The Keyhole of Kaveh Akbar's Brain

Transcript of episode

Speakers: Camille Rankine and Kaveh Akbar

Note:
Episode transcripts are provided to make this podcast accessible to a wider audience. Please note that interviews featured in this episode have been edited for concision and clarity.

[Podcast begins]

Kaveh Akbar
I've read this poem a million trillion times and talked about it a million trillion times. Like, it just stirs me up, you know? Like, it just activates something inside me. The way that it is strange is, like, shaped exactly like the keyhole of my brain.

[Theme music starts]

Camille Rankine
Welcome to The Glimpse. I’m your host, Camille Rankine.

The keyhole to Kaveh Akbar’s brain involves a dog, a hatchet, and a slight undercurrent of dread. He’s a highly lauded poet, editor, a teacher, and author of the poetry collections Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf. We caught up with Kaveh at an airport lounge during a book tour for his debut novel, Martyr! Kaveh is our guest today on The Glimpse.

[Music lingers and fades out]

Camille
Kaveh Akbar writes in the language of someone who loves what language can make and what poems can make from their language. In his latest poetry collection, Pilgrim Bell, sound and sentence and fragment play across the breadth of the page, carrying us through their investigations of God, empire, identity, and the strange and sometimes difficult wonder of being alive. All the while, we see through the generous gaze of an eye wide open to both the divine and the mundane as they bask in the same warm stretch of light. Welcome, Kaveh. Thanks for being here.

Kaveh
That was gorgeous. Thank you so much for that. Thank you for seeing me and paying attention. That's not a small gift.

Camille
I'm happy that you feel seen. I always try. I'm so looking forward to talking to you about your poetry and your fiction. I mean, I know we're here to talk about your poetry really. But you just published a novel and you're traveling now, reading from that, Martyr! Congratulations on that. That's awesome!

Kaveh
Thank you so much. Yeah, we met as poets years and years ago. And it's a funny thing, too, I mean I still very much think of myself as a poet. You know, people will come up to me and say, “you know, I'm a writer,” and I'll be like, “oh, do you write poems or fiction or what do you write?” and they'll say, “poetry,” and I'm like, “Ah, one of me, one of my tribe.” And sometimes they'll say, “oh, I write stories, or I write novels.” And I'm like, “oh, that's dope. You know, I know novelists.” You know, like, I don't sit in that. Exactly. Yeah.

Camille
Yeah. I think that when poets write prose there is just so much attention to language. And I've really been enjoying that in your novel: the prose is so gorgeous. I'm, like, picky about that. Like, the prose is not really doing it for me.

Kaveh
No, one hundred percent. I'm super quick to put a novel down. I think the opportunity cost of reading a novel is massive. Right?



Camille
Right!

Kaveh
And if I finish a novel, that in and of itself is like a pretty august mantle in my regard, because that means that it's held my attention for its duration. I mean you're a terrific poet, and you understand that, even if you're writing a long poem, that doesn't mean that, you know, in the middle of the ten-page poem, your language can get slack, right? It's a lot, you know, you're just lengthening the tightrope. And I feel like that was the novel for me, right? I still want to say things in their most irreducible way. I still want to say complicated things simply, right? But I can say 85,000 words of it, instead of, you know, a sonnet or whatever.

Camille
Is that exciting for you, having that space to expand? Or daunting? [Camille laughs]

Kaveh
It's both, but it was really fun to just have room to play. And that's what it felt like, was playing with my favorite toy in this new way. You know what I mean? Like, I had all these Legos, this language, right? And I had been using them to build spaceships or whatever. And now I use them to build, like, a scale model of the Earth instead, you know what I'm saying?

Camille
Mmhmmm. So let's talk about your poetry.

Kaveh
Yeah, yeah. I'm sharing a poem called “Reading Farrokhzad in a Pandemic.” This is the last poem that I wrote that made it into my second poetry collection, Pilgrim Bell. It was my Covid poem, you know? It was sort of the poem of my “Covid moment.” Over Covid, I was both learning how to write narrative and working on this narrative project. But I was also relearning Persian. It was my first language. I was born in Iran. But when we came to America, it sort of atrophied. And my brother is seven years older than me and so, when we got to America, he was really struggling in school. And so, in a misguided but understandable effort to help him, my parents banned speaking Farsi in the household. And so, you know, our first language sort of withered a little bit.

