occasion for bewilderment.
JM: I am intrigued by the words that open and conclude a book. Pilgrim Bell begins with “Dark” and ends with “much.” In theological terms, darkness is often connected with mystery, the unknowability of God. I wonder if this resonates for you, and whether you are more drawn to apophatic theology—coming to know God by saying what is not God—or cataphatic theology—coming to know God through affirmation. As for muchness, it seems like one of the qualities in your poems, and your work through Dive Dapper, teaching, etc. is abundance. Can you speak about how you experience abundance, in literature, in life?
KA: That’s a useful question. The poem is a technology of spiritual perception. I think—probably obviously—I find myself a much more apophatic than cataphatic poet. I do believe that - if you conceive of prayer as a way of speaking and meditation as a way of listening for the divine there might be room for cataphatic response. I take the useful parts of Simone Weil, apophatic theology, and discard the ickier bits. A lot of what feels urgent to me is what God isn’t. I’m gesticulating wildly to the sky as I walk, by the way, given the insufficiency of language. Whatever the English language is, it’s another man-made technology. It doesn't bother me to call the divine “God” because we don’t have better language for it, but I know some people balk at that name. I am in a moment where horrors of my civic station are not-God, whether state murder of civilians or empire taking us to the brink of ecological collapse. If I know that’s not-God, it helps give shape to what is. I find the apophatic reachable.
Hannah Arendt talks about what is new always appears despite the overwhelming odds of nature. What is new always appears in the guise of a miracle. Every time I sit down to write, every time anyone sits down to write, there’s the possibility of the miraculous. What is new appears in the guise of a miracle.
JM: “It’s delicious/being so governed//by the primacy/of my tongue,” you write in “There Are 7,000 Living Languages.” A tongue is both how we speak and how we consume, a way to offer and a way to receive. Is language always primary for you in the making of a poem, or do you sometimes prioritize an emotion, an image, a story (not that any of these can be divorced from language)? What makes a poem delicious?
KA: It’s one of those things that’s interesting to think about. I took Latin; Farsi was my first language; I'm obviously an English speaker and writer. That poem claims 7000, but I think it’s closer to 8000 languages. So much of my knowledge of other languages is the food, my knowledge of Portuguese comes from Brazilian food. There’s the parable in “My Father’s Accent” of the devil entering the world via Adam’s lips and eventually making his way through his guts and out his anus. To the extent that there’s a unifying thread between my two books, it’s about how the desire to fill one’s self—with language, food, sex, drugs, praise—that is inextricable from my movement through the world. It’s a, or maybe the, great corrosiveness to my spiritual life.
JM: I love these lines in one of the “Pilgrim Bell” poems:
All day I hammer the distance.
Between earth and me.
Into faith.
Can you speak about your relationship with the earth? Are there particular aspects of nature that are more or less beguiling or bewildering for you?
KA: One of the great things about being married to Paige Lewis is that I get to see them see the world. When they see a spider, they really see that spider. They really see that cloud fully. They would be able to take a walk and sketch a tree from memory from that walk. There’s not a place that we can go that I'm not able to apprehend more fully, more intimately for having seen it through Paige's eye or having seen Paige's eyes see it. I am made so much wiser and better for having that as a load-bearing part of my experience of seeing the world.
JM: There are a number of things I’d love to know about the Pilgrim Bell poems. How did they first come to you? When did you realize they were multiple and are there some that didn’t make the cut of the book? What made you decide to call the book after them? What are the periods doing?
KA: For a while The Palace and Other Poems was the title. There was a time I thought I was going to call the book simply God. I love Jericho’s Please, Siken’s Crush, Cathy Che’s Split, these monosyllabic titles. People were like: who are you to call a book God. But I didn’t hear it that way.
I remember when I got my boxes of Calling a Wolf a Wolf in the mail, I slept with one by my pillow for weeks. Honestly, it made me feel a little bit less afraid to die. I had lived long enough to make that book. Nobody could take that away from me. Not even myself.
Bringing this into the world isn’t dissimilar. The first book felt so urgent and I was floating in the middle of the ocean grabbing onto matchsticks to stay above water. It feels supersaturated at the level of the line. Since that first book came out, my life has gotten a lot louder. I got married, I teach, I hop around; a lot more depends on me. When I was writing the first book, if I had disappeared for a week, Paige would’ve noticed but not many other people would have. Now, if I don’t answer email for 12 hours…
I’ve sought to build poems with silence being the fundamental architectonic element. You can write metaphor apophatically; if you say the bladeless knife with no handle, there’s an image that recedes more and more. I didn’t sit down to write a pilgrim bell poem, but the excessive punctuation and the stopping and caesura are built around silence. I felt it was like the ringing of a bell. The periods try to contain what a bell chime contains. The lines try to artificially contain that but the lines resist the punctuation.
JM: In “How Prayer Works,” you write about “miracles we did not think to treasure.” Do poems enable this treasury? Does prayer? What else helps you become attuned to the miraculous? What qualifies as miracle?
KA: As we’re talking, I’m surrounded by trees and grass which turn sunlight into glucose. Light from a star 93,000,000 miles away, into sugar. Naming this magic, understanding its scientific properties, doesn’t make it not magic. I talk with my students about this a lot; we are in art to make magic. I’m walking among trees and geeking out about photosynthesis, and still if I closed my eyes right now, I couldn’t draw any one of these trees with any fidelity. I see the idea of the tree, I don't see the tree itself. What we are doing as poets is defamiliarization through language, it’s an ongoing work of bewilderment that can make us more aware of the miracles around us.