Kaveh Akbar was balancing on his toes. It was the first thing I noticed about him, despite his other striking qualities—the lopsided bun that could hardly contain a mass of dark curls, the nimble fingers riffling pages. But it was the balletic stance that got me right away, the fact that his feet barely touched the ground as he stood en pointe at the front of the room. He punctuated the ends of particularly compelling sentences by bobbing his heels toward the floor, only to spring upward once again. It was the time of day that usually draws a soporific, scholarly crowd to a reading—middle-aged locals with little else to do on a Tuesday evening at happy hour—except today the room was packed and the faces attentive, some, stranger still, even young.
It was Akbar’s poetry that had brought me to the reading. His first two major collections, Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Pilgrim Bell, debuted to great acclaim, and won him fellowships, Pushcart Prizes, and the kind of pop-cultural enthusiasm that seems elusive for other contemporary poets. His hyper-attuned literary taste—as a poetry editor first at The Paris Review and then at The Nation—solidified his following and proved his ability to reinvent poetry as a relevant art form. My own admiration stemmed from his commitment to a rigorous historical excavation of the poetic tradition, and his interest in advocating for the continued value of spiritual verse in our secular literary world.
But on this particular day, he was reading a passage from his then yet-to-be-released debut novel, Martyr! So, I thought, this tiptoe stance could be chalked up to anxiety—the understandable nervousness of a poet sharing his first narrative endeavor. But as the passage he’d chosen began to accumulate in the room, creating its own distinct presence, I started to doubt my first impression. After just a few minutes, Akbar’s enthusiasm had mingled with his prose to produce the extraordinary: a crowd of energetic, even vocally engaged listeners. There were audible laughs punctuated by soft, reflective “hmm”s. This author had nothing to be nervous about.
When I finally, and eagerly, received a copy of Martyr! a few weeks later, I found myself anticipating the passage from the reading with a growing sense of bewilderment. How might his narrative get from here to there in the space of a few hundred pages? And yet, when the passage did arrive, it fit perfectly. Akbar is capable not only of translating his interests and concerns from the potent images of poetry to the expansive narrative of fiction, but of transforming and deepening them in ways I never could have expected. In an increasingly specialized world, Akbar serves as a reminder that the exceptional writers among us are capable of being “both/and,” picking and choosing their mediums to illuminate different facets of their creative universe.
And Akbar’s creative universe is vast. Many of his poems echo his personal experiences as a recovering alcoholic, holding equal space for the abject despair of newfound sobriety and the overwhelming gratitude for daily survival. He has, indeed, described poetry as a place to put himself during recovery—to hold on to what he calls “the delicious primacy of the present” and ward off thoughts of suicide. While his interest in the spiritual is a theme throughout all his work, he always seeks to interrelate the mundane and the bodily with the lofty and the divine. Akbar often mentions a quote from the fourteenthcentury Persian poet Hafez: “Start seeing God everywhere, but keep it secret.”
Martyr!, a continuation of all these themes, proves nearly impossible to summarize. It manages to include terminal cancer, Alcoholics Anonymous, American imperialism, an Iranian soldier who impersonates the angel of death, bisexual love, gay love, straight love, the New York art world, an industrial Indiana chicken farm, and what it means to be alive and to be good.
If all this paints a picture of Akbar as some morose philosopher, weighed down by misery and introspection, discard the image! Even the darkest events in his prose turn hilarious, and his commitment to redemption renders his writing urgent and useful. Indeed, as I closed Martyr! and found myself thinking back to that very first image of him, tiptoe before an attentive audience, I realized it wasn’t a posture produced by excessive anxiety or energy. No, I thought, it was the stance of an author buoyed by sincere, nearly anti-gravitational enthusiasm.
I spoke to Akbar over Zoom about everything from addiction to secular forms of prayer, from the origins of poetry to the ways his dog reminds him to practice an ethics of care.
—India Ennenga
I. “First Fight. Then Fiddle.”
THE BELIEVER: There’s an interest in the failure or the limits of language in your work, across poetry and prose. To my mind, the ineffable can come either from not having the words for something or from experiencing something that exists beyond words.
KAVEH AKBAR: My favorite works of all time incorporate the idea of an emotional catalyst dwarfing the medium’s ability to record it—whether that’s Coltrane’s irreproducible high C, or how Rodin left his thumbprints all over his sculptures. It’s Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” too. All my favorite artists signal the insufficiency of their medium to fully represent what is being gestured toward.
BLVR: You’ve said you want to honor all the poets “whose rapturous ecstasy overwhelmed even language’s ability to transcribe it.” Many of those, I imagine, are the authors you included as the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets and the Divine. Spiritual and religious writing offers some of the deepest considerations of the ineffable but feels a little taboo in our increasingly secular culture.
KA: It’s out of style, certainly. The standard belief is that if you’re smart, you have to be cynical. There’s an equivalency of skepticism with intelligence, and of belief with naivete, which is the height of hubris to me—as if we have suddenly landed upon an intelligence heretofore unavailable to Milton or Rabi’ah.
BLVR: That equivalency makes it easy to forget that spiritual verse is the origin of poetry—indeed, in many cultures there is no distinction whatsoever between poetry and prayer. Would you say that all poetry, even the most contemporary and secular, is still grappling with our earliest concerns of articulating a spiritual ineffability?