And so, over quarantine, I had this Persian tutor with whom I met on Zoom, and I was working on learning Persian as I was processing this mass casualty event, you know, this global catastrophic death event. So the title of this poem references Forugh Farrokhzad, who was one of the great Persian poets of the 20th century, one of the great Iranian poets. She's a little bit like Plath or Sexton in that she wrote a lot of really, really fiery poems about domesticity and femininity and motherhood that really kind of undermine the typical ways in which those things were spoken of in a patriarchal culture, right? And she also died very young, very tragically, like those two poets, and there's this sort of now weird obsession with her love life and who was her lover, you know, in exactly the same way with Plath and Sexton. And so, she's sort of that figure in Iranian poetry.

So anyways, this poem is called “Reading Farrokhzad in a Pandemic.”

"Reading Farrokhzad in a Pandemic" by Kaveh Akbar from Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf Press, 2021)
The title is a lie;
I can’t read Farsi.

‎ما هر چه را که باید از دست داده باشیم از دست داده ایم

I can make out:

“we lose,
we lose.”

I type it into a translation app:
“we have lost everything we need to lose.”

In between what I read and what is written:
“need,” “everything.”

*

Here, the waving flag.
Here, the other world.

Because we need mail, people die.

*

Because we need groceries, people die.

I write “we need”
knowing we dilutes

*

my responsibility,
like watercolors dipped
in a fast river.
Get behind me, English.

*
When I text
ما هر چه را که باید از دست داده باشیم از دست داده ایم

to my dad he writes back,
“we have lost whatever we had to lose.”

Hammering
pentameter.

Whatever we
had.

People die because they look like him.
My uncle jailed, his daughter killed.

*

This a real fact too wretched for
letters. And yet:

My uncle jailed.

*

His daughter killed.

Waving world,
the other flag—

there is room in the language for being
without language.

*
So much of wet is cold.
So much of diamond is light.

*

I want both my countries
to be right

to fear me.

We have lost
whatever

we had to lose.


From Pilgrim Bell: Poems by Kaveh Akbar. Used with the permission of Graywolf Press. Copyright © 2020 by Kaveh Akbar.

Camille
Thank you so much for reading that. So beautiful.

Kaveh
Thank you.

Camille
I mean, one of the things I was thinking about reading this is about that translation that we land on at the end, “we have lost whatever we had to lose.” And I was thinking that it could mean that “we lost whatever it was possible to lose.” But also that it might be “we lost whatever it was necessary to lose.”

Kaveh
Yeah, yeah, like whatever we needed to lose, we lost, right? Yeah. I love that duality. I love that it sits in both of those.

Camille
I think that's so interesting. Because thinking about the poem in the context that it enters in the pandemic and the deaths that you kind of talk about both in the world of the pandemic and maybe in the world of Iran as well. And that's kind of what I gleaned from the poem in thinking about, like, were those necessary losses, you know what I mean? Who decides what we need to lose?

Kaveh
That's beautiful. The idea of one's mortality as being a thing that one has to lose is salient across all my work, you know, is an endless obsession of the novel, of this book, of the first book, in terms of, you know—if I'm going to give this away, to whom shall I give it? For what shall I give it? If one's mortality is taken away, where is the volition in it, right? If it happens, even if it happens naturally, to what extent is volition given, right? To what extent does consent play, you know?

Camille
Mmmhmmm. I like the idea of, you know, thinking about mortality as something you have to lose, ultimately, your life is something you do have to lose eventually. And then thinking about the agency that may or may not come into that is interesting.

Kaveh
Yeah, I mean, none of us had agency in accepting it in the first place. Right? There's that famous line from Fences where he says, you know, “I gave you your life, I can take it away,” right? The Denzel Washington character, right. And that line in his mouth in the context of that play sounds very cruel. But you know, if you believe in a capital-G God who sits in a cloud stroking his beard, you know.

Camille
That’s definitely what God is doing, for sure. (Laughter). One thing I was going to ask about, and that I enjoyed seeing, was that you included Persian script in the poem, which actually happens elsewhere in your work as well. And I wondered for you, how do moments of non-English operate in poetry written in English? And what does it bring into the work for you?

