Today the great weapon used to stifle critical thinking is a raw overwhelm of meaningless language at every turn—on our phones, on our TV’s, in our periphery on billboards and subways. So often the language is passionately absolute: immigrants are evil, climate change is a hoax, and this new Rolex will make you irresistible. Interesting poetry awakens us, asks us to slow down our metabolization of language, to become aware of its materiality, how it enters into us. Sacred poetry, from antiquity to the present, teaches us to be comfortable sitting in mystery without trying to resolve it, to be skeptical of unqualified certitudes. In reminding us that language has history, density, complexity, such poetry becomes a potent antidote against an empire that would use empty, vapid language to cudgel us into inaction.
Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. His second full-length volume of poetry, Pilgrim Bell, will be published by Graywolf in August 2021. His debut, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, is out now with Alice James in the US and Penguin in the UK. He is also the author of the chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, published in 2016 by Sibling Rivalry Press. In 2022, Penguin Classics will publish a new anthology edited by Kaveh: The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine In 2020 Kaveh was named Poetry Editor of The Nation. The recipient of honors including multiple Pushcart Prizes, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, and the Levis Reading Prize, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson. In 2014, Kaveh founded Divedapper, a home for dialogues with the most vital voices in American poetry. With Sarah Kay and Claire Schwartz, he wrote a weekly column for the Paris Review called "Poetry RX."
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
[MUSIC PLAYING]
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: The Word Dropped Like a Stone, Sacred Poetics Under the Reign of the Money God, October 18, 2021.
SHERAH BLOOR: My name is Sherah Bloor. I am actually talking to you from night time, Berlin, and I'm a poetry fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at the Harvard Divinity School.
And I feel so fortunate to welcome you to today's event, a talk by Kaveh Akbar, a poet I admire deeply. And Kaveh was with us actually a fortnight ago for-- he read at the launch of the new edition of Peripheries, which is a literary journal that is run by the Center. And you can download it for free online, I'll add the link to the chat.
But we were honored to publish poems from Kaveh's new book, Pilgrim Bell. And you'll find a poem called "The Miracle," which Kaveh read at the launch. It tells the founding events of Islam, the angel Gabriel visits the prophet with the imperative to read or recite.
So the founding miracle of that religion happens in two language-- with language. It's a linguistic phenomenon. And its status as a miracle rests on its relationship, its proximity, and difference from poetry. It's an ambivalent relationship between prophetic and poetic speech.
The one shouldn't be mistaken for the other. And yet because this mistake is always possible, always a danger, it's the poet that can bear witness the miracle. So when people doubted the revelation, poets were called in from around the Arabic speaking world. They were in a unique position to be able to recognize, OK, something very special just happened in speech, something a natural divine perhaps something just.
And perhaps the poet is also well positioned to recognize injustice. That is, if injustice or idolatry or illusion is something that likewise can happen through and two language, something language can do.
I believe that this is what Kaveh speaks to us about tonight. His talk is titled The word dropped like a stone, sacred poetics under the reign of money God. And I welcome you to it. And to briefly introduce Kaveh, the celebrated poet. Teaches at Purdue University and Randolph College and Warren Wilson. And he's the author of the chatbook Portrait of the Alcoholic, and has two volumes of poetry, his debut Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Pilgrim Bell, which was just published by Graywolf. So let me handle this over to Kaveh.
KAVEH AKBAR: Thank you so much. It's really lucky to get to be here. I'm going to trust that there are more people here than just Sherah. Thanks to Nick, who is here and is moving the hands behind the curtain to make all of this run. And thanks to Sherah for that lovely introduction.
My name is Kaveh Akbar, my pronouns are he/him. I live on unceded Lenape territory in Indiana, central Indiana. I teach at Purdue University. I'm really excited to be here. I'm excited to talk about this stuff, I'm just going to talk about some of the things that I've been wandering around-- in toward wandering and wandering around and toward for the past-- I don't know, year or so, maybe the past 18 months. I put it into a cogent document that I might share it with people who are smart and might help me wander and wander around it. And that seemed like this was a good opportunity for that.
So I'm going to read, I'm going to read it for-- I'm just going to read the thing that I've prepared for the first chunk of this time together. And then during the second chunk of this time, we'll have an opportunity to talk to each other. Although I guess maybe you guys will be invisible still, so I'm just going to have to trust that you're there and speak to the little yellow dot on my laptop. [CLEARS THROAT] But I'll know you from the language that you leave and we'll be able to talk to each other that way.
So I'm going to get into it. Before I do, though, there is a little handout. You don't have to have this if you're listening to this while you wash the dishes, or wait to pick up your son from ballet, or whatever. You don't have to have this handout. It's not imperative. I'm going to read everything that's on it just in the course of the thing. But just as a sort of artifact of this conversation so that you can take it with you. Oh, crap. So that you can have it.
If you want to read along, if you're a person who likes to read along, if you have any auditory impairment that makes it difficult to follow along, if you have whatever, or if you just want to have access to the poems that I'm talking about later after this conversation or if you're like, God, I couldn't stand that Kaveh guy. But those poems that he was talking about sure sounded interesting. There's the document.
Hopefully, that link works. If someone can confirm in the chat, maybe that it opens for a non-meat person and that there's no permissions issues or anything. I think you are all able to access the chat just like a thumbs up or something. Brilliant. Thank you. OK, so that's all you need.
I'm going to get into it. And here we go. Brilliant. OK.
"In 1989, I was born in the middle of a snowstorm in Tehran. My first two languages were Farsi and English, in that order. My first full sentence was give me aab, aab being the Farsi word for water. I've always been a bit thirsty, I've always been a bit enamored of the materiality of language, trying to snap together parts that don't exactly click, but might if coaxed just right like sticking a Mega Blok into a LEGO.
My third language was Arabic. But Arabic gets an asterisk because I never really spoke it, I just learned to pray in it. When we came to America, Islam's five daily prayers became one long prayer to say at the end of the day.
We were full of these kinds of new world workarounds. My mother never ate pork except secretly in the form of pepperoni pizza. Once every evening, my father would announce it was time for namaz, evening prayer. And he, my mother, my older, brother and I would assemble to do our [? Wudu, ?] a kind of pre-prayer ablution, drawing water to wash our faces, our hair, our heads, our arms, our feet. Then we'd gather as a family in the kitchen or living room or a bedroom to lay out our mats and move through the postures of devotion.
In my very early childhood, I would just watch my family, mimicking their movements as best as I could. Mostly their prayers were whispered, barely audible, so instead of sounding like them I focused entirely on moving like them. Cupping my hands before my face, as if they were full of water, then splashing my hands up to my ears, bending at the waist, kneeling, touching my head to my Janamaz, my own tiny embroidered prayer mat.
However, when I was six or seven, my father decided it was time to teach me to say the prayers on my own. He wrote out the Arabic words using the English alphabet, spelled phonetically in various colorful inks. He laminated the pages. And every day, he and I would spend an hour together sitting on the couch, studying the plastic pages. The line would say, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH], and slowly we would make the sounds together. Me leaning up towards his stubbly lips, blissing in the magical music that came from them.
