Interview by Shereen Lee
“This is a holy text,” Kaveh Akbar pronounces at the opening of his new collection, Pilgrim Bell. But his persona is unsure of how to write a text befitting holiness, or what it even means to be holy. With his auto-invocation, Akbar deftly opens a lyrical series of poems that attempt to assess the complexities of human relationships, duties, and powers. The book is a beautifully inchoate interrogation of what it means to be alive at this moment in time. In May, Akbar and I met over Zoom to talk about Pilgrim Bell, pandemic poems, and the poetics of blank space.
Shereen Lee: In an interview three years back, you said, “We’re living in an unprecedented life that has never before existed on this planet Earth.” Given the events of the past year, this phrase takes on a very different meaning. What is your relationship with the unprecedented life we’re leading, and how has the unprecedented nature of life in 2021 affected your writing process?
Kaveh Akbar: Obviously this past year has changed us and changed our material conditions wildly in disparate and disproportionate ways. But also, one of the things I’ve found myself doing in quarantine is returning to work in antiquity. Because however unprecedented this specific iteration of a plague feels, it is precedented in history. There have been pandemics, there have been quarantines, there have been plagues. I haven’t been spending a lot of time with creative work written from inside the quarantine yet. It still feels a bit molten, and it still feels a little bit like trying to describe a cloud from inside the cloud. You can’t tell anything about it, it just looks like a fog.
But when you’re removed from it you can see its shapes. So I’ve been looking back into antiquity—this iteration of ourselves is wildly unprecedented, not just because of the quarantine. You’d be hard pressed to find another straight-passing man who was born in Iran, who moved to Pennsylvania when he was two and a half, then moved to New Jersey, then moved to Wisconsin, then moved to Indiana, who became a poet and an addict, and wrote about those things. You know what I mean? I have a very unprecedented life. But there are elements of that in our lives and even our elders’ lives that feel precedented. So I’ve been spending a lot of time on the work of our ancestors, to find correspondence.
SL: You do have one poem that directly refers to the events of 2020—“Reading Farouksad in a Pandemic”—in your latest book, Pilgrim Bell. Can you tell me a little bit about that poem?
KA: I think that’s probably the newest poem in Pilgrim Bell. I’ve written other poems in the past year, but that was the last poem that felt to me like it could be a part of the book. And the entirety of the poem was written during the pandemic, so that’s me trying to describe the cloud from inside the cloud—a doomed enterprise.
SL: How did writing a pandemic poem make you feel? And how does the poem fit in with the rest of the collection?
KA: I think a lot of the book is obsessed with the difference between “they” and “we,” and the permeability of that difference. A lot of the time when I’m talking about “those people in Washington,” “they,” etc., my actions are still aiding and abetting them. I pay taxes to an empire that sanctions my family members in Iran. And a lot of the time, when I feel compelled to say “they” to absolve myself from responsibility, what I really mean if I’m being rigorously honest is “we.” And I think that has a lot of meaning in a pandemic where some people have to work two jobs, maybe corporeally, while others of us can teach our classes over Zoom. The relative comfort and safety of the position situated between two empires—maybe there’s something in that.
SL: One of the primary resonances that struck me the most was how often you use your poems to ask for advice almost as a demand: “Tell me how to live and I will live that way,” for example. Do you think you’ve ever come close to finding answers to those questions you’ve asked?
KA: I’m fasting right now. Every year I fast for a month, and I expect at some point for the clouds to part and angels come through, saying, “Here’s the clarity that you’ve been looking for.” That’s just never happened. I feel not great all day, and I feel tired, just kind of out of it all day long. I feel like the speaker of the book is caught in that too, and wants this clarity that’s completely resistant.
There’s a poem by the poet Mary Karr called “The Voice of God.” The ending of the poem goes: “It says the most obvious crap— / put down that gun, you need a sandwich.” It’s the perfect articulation of my relationship to these experiences. My clarities haven’t been an angel appearing in my window, the clouds parting and Gabriel’s trumpets. It’s more a sense of: “this person was placed in my life in a way that just was too perfect to have been anything but ordained.” These are the sort of miracles to which I have been privy.
I think that one of the things that poetry can do is to help us to apprehend those miracles. I’m surrounded by all these trees out here. I’m endlessly tripped out by every one of those trees, how all their matter comes from a star that lives ninety three million miles away. Light from stars weighs nothing on Earth, but becomes glucose which weighs something. That’s Gabriel’s trumpet. And I think that the relative silence of my living today helps me to see and hear those a little bit better.
SL: I wonder if the type of discourse that you’re doing as a poet ever works actively against finding the trumpets. You’ve used poetry to embark on a search for understanding; but you’ll never get there, because poetry as a form renders questions unanswerable.
KA: It’s this sort of quixotic thing, where we begin by trying to represent cognition with language: language being a manmade technology to give meaning to experience or cognition, whatever the fuck those things are. It’s doomed from the jump—you know what I mean? We’re trying to type on a keyboard that only has four letters. And we’re trying to type Ulysses.
There’s something really beautiful to me about this idiot practice of galloping in, of knowing that it’s doomed and still being like, “Well, you know, maybe this time,” knowing that no one has ever done it. Maybe Dante did it. Maybe Sappho did it. But no, none of us mortals have ever done it. And still, we gallop into it.
SL: Well, it’s funny that you bring up Sappho, because her work nowadays is mostly characterized—or punctuated—by silences.
KA: When we’re talking about silence as an architectural element—what we know of Sappho, we know from bits that other non-Sappho writers have quoted, right? We put that together, we have these long silences in between segments, and our minds have to be called into the poem to imagine the rest of the poem in full. She lives in that transcendent way. But if we had the full poems, that wouldn’t be the same. We don’t read Seneca the same way as we do Sappho. There are so many other poets who were by all means her peers. But we love Sappho because we have to be actively engaged in metabolizing her work.
SL: If your work were to be read by people in a thousand years, what medium would you like it to be presented in? Do you have any optimal conditions in mind?
KA: I mean, I don’t have any delusions about anyone reading my work after I’ve gone. If my spouse didn’t read my books, I would feel kind of bummed out, but beyond that, it’s all great. My first book, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, is very much an autobiographical addiction recovery narrative. I’m nearly eight years sober right now. Which means that eight years ago, I was living on a mattress in a house with broken windows facing the bed, literally dying when the liver was pre-cirrhotic.
I’m literally getting goosebumps talking about this right now. The idea that I’m sitting here now, talking to someone who’s read my work and is thinking such intelligent, beautiful, and generous thoughts that are illuminating the work for me: it’s unimaginable. I don’t need more than that.
Kaveh Akbar‘s poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, New York Times, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf Press), Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James 2017) and a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, published by Sibling Rivalry. He is the recipient of a Levis Reading Prize and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Born in Tehran, Iran, Akbar now teaches at Purdue University, Randolph College, and Warren Wilson College.
Shereen Lee lives and studies in Nanaimo. Her work has appeared in The Puritan, the Ploughshares blog, and elsewhere.