Kaveh
Yeah, thank you for saying that. And it's something that I've been interested in my whole sort of poetic life, I guess. You know, Eduardo Corral’s Slow Lightning came out in 2004. I think I saw it early in my undergrad. But that was the first book that I ever saw that had long arrays of untranslated, unitalicized second language alongside the English.

Camille
Snaps to that.

Kaveh
And it's hard for me to understate the significance of that book on my own development as a poet, so I want to shout it out here. And then, you know, this poem is literally about me, learning to read Farsi, which I never did, you know? It was my first language, but I spoke it as a kid, right? So I was never reading it by the time we came to America. So reading Farsi, going from it being these tea leaves, to actually carrying lexical semantic data, right? Even like stripped of actually being able to translate anything, even just being able to sound out arrays of texts, felt really thrilling to me. And Farsi and Arabic use basically the same alphabet. Farsi has a few extra letters. And so I wanted and have always been interested in having little shreds of that around, right?

Because a lot of the time a reader who doesn't speak or read Farsi will see it and feel the way that I felt for a lot of my life. Right? Which is just like: looks cool, means nothing to me semantically. Right? And then there are other readers who will see it and know, like, actually be able to read it, you know, what I mean? And then there are other other readers who maybe speak Pashto or, you know, Arabic or Urdu who will be able to sound it out. And so there will be, like, a sonic element for them, but not a denotative semantic element, right. And that's thrilling to me, again; like, that's those different valences of experience that different kinds of readers can have. There's no hegemony, it's not like one reading is more or less correct than the others, right. But the idea that you can hand a poem to 100 different people, and they'll receive it 100 different ways, but to sort of create this moment that really acts to sort of stratify those different readings is fun to me.

Camille
Yeah. I'm excited to hear you talk about that, because I'm a little obsessed with how that can happen. And just a crystallized moment in a poem where all these different doors open.

Kaveh
Yeah.

Camille
And depending on your relationship to that language, you know…

Kaveh
Yeah!

Camille
And they all have like a completely valid and really interesting and layered experience of the language. Like, feeling refused by it, feeling intrigued by it, not knowing, not having access to it, or having some access but it bringing up something for you. And I mean, I think that there's—and that always happens in language, but it's just such a literal moment of it happening on the page. And I just, I love it.

Kaveh
Yeah, and I love what you say about that, about the doors and feeling excluded by it or feeling refused by it because, if you're like waiting on the G train, you're gonna hear a lot of languages that don't make any sort of semantic sense to you. And I feel like the experience of poetry—it's like the only art form that we sort of strap to a gurney and try to beat a confession out, you know what I mean? [Camille laughs.] Like, I can play Ave Maria for my students and watch them get emotional, even though they don't speak the language, right? We understand that. Sonic experience carries emotional data, right? Sonic experience can carry psycho-spiritual, metaphysical data, right?

We understand this in every other form. Like, we understand that a movie with no music is weird and uncanny and creepy, but a movie with different kinds of orchestration can feel triumphant, like John Williams, or can feel, you know, very unsettling. But like, for whatever reason, allowing a moment of poetry to just be, like standing on that G-train subway, you know, people are like, “Oh, what do I don't speak this, I can't read this,” you know, it's like, you don't have that with any other art form. You know what I mean?

Camille
It's true. And I think that I enjoy elements of poetry that are, like, outside of just the textual experience. So like, not necessarily just about…

Kaveh
One hundred percent.

Camille
…what the owners are doing, but the experience of being in the poem. And I feel like, first of all, I always love it when an English speaker is kind of thrown off a little bit, like, thrown off and reminded that, like, English is not the only language—like, “Surprise!” And poems can speak to us in a lot of ways that aren't necessarily literal language, you know?

Kaveh
And how often do Americans actually feel uncentered in the global conversation, you know what I mean?

Camille
Exactly, exactly.

