Prairie Schooner Interviews Kaveh Akbar, Man With 'Chutzpah'

Prairie Schooner's Katie Schmid Henson interviews poet and Divedapper editor Kaveh Akbar. We've covered Akbar's editorial efforts before, most recently here, and we're pleased to read more about it in his own words. Also, yes: cold calling poets for submissions when you're in high school really does take chutzpah!

The Prairie Schooner Book Prize is now open! In honor of the 2016 Book Prize season, Book Prize Coordinator Katie Schmid Henson will interview authors about the process of constructing a manuscript and bringing it to publication. This week, Katie interviews poet and editor Kaveh Akbar about the ecstatic joy of poetry, the art of the interview, and constructing a first manuscript with intention.

I’m really interested in the work you do at Divedapper—it’s publishing some of the most exciting, thoughtful interviews I’ve read recently. Can you talk about what made you want to start the site, and how, if at all, the interview process has changed your conception of yourself as a writer and artist?

Well, thank you for the kind words. They mean a great deal. I always loved literary interviews; they were my favorite part of the old New York Quarterly and the Paris Review. I started doing them in high school (when I fell in love with poetry)—I interviewed Yusef Komunyakaa when I was seventeen for the little lit-mag I ran back then. It was a long, sprawling phone interview, too!

I spent most of my undergrad being a stupid undergrad, doing stupid undergrad stuff, but I came back to poems in earnest during my MFA. As I became more and more singularly obsessed with poetry, I started to think of ways I might make myself useful to the community, and I kept coming back to interviews. I toyed with the idea of just having a bunch of these conversations and sending them out to lots of different magazines, but in the end I decided it’d be neat to house everything in a single place, under a single roof.

Read a certain way, Divedapper almost becomes a diary about my conception of myself as a writer. I started out being super self-conscious, very starchy. I was anxious that the people I was interviewing (my heroes!) wouldn’t think I was qualified to be interviewing them, so I prepared a lot of complicated, near-unanswerable questions quoting 19th-century poetic theory and that sort of thing. It was very cringe-y. Now, I don’t even prepare questions in advance. I take a few notes, list some poem names and publication dates, but by and large the conversations just happen organically. I don’t know what that is, exactly—patience, confidence, comfort in my own skin—but whatever it is, Divedapper’s given it to me.

More inspiration at Prairie Schooner.