We'd practice saying it all together, moving through the postures, right there on the old couch, us both laughing at my forgetfulness, growing tired and eventually hungry. It didn't take long before I had mastered it. Could offer 15 minutes of continuous prayer in this gorgeous, mysterious language. I was so proud and so was my father. It was the same language spoken by the prophet himself.
The poet Kazim Ali writes, if prayers can make a place holy, then it must mean there's some divine energy that moves through a human body. I learned from Kazim that the Arabic word ruh means both breath and spirit." It's also true of the Latin sperare. "And this seems absolutely essential to my understanding of prayer. A way of directing, bridling the breath spirit through a kind of focused music.
This music, this way of hemming directly to God was my first conscious experience of mellifluous charged language. And it's the bedrock upon which my understanding of poetry has been built. I had no dictionary sense of what the words actually meant.
Arabic was a private tongue reserved for God. God's own tongue, and I understood, if I spoke it to God earnestly, mellifluously, it would thin the membrane between us.
Poets have invested themselves in this promise for millennia. The idea that mellifluous, earnest language, might thin the partition between our world and the next. Our world and the divine. That there might, in our breath, exist a bit of spirit that could be harnessed, bridled. It's an idea as old as language, as old as incantation.
The earliest attributable author in all of human literature is an ancient Sumerian priestess named Enheduanna, the daughter of King Sargon. Enheduanna wrote sensual desperate hymns to the goddess Inanna. Written around 2300 BCE, Enheduanna's poems were the bedrock upon which much of ancient politics was built.
And her obsession, the precipitating subject of all of our species is written word, Inanna, an ecstatic and often desperate awe at the divine."
Here's an excerpt from one of her hymns to Inanna, translated by Jane Hirshfield. And this is, again, on that handout, which you don't have to look at as I read it, but if you want to, it is on that handout.
A lot of her translations, if you look up her translations, a lot of them are done from the Sumerian cuneiform by anthropologists. And so they're really focused on getting the meaning right but there's just no ear to it. So it's like bird woman fly, magic wall just really starchy and unreadable and not the way that you translate anything else. But Jane Hirshfield has worked with those anthropological translations with the [INAUDIBLE], the raw literal translations and brought it into something like a contemporary lyric. So that's what I'm reading from, is this poetry in Hirshfield's translation.
"Lady of all powers and whom light appears, radiant one, beloved of heaven and Earth, tiara crowned, priestess of the highest God, my lady, you are the guardian of all greatness. Your hand holds the seven powers.
You lift the powers of being, you have hung them over your fingers, you have gathered the many powers, you have clasped them now like necklaces onto your breast. Like a dragon, you poisoned the land.
When you roared at the Earth in your thunder nothing green could live. A flood fell from the mountain, you Inanna foremost and heaven and Earth. Lady riding a beast, you rain fire on the heads of men. Taking your power from the highest, following the commands of the highest, lady of all the great rights who can understand all that is yours.
In the forefront of the battle, all is struck down by you. Oh, winged lady, like a bird you scavenge the land, like a charging storm you charge, like a roaring storm, you roar, you thunder and thunder. Snort in rampaging winds, your feet are continually restless carrying your harp of sighs. You breathe out, the music of morning.
It was in your service that I first entered the holy temple. I, Enheduanna, the highest priestess, I carried the ritual basket, I chanted your praise. Now I have been cast out to the place of lepers. Day comes and the brightness is hidden around me. Shadows cover the light, drape it in sandstorm. My beautiful mouth and nose, only confusion. Even my sex is dust."
And that's just an excerpt. I'm going to paste that link to the handout in the chat, in case anyone came a little late.
I could spend our whole time together just marveling at this artifact with you. Enheduanna has been one of my most treasured companions through the quarantine. A woman who lived roughly 43 centuries ago, writing about the same things I've spent my life wondering about, wandering toward.
"What language can and cannot do? Doubt, exile, bewilderment. There is in the vast shadow of a global death event of numerous worldwide fascistic takeovers of total irreversible ecological collapse, a sense of the utter unprecedentedness of our moment.
It's easy to feel rudderless, like there is no path forward that includes the survival of our humanity. But then reading a poet like Enheduanna who wrote her verse roughly 43 centuries before this date, I feel more than anything else, utterly precedented.
She writes, like a dragon you poison the land. When you roar it at the Earth, in your thunder nothing green could live. She was writing to Inanna, the ancient Sumerian goddess of love and fertility and water. But she may as well have been writing to the American God too, the money God, whose reign of destruction has also poisoned the land and ensured nothing green could live.
Fracking and Monsanto and microbeads are all 21st century faces on a species old problem. Mankind's corrosive impact on the Earth. She writes in the poem of exile saying, I carried the ritual basket, I chanted your praise, now I have been cast out to the place of lepers. Day comes and the brightness is hidden all around me."
It is unclear when or why Enheduanna was exiled. Only that after her father's death, her brother took over the kingdom of her, and she was for a time banished.
The great moral tests of the 21st century will be refugee crises, which will only grow more dire over time as the effects of climate change continue to displace populations. Thus far we as a species have failed these tests miserably, Brexit children in cages. What can an ancient Sumerian poet teach us about immigration reform?
Track the rage in Enheduanna's final moments. "And the brightness is hidden all around me, shadows cover the light. Drape it and sandstorms. My beautiful mouth, nose, only confusion. Even my sex is dust."
I find myself unaccountably moved by this language. For one, it is clearly the language of a poet throwing her hands up, saying, I don't know what language can or can't do but I am desperate and I need someone to hear this. It's the promise I found inside language as a boy praying with my family in Arabic. Here I am, speaking earnestly, mellifluously, believing such speech can be an end to itself.
But I am also drawn to Enheduanna's rage. Today, more than anything else, it's rage that seems to govern me. I am an Iranian, mostly raised in America, caught between two national regimes actively toxic to hope. To quote, Audre Lorde, "It is not my anger that launches rockets. Spends over $60,000 a second on missiles and other agents of war and death. Pushes opera singers off rooftops, slaughters children and cities stockpiles and nerve gas and chemical bombs.
Hope comes and goes in a world that actively conspires against it. But occasions for anger bloom in both my nation's daily state murder of civilians, voter suppression, murderous foreign policies. In such a world, an engine that runs on rage will never sputter. And ultimately, I do think rage is a measure of tenderness. Rage is our ability to imagine wholly the humanity of the harmed."
And then Enheduanna it trains us in that imagining. We really believe that rage can come from a surfeit of tenderness. If you can imagine fully or fully enough, the interiority of a harmed party stands to reason that you would feel rage.
And I think that one of the important things that movements like BLM have taught Americans in recent years is that, from the vantage point of mortal terror, fear for yourself or for your family or for your kids, rage looks pretty comfortable. Rage, outrage, repulsion, these things look pretty comfortable from the perspective of mortal terror. And I think that makes it incumbent upon those of us with access to rage to leverage that gulf between our rage and other people's mortal terror into something like action.