Kaveh
Like, in Iran, right, the feminist riots that were happening for the past several years, right? Everyone on social media was like, “Oooh, what can I do to help? What can I do?” Like, every Iranian I know, of all my family, was like, “You stay over there, like, this is our thing. Like, don't try to co-opt our struggle.” You know what I mean? And, like, the maybe well-intentioned but ultimately sort of still American in their provinciality, sort of like ostensible allies or whatever, like, “Well, but surely there's something we can do.” And it's actually—no! Like, just practice sitting on your hands for a second, practice just not being the center of this conversation for a second.

Camille
Yeah, that's a challenge.

Kaveh
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I don't mean to—sort of a tangent of a tangent, but.

Camille
I am here for it. Honestly. You just have to sit with it. It's something that we all need to learn sometimes, especially in this country.

Kaveh
Yeah, yeah!

Camille
And sometimes you don't have to sit with it. There's moments, you know.

Kaveh
Yeah.

Camille
Well, let's take a little break. Let's take a little break.

BREAK





A message from co-founders Cathy and Peter Halstead:

We hope you're enjoying The Glimpse. It's just one small part of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. We are the founders, Peter and CAthy Halstead. Our goal is to make poetry more accessible to everyone. And we do that in a variety of ways: through partnerships, our film series, this podcast, and our website, brinkerhoffpoetry.org. We hope these works will lure you into a parallel universe, the way a Möbius strip brings you into another dimension without leaving the page you're on. Thanks for listening.

Camille
So we're back.

Kaveh
We're back.

Camille
And we're going to talk about your inspiration poem. Do you want to tell us about it? Or you can just jump in and read it.

Kaveh
Sure. Sure. Yeah. So Russell Edson's “Neighborhood Dog” is the poem that I thought of, or Russell Edson’s “The Neighborhood Dog,” sorry. It's an utterly strange poem. Russell Edson was in the school of kind of Daniil Kharms or James Tate of just writing these utterly uncanny little fable poems, almost, or parable poems. Edson wrote mostly in prose poems, too. And so they feel even more sort of like little enchanted, sometimes terrifying, fairy tales. Truly uncanny. Maybe I'll read it and then we can talk about it. So this is Russell Edson’s “The Neighborhood Dog.”

(worried about changing type-face due to spacing)

A neighborhood dog is climbing up the side of a house.
I don’t like to see that, I don’t like to see a dog like that, says someone passing in the neighborhood.
The dog seems to be making for that 2nd story window. Maybe he wants to get his paws on the sill; he may want to hang there and rest; his tongue throbbing from his open mouth.
Yet, in the room attached to that window (the one just mentioned) a woman is looking at a cedar box; this is of course where she keeps her hatchet; in that same box, the one in this room, the one she is looking at.
That person passing in the neighborhood says, that dog is making for that 2nd story window…This is a nice neighborhood, that dog is wrong…
If the dog gets his paws on the sill of the window, which is attached to the same room where the woman is opening her hatchet box, she may chop at his paws with that same hatchet. She might want to chop at something; it is, after all, getting close to chopping time…
Something is dreadful, I feel a sense of dread, says that same person passing in the neighborhood, it’s that dog that’s not right, not that way…
In the room attached to the window that the dog has been making for, the woman is beginning to see two white paws on the sill of that same window, which looks out over the neighborhood.
She says, it’s wrong…something…the windowsill…something…the windowsill…
She wants her hatchet. She thinks she’s going to need it now.
The person passing in the neighborhood says, something may happen…that dog…I feel a sense of dread…
The woman goes to her hatchet in its box, she wants it. But it’s gone bad; it’s soft and nasty. It smells like something that’s lost its ghost. She wants to get it out of its box (that same cedar box where she keeps it), but it bends and runs through her fingers…
Now the dog is coming down, crouched low to the wall, backwards; leaving a wet streak with its tongue down the side of the house.
And that same person passing in the neighborhood says, that dog is wrong…I don’t like to see a dog get like that…It’s not over yet…
"Neighborhood Dog"" appeared in Russell Edson’s The Tunnel: Selected Poems, copyright 1994. Reprinted by permission of Oberlin College Press."

Camille
That poem is so strange. It's, like, delightfully strange.

