Kevin Young and Kaveh Akbar Discuss Poetry and Power at the New Yorker

For the New Yorker’s Page-Turner column, the magazine’s poetry editor, Kevin Young, talks with Kaveh Akbar about his poetry collection in progress, Pilgrim Bell. In particular, their conversation delves into Akbar’s poem, “The Palace,” which “holds a central place,” Young explains, then asks: “Can you describe the book and this poem’s role in it?” Picking up with Akbar’s response from there: 

“Pilgrim Bell,” as it exists right now, builds to “The Palace.” Many of the poem’s images and thematic concerns are first introduced elsewhere in the book. For instance, in an early poem, you learn that when my father came to America the only bits of English he knew were Rolling Stones lyrics. So, when Mick Jagger appears later in “The Palace,” there is a little spark of recognition, an extra valence of meaning. “Pilgrim Bell” as a whole is a kind of pilgrim’s journey, a pilgrim trying to move from a desperate desire to believe into belief itself, while all the usual suspects—nation, language, memory, self-will—conspire against him. I’ve been thinking a lot about bells, how it’s the heft of a body that makes a bell ring. The book is another way to throw weight into sound.

“The Palace” recalls the epic mode, but also the ars poetica—the poem about making poetry. How do you understand the art of poetry to intersect with ambitious themes like power, violence, history, and mythology?

Poems are rarely on the side of power. What would a poem in praise of the political status quo look like? A brochure? White text on a red baseball cap? The Kurdish poet Abdulla Pashew writes: “If a word / can’t become . . . winged bread / to fly from trench to trench, / then it might as well / become a brush to polish the invader’s boots.” This isn’t an ideological stance; it’s a craft issue. The status quo is so certain of its righteousness, so convinced of its own goodness—like the old king early in the poem—its speech becomes a closed loop. There’s no exploration, the language has no synapse to fire across, so it never illuminates. Such certainty is death to interesting art.

Read on at the New Yorker.