Anyways. [CLEARS THROAT] "That I'm in recovery is no secret. My whole first book largely obvious mine getting clean. A year after I got sober, I learned from a routine physical that my liver was behaving abnormally, teetering on the precipice pre-cirrhosis. This was after a year of excruciating recovery, a year in which nothing harder than ibuprofen passed through my body.
If it's this bad after a year of healing, a nurse told me, imagine how bad it must have been a year ago when you quit. When I got sober, it wasn't because I punched a cop or drove my car into a Wendy's or anything dramatic like that. I had a dozen potential bottoms that would have awakened any reasonable person to the severity of my problem. But I was not a reasonable person.
The day I finally lurched my way towards help was a day like any other. I woke up alone on my floor still drunk from the night before. I remember taking a poll from a nearly empty bottle of Old Crow by my mattress, then searching for my glasses and car keys. Finding them, I calmly drove myself to help.
The Greek poet Sappho, born roughly 630 BCE was, by all accounts, one of history's greatest poets. But the entire corpus of her work burned with the great library of Alexandria. So today we only know her through the bits other writers have quoted.
We know that in fragment 22 she wrote, "Because I prayed this word, I want." But we don't have the entirety of the poem preceding it. Her, because hanging there to explain some now unimaginable consequence of desire.
I am understandably, I think obsessed with desire and its consequences. If my liver function was still so erratic after a year of healing, then at the end of my active addiction I must have been near some Rubicon from which there could be no return.
Some awareness permeated my dense fog of destruction. That awareness might have been bodily. The way an iron deficiency, sometimes provokes in a person an unconscious desire to eat dirt. That might have been fatigue, a cumulative sense that the corrosive manner of my living had become untenable or it might have been something else. I'll never know, which I think is the point.
A common formulation states that prayer is a way of speaking to the divine, and meditation is a way of listening for it. Poetry synthesizes these. The silence of active composition being a time even the most skeptical writers describe using the language of the metaphysical, saying, such and such a phrase just came to me or those hours just flew by.
And then reading a process through which dark rooms on a page or strange vocalizations in the air can provoke us to laugh, to weep, to call our mothers or donate to Greenpeace or shiver with all.
It is wrong to think of God as a debt to luck. But I could have died, and then I didn't, I haven't. When so many around me, like me, did and have the grief of survivor's guilt is real. The omnipresent grief of still being here and not knowing what to make of it.
Most of us are probably familiar with the Kubler-Ross model of grief named for Swiss Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross who wrote about, in her 1969 book, On Death and Dying based on her work with terminally ill patients.
The model states that dying people or those who love dying people, will often pass through five main terminals of grief denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance.
Most of us have some familiarity with this way of thinking. But again, the model is utterly precedented.
Here's a poem from the Indigenous Mesoamerican Nahuatl people, orbiting a mother's death and childbirth. First recorded in the 16th century, but likely quite a bit older. I'll post that handout here again in the chat, in case there are new people.
Again, on your handout it says, that this poem is from 1574. It's like I said, it's likely much older than that but this is the first recorded instance that we have of it, the first translation into Spanish from the Nahuatl. Again, this is a Mesoamerican oral poem from the perspective of a midwife addressing a mother who has passed away in childbirth. So I'm going to read it. You can follow along if you like. Also I don't speak Spanish, and there are some words here that I'm going to pronounce. I apologize in advance for those of you who are Spanish speakers.
"Precious feather child, eagle woman, dear one, dove daring daughter, you have labored, you have toiled, your task is finished. You came to the aid of your mother, the noble lady [NON-ENGLISH]. You received, raised up and held the shield. The little buckler that she laid in your hands, she, your mother the noble lady, [NON-ENGLISH]. Now wake, rise, stand up.
Comes the daylight, the daybreak, dawn's house has risen Crimson. It comes up standing, the Crimson swifts, the Crimson swallows, sing, and all the Crimson swans are calling, get up and stand up, dress yourself. Go, go seek the good place, the perfect place, the home of your mother, your father, the son, the place of happiness, joy, delight, rejoicing. Go. Go follow your mother, your father, the son. May his elder sisters bring you to him.
They, the exalted the celestial women who always and forever know happiness, joy, delight, and rejoicing, in the company and in the presence of our mother, our father, the son who make him happy with their shouting.
My child, darling daughter, lady, you spent yourself, you labored manfully. You made yourself a victor, a warrior for our Lord, though not without consuming all your strength. You sacrificed yourself. Yet, you earned a compensation, a reward, a good, perfect, precious death.
By no means did you die in vain. And are you truly dead? You have made a sacrifice. Yeah, how else could you have become worthy of what you now deserve? You will live forever. You will be happy, you will rejoice in the company and in the presence of our holy ones, the exalted women.
Farewell my daughter, my child. Go be with them, join them. Let them hold you and take you in. May you join them as they cheer him and shout to him, our mother, our father, the son. And may you always be with them, whenever they go in there rejoicing.
But my little child, my daughter, my lady, you went away and left us. You deserted us. And we are but old men and women, you have cast aside your mother and father. Was this your wish? No. You were summoned, you were called.
Yet, without you, how can we survive? How painful will it be, this hard old age? Down what alleys or in what doorways will we perish? Dear lady, do not forget us. Remember the hardships that we see, that we suffer here on Earth. The heat of the sun presses against us. Also the wind, ice, and cold, this flesh, this clay of ours is starved and trembling. And we, poor prisoners of our stomachs, there is nothing we can do.
Remember us, my precious daughter. Oh, eagle woman. Oh, lady, you lie beyond and happiness, in the good place, the perfect place. You live in the company and in the presence of our Lord, you live. You as living flesh can see him, you as living flesh can call to him. Pray to him for us, call to him for us. This is the end, we leave the rest to you."
Got a little-- that poem really gets me.
This ancient poem of indigenous Mesoamerica preceded the Kubler-Ross model by at least 500 years. But you can map, Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief almost directly onto the poem, remember those five stages are denial, anger, depression, bargaining, acceptance.
So denial. Wake, rise, stand up, anger. You went away and left us, you deserted us, and we are but old men and old women. You have cast aside your mother and father.
Depression. Yet without you, how can we survive? How painful will it be, this hard old age? Down alleys or in light doorways, where we perish. Bargaining. You as living flesh can see him, you as living flesh can call to him. Pray to him for us, call to him for us. Acceptance. This is the end, we leave the rest to you. It's astonishing.
What can ancient spiritual poetry teach us about our living? A living that so often feels governed by grief. A half millennium before Kubler-Ross studied this phenomenon clinically, the Nahuatl people were already teaching it.
And also keep in mind that the idea of art as an aesthetic object, like as a painting that you hang on the wall to appreciate aesthetically, is like a relatively new and a relatively Western, I don't like the word Western because the Earth is a sphere and it places the center in Europe. But it's a relatively new thought, the idea of art existing as ornament, as an aesthetic thing.