Kaveh
It's so strange. Isn't it the strangest poem you've ever heard? Yeah. It's one of my desert-island poems just because, you know, so many people try to write this kind of strange just for the sake of strange like, “Oh, there's an elephant and the casino teller is sneezing, and the elephant is barking,” you know, just saying random shit. But something about this poem that makes it so uncanny and so strange is the way that it's almost a suburban scene, you know, it's almost like Stepfordian, you know?

Camille
Yes. I think uncanny is the perfect word. I mean, I love the idea of the uncanny, like this thing that's just a little bit off. from what you are used to, you know.

Kaveh
Yeah, yeah.

Camille
And I think that the uncanny valley, you know, it's just like, that's what makes it so uncomfortable. Because you almost recognize it. And this is interesting, because, like you're saying, it's not randomly strange. It's like—it feels like allegory, but then it also just has these elements of such, like, just the bizarre that you can't quite place necessarily easily into allegory. You know?

Kaveh
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just the woman's saying “That dog. I don't like to see a dog get like that.”

Camille
Yes.

Kaveh
It's like, “I don't like to see a dog get like that” is what you might say if a dog is feral, or if someone is, like, spoiling their dog, you know. I've read this poem a million trillion times and talked about it a million trillion times. Like it's just like, it stirs me up. You know? Like, it just activates something inside me. The way that it is strange is, like, shaped exactly like the keyhole of my brain.

Camille
Yeah, absolutely. It's funny, when I started this poem, I remembered seeing, like, in New York once this squirrel walking on the side of a stucco apartment building and having the same reaction. I don't like to see that. I don't like to see a squirrel like that. I was like, I'm implicated. [Laughs.]

Kaveh
Yeah, because my spouse and I, we’re both poets. My spouse is transcendent American poet Paige Lewis. And we both are constantly reading each other poems. And this was a poem that, I think, I discovered it fairly early in our courtship or relationship or whatever, marriage. So we are constantly referencing it, you know, like, well, we're constantly saying, like, “it's chopping time, it's almost chopping time.” Or like, we'll say, like, “I don't like to see an X get like that.” Like, if there's like a car that's like falling apart, I'll be like, “I don't like to see a car get like that” or Paige will be like, “I don't like to see a shopping cart get like that.” Right? It's sort of one of our little go-tos.

Camille
Just a great way of describing something that just, it's just making you feel uncomfortable, you know?

Kaveh
Yeah, it's just unsettling. Like, that squirrel shouldn't be able to be lateral on the stucco like that.

Camille
It should not! It should not and I still think about it sometimes.

Kaveh
Yeah, I think what I love about the poem so much is that it's irreducible, you know. It's not a short poem, but every piece of it contributes to that strangeness, you know, like the strangeness early in the poem of sort of establishing her going to the hatchet box, right, sets you up for when she finally picks up the hatchet and then it runs through her fingers. Like it's “something that's lost its ghost”? What?

Camille
I'm like, “It's what?!” Like, at first you're like, “Sure, that smell,” because everything else has been so concrete. And then it's like, “Wait, what is that?”

Kaveh
Yeah, it smells like something that's lost its ghost.

Camille
It sneaks up on you.

Kaveh
Yeah, yeah. Literally, like, it's like you read it. You're like, “Okay, okay. Yep. Like something that's lost its ghost.” And then you're like, “Wait a minute”—it comes back from behind, you know? And then you can break it like something that's—so everything has a ghost.

Camille
Right.

Kaveh
And then the loss of that ghost creates a smell—you know what I mean? It's one of those things that, like, the more you look at it, the more complicated it gets.

Camille
And then a hatchet has a ghost? A hatchet? So every object, not just, like, humans, animals, plants. Every object also has a ghost and has the ability to, like, go off. Like, the hatchet, it's not good anymore.

Kaveh
Yeah, it's lost its ghost. It smells like something that’s gone bad, yeah.

Camille
I don’t like to see a hatchet get like that.

Kaveh
Yeah, yeah yeah yeah yeah, yeah.

Camille
I mean, I get the woman's reaction, honestly; it makes sense. The other element about it that I think is interesting, in terms of its strangeness and how it works and doesn't feel random, is that I can see how this could be a commentary on, like, surveillance state or policing even, you know? Like, it's, it's almost there. So it's like, there's these threads that you can tie in to, like, this social commentary. But it doesn't, like, insist on that either.

