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A Reading by Kaveh Akbar
captured October 8, 2018
Gregory Donovan: And now it’s my pleasure to introduce Caitlin Etherton, an outstanding student in our graduate creative writing program who is this year’s Levis fellow, and in that role she oversees the day-to-day operations of the annual Levis Reading Prize Competition. Caitlin will introduce tonight’s honored guest. Caitlin Etherton.
Caitlin Etherton: Thank you, Greg. Thank you to our sponsors: the VCU Department of English, VCU Libraries, Barnes & Noble, and the College of Humanities and Sciences. And thank you also to Emily Block, who isn’t here tonight, who was last year’s Levis fellow and who facilitated Kaveh’s arrival. Thanks also to Thom Didato, Gregory Kimbrell, and the Bowe House Press. And thank you all for making time this evening for poetry.
I am Caitlin Etherton, this year’s Levis Fellow, which means in addition to handling reviews for the 2019 Levis Reading Prize, I have the honor, tonight, of introducing the winner of the 2018 Prize, poet Kaveh Akbar.
Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, grew up mostly in the Midwest, and currently lives in Indiana. In 2014 he founded Divedapper, a free online collection of poetry interviews. In 2016 he received the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. In 2017 he published both a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, as well as a full-length poetry collection titled Calling a Wolf a Wolf,and then he received a Pushcart. Kaveh’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Tin House, APR, and PBS. He teaches at Purdue University, Randolph College, and Warren Wilson [College]. Somewhere along the line he became a columnist for The Paris Review. And in a recent interview with Glass Poetry Press, Kaveh said, “I just don’t sleep that much.”
Calling a Wolf a Wolf is a three-part book of poetry that contemplates addiction, personal history, hunger, joy, faith, and the divine. Here is a world where sometimes God is rust, where “old men in orchid penny loafers / furiously trade orchids,” “where brackish water trickles in” to the brain and “memory trickles out,” where “We all want // the same thing (to walk in sincere wonder, / like the first man to hear a parrot speak).”
In interviews Kaveh speaks often about this necessity of wonder. And in a conversation with Danez Smith, Kaveh mentioned that his students are exhausted with him repeating Horace’s pronouncement that a poem should both “delight and instruct.” In his poem “Exciting the Canvas” Akbar writes:
Some people born before the Model T
lived to see man walk on the moon.
To be strapped like that
to the masthead of history
would make me frantic.
At parties I’d shout
I’m frantic, and you?
Only seven lines and already we readers have traveled from a noisy living room house party, to the Ford Plant in Detroit, to the surface of the moon, to the tip of a sailboat, the pressroom of a newspaper. Already we have had seven, eight, maybe a dozen moments of feeling just so “frantic.”
During my time as an MFA student I have volunteered at VCU’s Bowe House Press, a letterpress studio within the School of the Arts. The letters we arrange are very tiny, and typos are unavoidable. But last week, while typesetting the end of Kaveh’s poem “Milk” for tonight’s broadside, I was surprised to look down into my hand and realize that I had accidentally mistyped not just one or two letters, but an entire word. In the second to last line, rather than spelling d-r-e-a-m, dream, I had individually chosen and set the letters for l-e-s-s-o-n, lesson.
I leaned in close to the poem, slid each letter of “lesson” out with tweezers, and dropped “dream” into place, careful not to disturb the tension of the stanza. Again, I was reminded of the poem’s ability to instruct and delight, to lesson and to dream, to bewilder and to involve. Perhaps the logic of dreams is not so predictable.
“The unexpected / happens, then what?” Akbar asks.
“The next thing,” he replies. “If I am / to be punished for any of this, it will be thousands of years too late.”
Please join me in welcoming Kaveh Akbar.
Kaveh Akbar: Thank you so much, Caitlin. I kind of just want Caitlin to be up here and read my poems; she did a really amazing job with it. My name is Kaveh Akbar. I’m so honored to get to be here and to get to be among with you all. Thank you, Greg, for that incredible essay and for your hospitality broadly. Thank you everybody who has been so kind to me today and broadly in association with this thing. I am very excited. I am very excited to be here with you guys. This is a beautiful space that you’ve built and a beautiful community, and I feel very among.
I am going to read some poems. I know that I am here because I wrote this book, which is in very big letters right there, but I am going to read some new things, too, and maybe that’s okay. I like to figure things out. Thank you all again for being here; I appreciate it. I hope I get an opportunity to substantively interact with lots of you after this.
This first poem I am going to read is called “Vines.”
[“Vines,” Kaveh Akbar]
My first language was Farsi, which is a good first language. It’s a beautiful language with a long history of poetry and great poets, but I don’t speak it anymore, which is a strangeness. My brain sort of wired itself for this one language and then—now there’s all this—all these roads and highways that just decay.
This poem is called “Do you speak Persian?” I was thinking when Greg was reading his beautiful essay about Larry Levis’s relationship to the stars. I was thinking that maybe this poem could be for Larry, to bring Larry into the room and into this reading even more than he already is here, and everything here is sort of inflected by him.
[“Do You Speak Persian?,” Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Alice James Books, 2017]
I like to, at my readings, I like to read poems by non-me people. Sometimes I feel like I get a little bored with myself, and I was going to read a poem by Larry Levis, but I feel like we just had this extraordinary reading by Larry Levis, and I feel like he is already here, and I also—it’s one of those things where like—it would be like following Tracy Chapman and then just doing a “Fast Car” cover like after she—you know what I mean?
So I just pulled this up right before I came up. It’s Indigenous People’s Day. This is a poem by the Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier. It’s called “King.”
[“King,” Layli Long Soldier]
It’s Layli Long Soldier, not me.