This was a poem, but it was a poem used to teach people how to move through grief. It was a poem that was passed as an oral tradition but it was a poem that in the same way that we have the Kubler-Ross method that clinically helps us study psychology and help people move through these terminals of grief. That's what this poem was doing. That's exactly what this poem was doing 500 plus years before Kubler-Ross studied it clinically. [CLEARS THROAT]
It's also important to note here that American spiritual poetry didn't begin with Dickinson or Whitman or anyone else writing in English, not even Wheatley or Jupiter Hammond. But with the Mesoamerican and Native American people who inhabited the land that would later be called America, passing their sacred texts along for centuries. Relative to how long those texts were a part of the Earth spiritual history. Anglo-American writers like Dickinson and Whitman are relatively brand new.
To flatten the project of spiritual poetry to a bunch of white romantic and metaphysical poets is to erase the Ethiopian epic Kebra Negast, to wash away Li Po and Rabiah and Mahadevi Akka and Teresa of Avila and Basho and Gilgamesh. It's a colonization, one that erases not only the bodies and lands but actual spirits.
One of the questions you can ask a poem, to what do I owe my being here? Li Po says, I sing and moon rocks back and forth. I dance and shadow tumbles into pieces.
[NON-ENGLISH] The world dropped like a stone on my still living breast. My working definition of sacred poetry rises directly out of my experience as a child praying in Arabic. Earnest, musical language meant to thin the partition between a person and a divine. Whether that divine is God or the universe or desire or land or family or justice or community or sex or, or, or.
As with my early prayers in Arabic, a one-to-one tentative understanding of the language isn't important. What matters is the making of music and the sincerity of the making. When I was getting sober I found no easy prayers, no poems to sing me well. What I did find was that during the early days of my recovery, when sobriety was minute to minute, white knuckles and endless cheap coffee by the pot, poetry was a place I could put myself.
I could read a book of poems and for an hour, two hours, I didn't have to worry about accidentally killing myself. I could write a poem and the language for what was happening would just come to me. Hours would just fly by.
Rabia Al Basri writing in 717 CE. Kings have locked their doors and each lover is alone with his love. Here I am alone with you.
My active addiction was a time of absolute certainty. Certainty of my own victimhood, of my convictions, of what I was owed by a universe that had split me from the land of my birth and dropped me into an America that was actively hostile to my presence. That certainty destroyed whatever it touched, corroding my own life and the lives of people who loved me.
In recovery, when I threw myself into poetry I was drawn to poems that were certain of nothing. Poems that embraced mystery instead of trying to resolve it.
WBAs, the ceremony of innocence is drowned. The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. [CLEARS THROAT] And it's not just writers from antiquity who take up this challenge of unknowing. Even today when irony remains the default posture of the public intellectual poets remain relentlessly sincere in their explorations of spirit, in faith of the mysteries that make and shape us.
Here's Lucille Clifton. And this is on your handouts as well. My dream about the second coming. Mary is an old woman without shoes. She doesn't believe it. Not when her belly starts to bubble and leave a print of a finger where no man touches. Not when the snow in her hair melts away, not when the strangers she used to wait for appears dressed in lights at her kitchen table. She is an old woman and doesn't believe it. When something drops onto her toes one night, she calls it a fox, but she feeds it.
The capitalization in the third to last line is Clifton's preserved. The word for those of you who aren't looking at the handout, the third to last line is, when something drops onto her toes one night, she calls it a fox, but she feeds it. And the only capitalized word in those three lines is the word something, when something drops onto her toes one night, she calls it a fox, but she feeds it.
The capitalization in the third to last line is Clifton's preserved. Its Clifton's poem within the poem. "Something" a proper noun despite its own mystery.
When I talk about engagement with spiritual poetics being an exercise, in sitting in mystery without trying to resolve it, this is what I mean. A capital S, something, drops onto your toes one night, and you don't know how or why but you feed it. [CLEARS THROAT]
Clifton has an entire suite of fox poems orbiting this mysterious, something fox, delving into its mystery without ever really diminishing it. Clifton teaches me to wander into mystery without galloping towards some hasty and inorganic conclusion, which in turn informs my living.
I'm trying to persuade you of the contemporary utility of writing that orbits with GK Chesterton called a vertigo of the infinite.
GK Chesterton actually use that phrase as a pejorative making fun of the writer. He was like, oh, they're all dizzy from their vertigo of the infinite. But I actually thought that was a really great. He was using it to make fun of people like me who think like this. But I actually really like it, I think it's a great phrase.
So I'm using it out of context or I've claimed it. It's not exactly out of context but it's like-- anyways. I'm trying to persuade you of the contemporary utility of writing that orbits what GK Chesterton called vertigo of the infinite. What Clifton called the lip of our understanding. Inquiries into the divine still connect contemporary poets to their ancestors.
In one poem 12th century Canada poet Saint Mahadevi Akka writes, when the body becomes your mirror, how can it serve? When the mind becomes your mind, what is left to remember? In her astonishment written over-- in her poem called astonishment, written over 800 years later, 20th century, Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska seems almost to pick up where the ancient Canada poet left off. Wrapping question after question around the immobilizing strangeness of being anything.
Why after all, this one and not the rest? Why the specific self? Not in a nest but a house. Sewn up not in scales but in skin. Not topped off by a leaf but a face.
The great Persian poet Hafez wrote, start seeing everything as God, but keep it a secret. I still have no idea what I mean when I say God, but I see it everywhere. I mean it intensely. I write poems and yes, books about it. I read about it constantly, which seems counter-intuitively to only deepen its secret.
I can't see you guys but I actually want to you all to do this for a second. I just have to take your word that you're doing it. Close your eyes, imagine-- really do this. Close your eyes, Imagine in your head a bladeless knife with no handle, a bladeless knife with no handle. Do you see how the image recedes from view? The more language I add to it, the bladeless knife with no handle.
Today, the-- you can open your eyes. Today, the great weapon used to stifle critical thinking is a raw overwhelm of meaningless language at every turn. On our phones, on our TVs, in our periphery, on billboards, and subways. So often the language is passionately absolute. Immigrants are evil, climate change is a hoax. And this new Rolex will make you sexually irresistible.
Poetry opposes these things. Asks us to slow down our metabolization of language, to become aware of it entering us. Sacred poetry teaches us to be comfortable with complexity. To be skeptical of unqualified certitude. And reminding us that language has history, density, integrity. Such poetry is a potent antidote against the late capitalist empire that would use empty vapid language to cajole us into inaction. The bladeless knife with no handle.
I can't think of a more useful skill to arm yourself with in the year 2021 than the ability to sit-in mystery without trying to resolve it. Carolyn Forde writes about poets to, and this is a quote, "Don't easily extricate morality, ethics, the sacred, and the political. For them, it's not possible to think of these as isolated categories but rather as modes of human contemplation and action which are inextricably bound to one another."