Kaveh
A hundred percent.

Camille
It's just possible.

Kaveh
Yeah, yeah. I think, undoubtedly, you could say it's inflected by the atmosphere of a surveillance state. This general sort of tension even among, you know, households and neighbors that Edson was breathing, right? I'm sure that one could write a very, very compelling essay being like, “Well, the woman represents this and the dog represents that.” And you know—and I've never been particularly interested in that kind of forensic reading of poems—but certainly there's a mood here, right? There's a mood.

And again, there's a lot of doors that a reader can open. If a person walks into this poem feeling claustrophobic because of maybe a history of domestic abuse, right? I think that there's a way in which you could read this poem as a text that is speaking to that. If someone walks into this poem with a history of racialized violence, I think that there's something in this poem that speaks to that, right? If someone is just feeling ill, like their body is ill-fitting [on] a particular day, if they're feeling kind of dysmorphic, right? That feels lucky and magical to me when a poem can be all of those things to all of those different kinds of readers without just being so nebulous as to be like, you know, sort of just nothing, right? Like this poem is concrete, and it lives in the world of images. It's not just this nebulous cloud of language that doesn't have any real center, right. But I think it is expansive in its sort of generosity to its readers.

Camille
Yeah, I think it's really interesting how there is something at stake, but the possibility of what's at stake is multiple. You know?

Kaveh
That’s a gorgeous way to say it, that's a perfect way to say it. Yeah.

Camille
So I want to say, thank you so much for talking to us during this time when you're traveling so much for your book, you're on tour. I'm sure that you're basically busy all the time with readings for the tour for Martyr! But are you thinking about what's next for you writing-wise? Are you working on something? Or are you taking a—you can take a break, too. [Laughs]

Kaveh
Yeah, no, sure, sure, sure, no, it's a generous question. And I'm so grateful to be here. I love your mind for poetry and have for a long time. And so it's my luck to get to be here and sort of chop it up with you about poems. But yeah, I am always writing. I'm someone who always writes and the vast majority of what I write I never show to anyone, you know. A small percentage of that I show to my spouse, and then a much, much smaller percentage of that I show to the world. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, it's my luck to get to be here.

Camille
Yeah, it's been a delight. So we have something special for our listeners, thanks to you. The first 12 listeners to drop us an email at theglimpsepoetrypodcast@gmail.com with Martyr! in the subject line will get a copy of this book. So please do that. Please send us an email. Don't forget to send us your name in the email and your mailing address so we can actually send it to you. And that's at theglimpsepoetrypodcast@gmail.com with Martyr! in the subject line., oh, cool.

Kaveh
That’s so cool.

Camille
Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much for helping us to make that happen. And I hope they will enjoy your prose as much as I've been enjoying it.

Kaveh
Thank you for saying that. It's my luck to get to be the beneficiary of your attention.

Camille
Well it's been a delight, delightfully strange. [Both laugh.]

Kaveh
My favorite kind of delight, yeah,

Camille
Yeah. And yeah, I hope that we'll speak again soon.

Kaveh
Thanks so much, Camille, I appreciate it.

Camille
Thank you.

(Music)
Thanks for joining us today. I’m your host, Camille Rankine.

Kaveh’s poem "Reading Farrokhzad in a Pandemic" from his book Pilgrim Bell, copyright 2021 was aired with permission from Graywolf Press.

Russell Edson’s poem "The Neighborhood Dog" appeared in The Tunnel: Selected Poems, copyright 1994, and was aired with permission of Oberlin College Press.

Coming up next week, Hafizah Geter touches on grief, her love of Carl Phillips, and his masterful use of a line break.

Make sure to like and subscribe to The Glimpse wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also find episodes on our website, brinkerhoffpoetry.org. If you have any questions or comments, please drop us an email at
theglimpsepoetrypodcast@gmail.com.


The Glimpse is a production of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. I’m your host, Camille Rankine. Our senior producer is Jennifer Wolfe. Kat Yore is our technical director and mixing engineer. Editorial Director Amanda Glassman is our curator and production coordinator. Amy Holmes is the foundation’s Executive Director, and our co-founders are Cathy and Peter Halstead. Thanks for listening!