Yeah, let’s clap for Layli. Layli’s incredible.
This poem is one that I wrote, though. It’s a strange thing to be going, you know, when Larry Levis’s poems are in the room and Layli Long Soldier’s poems are in the room and all of the previous recipients of this award. It’s a nuts list if you look at the list. All of these great poets are in the room, and you just sort of waddle in, trying to, you know—it feels like two seven-year-olds stacked on each other’s shoulders inside a trench coat, you know?
This poem is called “Every Drunk Wants to Die Sober It’s How We Beat the Game.”
[“Every Drunk Wants to Die Sober It’s How We Beat the Game,” Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Alice James Books, 2017]
This is called “Juice Box.”
[“Juice Box,” Kaveh Akbar]
I’m going to read a longer poem. This is something that I have been working on for a long, long time, and it’s starting to come into clarity. And one of the things that sometimes helps me fully bring a thing into clarity is to see how it sounds in a room with acoustics and faces, like, rolling their eyes at parts or, you know, the parts where you start to check your phone. But it’s a little bit longer, so sit back in your seats maybe or take your shoes off or lean your head on your beloved’s shoulder or whatever. It’s not like—you’ll be fine—it’s just a little bit longer than what I’ve been reading.
This is called “The Palace.”
[“The Palace,” Kaveh Akbar]
Thanks. It’s a weird one. I wrote this book waking up early to write. When sometimes, if you are a writer who wakes up early to write, it’s very easy to use that as a sort of cudgel to, like, beat people into accepting your sort of supernatural writerliness, but I just happen to like writing in the morning; there’s nothing supernatural about it. Lots of people like writing at night. Anyways, all this to say I like writing in the morning because I like to get into the language while my brain is still kind of gummy with dream logic, before the mundane prattle of the everyday gets in there and, you know, I start thinking in e-mail speak or in coffee shop orders or whatever. But lately it has seemed increasingly unconscionable not to let the argle-bargle of the everyday come into the poems when the argle-bargle of the everyday is so—it seemed like a sort of, very sort of privileged position to be able to say “No, I don’t want you in here.” So I’ve been trying to write at night, and it doesn’t feel as comfortable to me, and consequentially I’m writing these, like, ten-page, like, whatever that was instead of my comfortable little—anyways, I am going to read some other poems, and then we can all talk to each other.
This is called “Orchids are Sprouting from the Floorboards,” which Caitlin referenced in her beautiful opening.
[“Orchids are Sprouting from the Floorboards,” Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Alice James Books, 2017]
I grew up all over the place, but a lot of my particular all over the place was in the American Midwest, and, like, once or so a year we would take these family pilgrimages into Chicago to go to Reza’s Restaurant, and it was the only Persian anything within a ten-hour driving radius. So it would be the biggest deal in the world. My brother and I would know exactly what we were going to order off the menu. My order would complement his order and vice versa, and we would never go out to eat even, so it was this huge deal.
This is a poem sort of about that to the extent that anything is about anything, and this is sort of about that. You need to know that Persians and Arabs are not the same thing, which hopefully you guys know, but, yeah, those are two distinct people with distinct histories and many sub-histories within them.
[“Reza’s Restaurant, Chicago, 1997,” Kaveh Akbar]
Thank you. I appreciate it. I know that we are all grateful to be here. I know that you are grateful to be here, and I feel very, very grateful to be here, so don’t feel any sort of compulsion toward that end. I feel it in the way that you are looking at me. And hopefully I’m returning it.
This poem is called “I Won’t Lie This Plague of Gratitude.” So this book is sort of an account of going from being a not very good person to someone who works very, very hard to come out at the end of the day roughly neutral, you know, or better on a good day. And one of the strange things about that for me was that I didn’t really have a relationship in my past life to gratitude, you know, I was saying to the class this morning, I just sort of spent my life lurching from crisis to crisis, and there was no real time to reflect, there wasn’t an occasion for gratitude or an occasion for me to become aware that I should have gratitude. One of the strange things that happened to me as my life started to improve was that all of these gratitudes began to come into my life, and I didn’t really have an experiential relationship to gratitude. I had well-trod psychic algorithms for what to do with pain and despair and loneliness and crisis, right? But I didn’t have those for what to do with gratitude. It was really sort of baffling and painful. This is about that, again, to the extent anything is about anything.
This is called “I Won’t Lie This Plague of Gratitude.” That preamble was longer than the poem.
[“I Won’t Lie This Plague of Gratitude,” Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Alice James Books, 2017]
[“Ways to Harm a Thing,” Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Alice James Books, 2017]
At poetry readings I think that whenever someone says “two or three more” or, like, “X or X plus one more,” they always mean X plus one. I am going to read two more. This poem, it begins with an epigraph by Saint Augustine, which is a very hoity-toity sentence, but I was reading this book in which I encountered this line by Saint Augustine where he says, “We must admit that a crying man is better than a laughing worm.” I read it two or three times, and I was like, “Must we?” Like, a laughing worm sounds pretty great, right? A crying man doesn’t sound all that fun. So this poem is called “In Praise of the Laughing Worm.”
[“In Praise of the Laughing Worm,” Kaveh Akbar]
I think the fatal flaw of that poem might be that it depends on the knowledge that worms have five hearts. Sometimes you just write your happy worm poem.
Thank you all so much for being here. Again, I am so, so grateful for your company. I am grateful for the hospitality that you guys have all have shown me. Truly, truly, truly this is extraordinary. Thank you all so much. I am profoundly grateful to each and every one of you.
This poem is called “Portrait of the Alcoholic Floating in Space with Severed Umbilicus.”
[“Portrait of the Alcoholic Floating in Space with Severed Umbilicus,” Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Alice James Books, 2017] 