I'm going to read that again really quickly because I think it's important. Carolyn Forde writes about poets who don't easily extricate morality, ethics, the sacred, and the political. For them, it's not possible to think of these as isolated categories but rather as modes of human contemplation and action which are inextricably bound to one another. Again, that was Carolyn Forde.
And attuned permeability to wonder, compels the curious poet to rigorously examine their stations both cosmic and civic.
So many of my friends, my students have articulated some version of one particular anxiety to me over the past year. Perhaps, you in the audience have experienced it too. The anxiety is how can my writing, my work matter right now? How can anything I have to say be timely or worthwhile?
To them, I continually point toward Enheduanna who's four millennia old poetry feels utterly miraculously prescient to me in my living today. I point to the Mesoamericans who taught us how to move through grief centuries before the advent of psychiatry and psychotherapy became serious medical disciplines. I point to Clifton, Szymborska, to Rabiah, and Mahadevi Akka, and all the other poets discussed here.
Writing Snapchat or Miley Cyrus into a poem doesn't make it timely. Writing in humanity, in all its endless mysterious baffle does.
I want to end with a poem by the 18th century Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa as translated by Robert Haas. And this is also on your handout, if you want to follow.
The poem in its entirety reads, the man pulling radishes pointed my way with a radish. The first time I read this poem it felt like a trick, like a Seliwanoff. The great masters wrote those two.
Something about it stuck with me though, something about its repetition. Heidegger wrote, language itself is language and nothing else besides. The understanding schooled in logic that calls this proposition an empty tautology.
Merely to say, the identical twice, language is language. How is that supposed to get us anywhere? But we do not want to get anywhere. We would like only, for once, to get to just where we already are. To get to just where we already are.
I'm going to read that poem again. The man pulling radishes pointed my way with a radish. The man pulling radishes is strapped to his living like anyone else. What does a man pulling radishes have to point the way? Well, the radish.
We are inheritors of a murderous age. As writers, we've deputized ourselves wardens of our species as most dangerous technology. The English language, a language invented by men. A language deployed throughout history and service of colonization, genocide, ecological decimation, chattel slavery, the building and deployment of nuclear weapons, drone warfare, and more. That's our paint, that's our radish.
What are we to do then? We, who are tethered to language like a plant to the soil. We, who write into a country run by religious zealots to their one true God, the late capitalist money God, to whom they would sacrifice our lives. The lives of people we love and people who love the way that we love.
What are we to do amidst such zealotry? Well, our ancestors have given us models. Reject certainty, which exists only in the rhetoric of zealots and tyrants. Reject false equivalencies, the vamp bangle of empire. Adjust our metabolism of language to remind us of its materiality, its power.
Our task, as wardens of our species as most dangerous technology to treat our material seriously. Embrace the mystery of Ernest mellifluous language. Embrace its infinite potential to thin the partition between us and the world we seek.
So that's what I've prepared in a way of summarizing my thinking around some of this stuff, and maybe introducing the conversation to those of you who are here in attendance, provided that there are some of you here in attendance.
So we have about a half hour, I think, for a Q&A, where we can talk to each other. So happy to feel-- hey, sure. I'm happy to field questions, comments, concerns, complaints, joys, raptures, sorrows, epiphanies, ecstasies, nightmares, visions, whatever you have to share. I'd love to chat about this stuff. This is all I think about anymore. And so I'd love to chat with smart people about it, and you seem like smart people.
SHERAH BLOOR: Very beautiful. Thank you so much, Kaveh. I have to speak for everyone. Unfortunately, we can't see the audience faces. There is a large audience listening. And we can give you a moment to write questions in the Q&A.
I was going to start with the question but I've just read that Isabel who is a dear friend of ours has written a beautiful question, I want to start with that. So I'm going to read it. It's really interesting. OK. So she says, how do grief an interdependence interact with one another in poetry? If art bridges a gulf between the dead, the living, and the unborn, how does the time scale of the present? The president's tenure, a national history, bear on our sense of radical interdependence. Does poetry resist this, and that it always addresses the unborn? It's like a dissertation in a question.
KAVEH AKBAR: It's beautiful.
SHERAH BLOOR: It's beautiful.
KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah. The idea of poetry always addressing the unborn is-- yeah. Yeah, I mean, there are two people throw around the idea-- thank you so much Isa-- that was from someone named Isabel? Thank you so much, Isabel.
Yeah, I mean, I think that people talk a lot about such and such a poem is timely or such and such a poem is the poem that we need right now or whatever. And I think that oftentimes, what they are really saying is that such and such a poem is disposable, such and such a poem is one use. Like you write a poem about the Walmart that opens in your town or whatever, and it's like, just about the Walmart that opens in your town.
So I like the idea of thinking about serious poetry orienting itself towards the unborn or towards the future. I also think about-- and I don't know if this is exactly answering your question, but I also think about in the spectrum of different mediums relationship to time.
I have these broadsides behind me right. And any one of them, pretend that's a painting. This is a little-- I don't know how to move my laptop like this. Pretend that's like a painting. The entirety of the painting enters the eye at once. The entirety of any of these paintings enters the eye at once. So the temporal, I mean-- and certainly you could like move your eye and study a certain detail. Move your eye around the painting. But unless it's like a vast mural that takes up multiple rooms or multiple floors or whatever.
That two-dimensional art, tends to all enter the eye at once. And so like the temporality of the poem is quite instantaneous or the temporality of the art is quite instantaneous rather.
For sculpture, it's a little bit different. Because this sculpture of the sparkling water that I have here, if this is in a museum, and this is a sculpture that someone is made like an ottoman vase or something, you can perceive a facet of it in a moment like a painting. But it's not until you animate your body and move around it, in its entirety, that you can take in the entirety of the text.
The entirety of this sculpture can't be revealed to you without incorporating the body, which means incorporating time. And so the temporal loadout of this sculpture, of this ottoman base that I'm showing is different than a painting.
I always thought that-- and then on the far end of the spectrum is something like music. You can't say anything about Rachmaninoff by listening to a single note, you have to listen to the entire composition. You can't say anything about a film and its duration or its plot really by looking at a single frame, you have to see the entirety of the thing.
And so those exist on this far end of this temporal spectrum, where you have to perceive the entirety of the thing to get any sense of its scale.
I always thought of poetry as existing somewhere near sculpture. And that right because for a sighted reader, if you look at that Issa poem that I shared, it will immediately enter the eye and you'll say, OK, this is like 10, 15 words. This is going to be a very quick engagement versus if I hand you the Bhagavad Gita. It's very differently in the hand. Your sense of temporal engagement is dramatically different.
But I also want to add to this that I taught a former student, current friend of mine, as the poet John Lee Clark who is a deafblind poet, whose first book is coming out with Norton, next year, and everyone should read it, it's called How to Communicate.
