JLF 2019 INTERVIEW SERIES

Kaveh Akbar
Kaveh Akbar is disarmingly handsome. For a long-time reader of his poetry, the beauty of his words and the power with which he reads them are familiar. Less so are the openness with which he speaks, and the warmth and empathy that emanate from his demeanour. I sat down with him one evening at Diggi Palace. Here are some excerpts from our meandering conversation:

How did you begin writing?
I’ve been writing as long as I can remember. My mom has poems that I wrote when I was three and four years old. I used to write short stories, I wrote novels. It’s just a big part of who I am.

Did your Iranian-American heritage start playing a part from a young age? Or did you at first write about angst and teenage drama, and so on?
The second thing! I definitely started writing more about dinosaurs and basketball and these sorts of things. It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I really started to think about who I was.

Did you always know that you were going to make a career as a poet?
I knew that I was going to make poetry in my life, but I assumed that that meant that I would be living in tubercula and squalor and write poems at night for nobody to read! I didn’t think that being a poet would mean getting invited to beautiful festivals and making a living being a poet.

You have written about your journey of sobriety. Was it difficult to write from such a personal space?
No, because I was just writing to make sense of it. This is where I go to figure out how I felt about anything. I have to work things out on a page so that I can figure out what I think about it.

Did you fear exposure, with publication?
No, because when I was writing, I wasn’t worrying about publication. Writing and publishing are two different things for me.

In a lot of your poems, there’s an overwhelming sense of isolation. Can you tell me what drove you to write about that?
Well, I mean, addiction is very lonely. Life is very lonely, but the life of an addict is particularly lonely, because you feel so sorry for yourself. I was defined by self-pity then, and I took no accountability for my behaviour. Recovery was a long process of learning how to be accountable. Writing helped me look at myself with objectivity and stare at my own… (long pause)… imperfections and cruelties without flinching.

Tell me about your relationship with your parents. I have a specific line here which I absolutely love… “you grow to love the creatures you create,” in River of Milk.

Yes, my mother’s brilliant. She gave me my love for language. She was the person who taught me that language was a site for fun. I love her very much. She was the first artist I ever knew.

Tell us about your future projects. Who are you writing to, or writing about, next?
I don’t know! I’m just writing. I just write some poems and eventually I’ll hold a magnet over them and they’ll just pull themselves together.

And finally, tell us about some wonderful poets of colour that we should be reading.
The poet Tiana Clark, whose collection that came out last year is called I Can’t Talk About The Trees Without The Blood. The Vietnamese poet Hieu Minh Nguyen whose collection, Not Here, came out last year. Javier Zamora wrote a book called Unaccompanied. I could name so, so many more.