But he's deaf and blind. And in teaching him, I realized that this relationship is completely contingent upon sightedness. Because for him, like that Issa poem, his braille reader is two lines at a time. And so that Issa poem is exactly the same length at a glance to him as the Bhagavad Gita or Gilgamesh or whatever.
I don't know. Even the scale of a piece of art's temporal engagement is so contingent upon our specific bodies and our specific corporeal loadouts. And I think all the time about Yates talking about being this beautiful immortal soul fastened to a dying animal. It's his language fastened to a dying animal.
And I just think about all of the limitations that my body imposes upon my ability to perceive the texts that the world gives me, and how unaware I am of all of those limitations. What, I mean, how I will-- and that's the project of defamiliarization and art, et cetera. But yeah, I don't know. I feel like I've spun totally free from the actual question now, but hopefully, something in there hit at something that you were asking as well.
SHERAH BLOOR: I think by starting with this Bill's question, I might have worried the audience and thinking that they have to ask something complex because I don't. So please ask anything. And while we wait for you. I'm going to ask something, I hope I don't do something complicated as well now. But--
KAVEH AKBAR: I mean, this is complicated-- yeah. They were easy monolithic certain answers, it wouldn't be interesting to talk about. I'd just rather [INAUDIBLE] and be done with it.
SHERAH BLOOR: I think I have a question that is maybe like-- just a question that's always bothered me. It's something about the true and the beautiful and the good. But sorry, Kaveh. But that was something you were saying at the end there that reminded me of them.
Christopher has her PhD thesis. This argument that I've always liked, and she argues that poetry shows you how language works to produce meaning. And its tools are just like everyday language, it's images, rhythm, voice but we don't see them at work in everyday language. So poetry is doing this deconstructive work for us. And so it's really similar to what Marxism does and showing the means of production of products. We don't see how things are being produced.
So I've always really liked this. And it sounded like you were saying well, language has-- poetry and language has all these functions. Maybe if we turn poetry just into an object of aesthetic appreciation, you said this, then we lose that work that it's doing for us. And there's all these functions that are very important for justice, for the good that poetry can do.
OK. So this is what I need to be saying at the end. But there's always this question I have, this worry. That it's if poetry is this activity arts ends definitely good, are we sure? Is unknowing always good. It worries me whenever there seems to be a guarantor of goodness.
KAVEH AKBAR: Oh, totally. Yeah.
SHERAH BLOOR: Be a good poet then you'll be a good person. I know poets. And then--
KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah.
SHERAH BLOOR: Do you know what I'm trying to--
KAVEH AKBAR: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I mean, you're resisting certainty. I hope that what you got from this wasn't like, here's a blueprint on how to be a good person. You know what I mean.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
But I do think that you use the word-- there are a lot of things that I want to say in response to what you said. You were talking about this very Wittgenstein, an idea of words are how you use them or the meaning of the word is how you use it.
SHERAH BLOOR: Right.
KAVEH AKBAR: But also like-- there are so many things that I wanted to say in response to what you said. The idea that-- oh, right. And so the idea that all of this work can only be deployed towards noble ends. Of course, it's like-- we're using this word work. And that was another thing, when you said, you were talking about the good work that poetry can do.
And work, by the physics definition of work, is the force applied to an object in order to move it. The force applied to an object [INAUDIBLE]. And so by that physics definition, it's not work if you apply force to an object but cause nothing to move. And it's not work if you merely comment on the movement of an object without having applied any force to it. And I think that those are two hallmarks of weak poetry too.
What, I mean, I think that inhabiting the carapace of revolutionary rhetoric without actually advancing anything new is a weak-- is a hallmark for a hollow poetics as is commenting on something that you had no part in.
The poet Gwendolyn Brooks has a book of poems called Annie Allen that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1949. And there's a sequence of poems in that book called The children of the poor. And one of the first, it's the second or third poem in that sequence, is called First Fight. Then Fiddle
And I feel like those four words just like more accurately synapses everything that I just said, and this stack of whatever, live in those four words. You know, what I mean. Which is to say, you do the work-- you first fight then fiddle. You do the work of clearing out space for-- in your community, whatever your community maybe is, art to exist in the world and then you make the art. But you don't confuse one set of actions for the other. You don't confuse, which-- not for nothing is like the bedrock upon which my understanding of prayer is built to not to get to Woo, Woo about it.
But my conception of prayer isn't that it's just like an incantation to summon an interventionist God to do my bidding. If I just say these words in the right order, then superhero God comes in and gives me a winning lottery ticket or whatever. You know, what I mean.
I don't pray for the unhoused and then be like, oh, great. I did my work today. You know what I mean? Like you pray for the unhoused and then you go buy socks and Clif Bars and distribute them. That's how prayer works. It points you towards the next action. And this is my conception of poetry too, is that, it doesn't supplant the action but it points you towards the action. Does this make sense?
SHERAH BLOOR: Yeah.
KAVEH AKBAR: This is my conception of successful poetry, I should say. Because I don't want to say, again, like all poetry is doing this or all poetry is good. Because it does-- you know, what I mean. My conception of successful poetics for myself is poetry that points me towards the action. And that is small, and fond, and local, you know what I mean. It's like call my niece and talk to her for-- you know what I mean? It's never like stand in front of the tank that's coming down the street. Because if I wait for that to happen, I'm going to wait a long time without doing any good.
SHERAH BLOOR: Yeah. I have a lot I want to say but I have to ask other people's questions.
KAVEH AKBAR: Sure. Yeah.
SHERAH BLOOR: I'm going to do that. OK so this is Kate, and she says, I really appreciate what you said about poetry that filled America and our world, long before Dickinson and Whitman. How do you conceptualize that work? The way those voices are still ringing out, how do we hear and count those voices that are not being read currently or barely being read but which may have been deeply important for hundreds of thousands of years?
KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah. Thank you, Kate, for that question. I'm or I have edited an anthology of spiritual poetics for a Penguin called-- I think it's now called the Penguin book of spiritual poetry 110 Poets on the Divine or something like that, will be out at some point in the next year or so. But so much of the project.
If you were to accurately account for the human project, the spiritual writing, as I'm sure that everyone in attendance here knows, you wouldn't be talking in terms of page count, you'd be talking in terms of how many libraries to accurately represent that project. And so to try to do something like that in 110 poets was ridiculous. But it's also true that so many of the anthologies of spiritual poetry that preceded this project that I took on were like, if there were 25 poets in it, it would be like 23 British romantics and metaphysical poets and then like maybe Rumi and Sappho for a little spice. You know what I mean.
I mean, again, like the history of attributable human writing is about 43 centuries old. And it has existed in every continent. Whether it's-- I mean, a lot of the African texts or Mesoamerican texts that exist in the anthology were oral texts that were passed on-- a lot of the Aboriginal antipodean texts that exist in the anthology were oral texts that were eventually transcribed. But there's no culture that doesn't have stories.
And so the work was not passive. To answer your question just directly, it's not passive. If you're just waiting for those writers to be accounted for in the Norton, it's not going to happen. And so you have to actively seek them out.
And another thing that I took on in this project was even when you find those texts so many of them were done by-- so many of the translations from, for instance, the Nahuatl or from the old Anglo-Saxon charms or whatever you're looking for, were done by old white men from 100 years ago. And those are the only translations that we have of these.
So one of the things that I was able to do with this project was commission new translations of some of these texts from women translators, from Black, and POC, and indigenous translators, from trans and queer translators.
So it's not just like the curatorial aesthetic shaping text selection but it's also like bringing the actual translations into-- it's like the difference between the Jane Hirshfield translation and the starchy anthropological translations of Enheduanna, actually allowing the poems to sing to us in a way that doesn't completely kill the spirit of the thing.
Yeah, I mean, to answer your question very simply, it's not passive. The American literary appetite is wildly provincial. American readers don't even read Canadian or British writing. We don't even read other English writers, let alone reading another that was originally composed in other languages. And so it's just not passive, you have to do a little bit of legwork.
SHERAH BLOOR: OK. So choosing questions here. May I ask you this one? Jason asks, could you say something about whether or how you feel connected to the numinous when you're working on your poetry? And also whether you take any specific steps to enter that space. Numinous as in, I guess, the feeling of divine mystery, maybe.
KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah. Sure. Yeah. And this is from Jason?
SHERAH BLOOR: Jason.
KAVEH AKBAR: Great. Thank you, Jason. Yeah, I mean, I think that most writers talk about getting to a place where-- again, I touched on this, but we talk about hours flying pie or such and such a phrase just came to me. This is the language of the supernatural. And again, the most boots on the ground skeptical writers talk this way. And I'm not the most skeptical or anything.
And so, yeah. I mean, I think that a lot of writers talk about courting that experience of writing. That is not merely of the intelligence, that is not merely of the ego. Whether you want to call whatever that other thing is your subconscious or the muse or whatever it is, that is not merely your intellect refracted onto the page.
I think that that's, of course, huge for me. And I think that, for me, it's always the language that leads me there. I think that there was something in the question about how do I caught that space or something. And for me, poetry is a deeply spiritual technology for me.
The two spiritual technologies that I have in this world are my body and my language. And both of those are hugely imperfect, and hugely have huge imperfections that make it really difficult to wield them. But I do think that language can get me a little bit closer towards the kind of clarity that I see going in a horizontal way. The horizon, you're always marching towards it and you never actually get there. I think that this is a horizontal thing like that. The way that standing on my roof gets me a little bit closer to grabbing the moon than standing on my floor. It gets me that much closer to the clarity that I'm after.
SHERAH BLOOR: There are lot of good questions. I'm struggling to [INAUDIBLE]
KAVEH AKBAR: No, you're good.
SHERAH BLOOR: Yeah.
KAVEH AKBAR: These are [INAUDIBLE]. I'm just trying to keep up. I hope any of this is cogent.
SHERAH BLOOR: Totally. There's just so much here. OK, because I think this follows from the last question, and it's something I was also interested in, when we're talking about different technologies and what kind of technology of not knowing. So Liz Hannah asks, she says, I'm not sure how to ask this but I find myself curious about the listening receiving aspect of experiencing poetry. This not knowing maybe. A phrase ecstatic listening occurred to me.
And I'm curious about not just how our state of consciousness or being alters our receptivity, but what we can receive from a text. But maybe our willingness to be formed by what we are taking in, some aspect of sacred poetry lying in a sacred listening or attending, and perhaps a sacred relationality. Would be grateful for any perspective. So I think instead of asking for more elaboration on that not knowing us.
KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah. Totally. This was-- you said this was Liz?
SHERAH BLOOR: Liz. Yeah.
KAVEH AKBAR: Liz. Thanks, Liz. I mean, I think that what you're getting at is so much the project of art making. Not to generalize too much but the Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky wrote a paper called Art as Technique, in which he introduces the idea of defamiliarization. And the famous line from it is make-- the artist must make the stone stony.
To make the stone stony, which is to say, we see tens of thousands of stones every day. If you walk anywhere, to anywhere, you'll see a thousand stones. But how many of those stones could you actually describe with any acuity?
I run around my neighborhood, you can see my doors right there, there are all these trees, and I run around it every day. And despite the fact that intellectually, I know that every one of those trees is taking light from a star that lives 93 million miles away, and turning that light from a star that lives 93 million miles away into glucose, which weighs something. That light weighs nothing and the glucose that arrives-- arrive isn't the right word, but the glucose that is formed from that light weighs something, you can put it on a scale. From light, from a star, 93 million miles away. And that's where-- all those trees come from that.
And despite the fact that intellectually I know this, if you gave me a pen and some paper right now, I couldn't draw a single one of those trees that I run by every single day. I couldn't draw a single one of them with any-- I could be like, OK, there's the Sycamore over there and there. But I couldn't draw that tree. I draw the idea of a Sycamore or the idea of a crab Apple. I wouldn't be drawing the specific tree.
Despite the fact that intellectually I'm aware that they're this literal miracle, I understand that it's photosynthesis. I've read the Wikipedia page for them. So I'm practically an expert. But naming magic doesn't make it not magic. It's light from a star, 93 million miles away that becomes a tree. I don't see them. When I see them I see the idea of a tree, I don't see the trees. That's the damage of habituation.
And that's what defamiliarization does. When you say, make the stone stony, make the tree tree. That's what Shklovsky is talking about. And so I think that this is what interesting art does. Is it allows us to see things as if freshly made or it undoes the damage of habituation.
And so we're so habituated to these ideas of love and death and justice and God and the divine and prayer and fear and loneliness. We're habituated to these things because we spend our lives sitting in them and we spend our lives afraid of them. And then good art makes them feel new to us. Good art makes the desire desire-y, or good art makes the photosynthesis photosynthes-y, or the justice justice-y.
When you read Marilyn Nelson's Sonnets for Emmett Till, you're encountering a vivid and unforgettable and a searching and fearless enactment of a particular atrocity that undoes the damage of habituation.
So when we sit here on our phones all day and it's like a Shaman ad and baseball scores, and then an autoplay snuff film of state murder of an unarmed civilian, and then immediately after that, it's a Hardee's ad or something. That's habituation. That's like teaching us to scroll past that shit. And to the same way that I don't see the trees, it's teaching us to not see the atrocity.
But then when we encounter something like Marilyn Nelson Sonnets From Emmett Till, it undoes that damage of habituation. It allows us to actually encounter the atrocity made atrocious in the art. And when you actually encounter it, it's like singers paradox of the drowning man or whatever. If you were walking out of a dinner party wearing an expensive tuxedo and you saw a man drowning in the river, you jump in to save him even if it ruined your tuxedo, and you'd bring him out.
And that's what's happening all around us every day. Is we're living in our comfortable tuxedos in our lives and all around the world there are people drowning. Is just because we can't see them, because there's a veil between us and them. We're not jumping in the water, we're not throwing our bodies into the gears of this thing. Anyways, I'm spinning out.
But yeah. I mean, I think that curating practice of defamiliarization within your life-- my spouse is an incredible poet. And one of the best-- one of my favorite things about being married to them is that when they see a bird, they really see that bird, that specific bird. They'll see the bit of white on it's one little toe or they'll see-- when they see that grasshopper, they see that specific grasshopper. And so watching them see the world has really been great for me. I heartily recommend marrying the Poet Paige Lewis to everyone. It's really done wonders for me in my-- Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
SHERAH BLOOR: OK. I think we probably have time for two more questions
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
KAVEH AKBAR: Hopefully, in the fullness of time, we'll talk to each other again.
SHERAH BLOOR: I think that all the questions are getting answered through the conversation.
KAVEH AKBAR: Great.
SHERAH BLOOR: So I'm going to ask this slightly longer question that has multiple parts and then a very short question at the end.
KAVEH AKBAR: It's OK.
SHERAH BLOOR: OK. So this is the Melissa's asking the longer question. It says, it's interesting to see how grief fits into all of these. Few questions. Can you speak more of Clifton's poem and this idea of a second coming as an old woman who no man touches, someone who cannot realize that she is old?
I am also interested in this depiction of grief and the death or dust of woman and how these ideas fit into whatever new world we attempt to embrace in these uncanny times. What is the role of woman? Are we to debate something or the existence of, say, a fox?
KAVEH AKBAR: Sorry. What was the last line?
SHERAH BLOOR: Are we to debate something or the existence of, say, a fox?
KAVEH AKBAR: Like in the Clifton poem. OK.
SHERAH BLOOR: Yeah.
KAVEH AKBAR: And so what was the what was this question asker's name?
SHERAH BLOOR: Melissa.
KAVEH AKBAR: Melissa. Melissa, thank you so much for this question. Yeah. Again, I'm still very much sounding my way through all of this. I think we all are-- there's a really great one of really the anthology that exists that most has informed my own work as an editor. Is Jane Hirshfield who did that first one-to-one translation. Put together a book called Women in Praise of the Sacred. And it was a corrective to-- I don't need-- well, whatever, like Stephen Mitchell's.
There are a number of translators who have done anthologies, I alluded to earlier, who have done anthologies of spiritual writing that are truly just an avalanche of why-- and listen, I love Blake and Marvel and Dan. These are-- I like them. But I just don't like them to the exclusion of everyone else.
And so Jane Hirshfield did this anthology in-- I don't know, the early 2000s, called Women in Praise of the Sacred. That I would really recommend it. It was her corrective.
There's another one called Technicians of the Sacred that does a good job of incorporating indigenous texts including the Nahuatl poem that I included there. And I don't know if I'm answering your question exactly but I--
Yeah, I mean, the questions that you're asking are of the questions that I'm asking. And again, I'm one editor trying to move through all of this and figure it out and imagine towards it. And the texts that have been useful in framing the conversation for me and illuminating some of this world for me like the Clifton, which I think you mentioned, and I forget which other one, but-- oh, the Enheduanna. Maybe yours will be Mahadevi Akka and [? Pedicara ?] or Teresa of Avila. Maybe you'll have other luminaries who do that work for you. Sorry, I don't know if that answered your question at all, I apologize.
SHERAH BLOOR: This is a mad question to end on, but I just think it's curious thing to do. Is Joe asks, what's the kind of poem you dream of writing?
[LAUGHTER]
KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah, Joe, that's such a good question. I actually dream of writing a lot and most of the times, I can't remember the language that I've dreamt. But sometimes I do and I'll wake up enough to scratch it down and then fall back asleep. And then 100,000% of the time, I'm always like, God, I'm going to write this down and it's going to unlock everything for me. And it's going to be like, this is such a vision. And it's like Gabriel came to me with his trumpet in my dream. And then I read it in the morning, and it's like pink banana roller skates. To some complete gibberish, and what was Earth shattering to me in dream is just total nonsense, which is-- but--
I've never gotten over the idea that there's some combination of keys that I could press on my computer and be on the phone with Warren Buffett. There's some combination of-- I don't know, hacking or making a phone-- whatever, but there's some combination of things that I could do on my computer that would immediately-- and then there's some combination of words that I could say, I'm an angel from the future and here's your social security number, and here's this memory that you had as a child, and this is what you named your sled or whatever, Citizen Kane.
But there's some combination of things that I could say that would convince him to just do whatever I said. And then if I was just like, give all your money to all-- and so I feel like my dream poem or whatever it would be whatever that combination of words is. That just like has the mysterious password that convinces all of the people with the power in the world to actually structurally change the-- to just give up their billions.
I know that that's not like a very romantic or pretty answer. But just purely pragmatically, they exists. This combination of words, they exists comb-- like this is your daughter's middle name-- whatever. I don't know anything about Warren Buffett, actually.
But whatever the combination of words for each individual oligarch, magnate, whatever, would be to get them to do that, that would be my dream, that would be my dream poem. It's like--
SHERAH BLOOR: That's amazing.
KAVEH AKBAR: By malaria net forever. Yeah, just do the shit that you could. So fucking easily, I'm sorry, but you could so easily do-- anyways. Yeah. So that's my dream poem. I know that that's-- my second dream poem would be to just write like, oh, do aggression or something like that, as if it had never--
You know the Pierre Menard, the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges was one of my favorite writers. And he has a story about this writer named Pierre Menard who recreates the Quixote from scratch not like copying it but living his life in exactly the same way to be able to reproduce the text that Cervantes made organically, every comma, and every word in place, but just-- anyways, mine would be like to Pierre Menard, to aggression or M. NourbeSe Philip's "Discourse on the Logic of Language." One of monolithic poems of our-- yeah.
Anyways, sorry. Thank you so much, Sherah. This was really lucky. And Inshallah, we'll be able to do this again and again in the fullness of time.
SHERAH BLOOR: Inshallah. And yeah, I hope you work on that poem that's--
KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah, I'll get cracking.
SHERAH BLOOR: This secret code if you could just crack it that would be--
KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah, I mean, it has to exist. It has to exist like some combination of words. That would be like, I'm the angel of your future and this is the password-- whatever. There has to be enough evidence that eventually you would be convinced that I am who I say.
SHERAH BLOOR: I'm sure you're going to figure it out.
[LAUGH]
KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah. Maybe not in this lifetime but eventually.
SHERAH BLOOR: Thank you so, so much for your time and for speaking to us.
KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah. Thank you so much.
SHERAH BLOOR: And I'm sorry for all the questions. I didn't get to that were--
KAVEH AKBAR: Yeah, me, too. I hope that all of us will get to break bread and drink good tea at some point in the future.
SHERAH BLOOR: Definitely, in person next time, hopefully. OK. Thank you so much.
SPEAKER 2: Sponsor, Center for the Study of World Religions.
SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2021, President of Fellows of Harvard College.