KA: In the anthology, I point to Enheduanna, born in 2286 BCE, a female priest who wrote often to the goddess Inanna, as the earliest attributable author in history. She was exiled from the Sumerian city-state of Ur by her brother when her dad, Sargon, died. So she was writing a lot of her hymns from exile, which immediately connected her to Ovid, and to Dante. And her themes feel very contemporary: she writes about man’s corrosive impact on the earth, for example, saying of Inanna, “In your thunder, nothing green could live.” Putting together The Book of Spiritual Verse gave me this sense of utter humility for just that reason. It forced me to recognize that for forty-three centuries, literary titans—from Enheduanna, to Rabi’ah, to Lao-tzu, to Donne, to Keats—have all been talking about the same shit that we’re still talking about.
My novel is interested in the most ineffable subjects that can occur to us, like how we can apply language to something as big as the possibility of a capital-G God. But I feel that, with any of the things I’m interested in writing about—life, death, love, justice—if something useful could be said about them with something as insufficient as language, it would have been done already. Which is to say that if Milton couldn’t figure it out, and Mahadevi couldn’t figure it out, and Enheduanna couldn’t figure it out, then Kaveh in his Houston hotel room isn’t going to be the one to land upon the pristine verse that will, for example, stop empire from lurching us into irreversible ecological collapse, right?
BLVR: So language has limits not only in regards to what it can describe, but also to what it can enact.
KA: And then there’s work that happens off the page, that happens in our living. Gwendolyn Brooks, in Annie Allen, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950, has a poem called “First Fight. Then Fiddle.” I can’t improve upon that; it’s perfect. In other words, you do the work that you have to do for your community and then you write about it. You don’t confuse one for the other. That sort of humility is really important. So I can take a call from a newcomer in recovery who complains to me about his mom for two hours, and then after that, I sit down to write a book orbiting sobriety and martyrdom. That’s how I might be called to action on any given day.
BLVR: Do you find yourself confronting the same questions around the utility and precision of language in your writing and your living?
KA: In both cases I’m constantly confronting the issue of how we apply something as clumsy as the human technology of language. This is especially true for English, which is the most murderous technology we’ve ever invented. English has been used to aid and abet Indigenous genocide, chattel slavery, the building and deployment of nuclear weapons. So how do you use that technology to tell your niece that you love her? Or to compliment your spouse’s new poem? Or to tell an imaginary story?
BLVR: You build silence into your poetry—especially in the collection Pilgrim Bell. Is silence a way of acknowledging that struggle with the ineffable that’s happening on the page?
KA: One hundred thousand percent, yes! Jean Valentine was a great poet of silence, and when you read her work, you get the sense that the language is just the mold around the shape of the silence, which is the thing that she’s really trying to hand to you. I’m so fascinated by that. There’s even a line in my book where one of the characters describes language as “flour thrown on a ghost.” In my experience of writing, I’m always left with that sense of the treachery of images.
BLVR: It’s the problem of Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” again.
KA: Exactly. Because what I’m making is a representation or an illumination, but it is not the thing itself. It can never actually be the object, or the person, or the justice, or the grief, or the loneliness, or the joy that is being pointed toward.
BLVR: That brings me to the title of your novel, Martyr!, which is overflowing with meaning in its own right. Did you have that title in mind from the beginning?
KA: No, I didn’t know that would be the title early on. The earliest drafts are called “The BookofMartyrs.docx,” which crops up in the novel as a self-referential detail. But I was definitely always aware that martyr was the animating word. It has very different valences depending on the context, but it’s a powerful word across American culture, contemporary Iranian culture, and ancient Persian culture.
II. A Piss-Pants Saint
BLVR: Visual art and performance art play an important role in Martyr! There’s a scene where a performance artist, Orkideh, describes Iranian mirror mosaics. As a side note, I immediately started picturing Orkideh as Monir Shahroudy in that moment—
KA: You know Shahroudy’s mirror pieces! She’s incredible, no? I was looking at a book of her work as I wrote that passage. Shahroudy talks about the Safawid explorers as a source of inspiration, saying that when they tried to bring mirrors back from Europe, the glass shattered in transit, so they used the fragments as a material for interior decoration instead. I see it as a cubist practice developed well before European cubism.
BLVR: The cubist notion of a fragmented self feels relevant to the book’s form, which revolves around different perspectives on a singular death. Is the fragmented narrative a cubist perspective on one tragedy?
KA: The book has a choral perspective, in which you never hear from the protagonist in the first person—everyone else is speaking in the first person about him, but you get his experiences only in the close third person. I was also interested in this because it’s the language of hagiography; it’s how the Gospels of the New Testament are constructed. That was important to me to replicate, because depending on how you interpret a few key moments in the text, the entire novel can be read as a hagiography of an unlikely martyr-saint. I’m interested in the possibility that such martyr-saints walk among us. Talmudic Judaism believes that at any given moment, there are thirty-six saints on Earth. Thirty-five of them have a direct line to God and can hear exactly what he wants them to be doing, but there’s one who does not have access to God—who just accidentally does all the right shit, purely organically. Isn’t that the best?
BLVR: That’s amazing. I’ve never heard that before, but it’s a beautiful idea. The most unlikely person or character might secretly be that thirty-sixth saint.
KA: Exactly. And that one poor person walking among us might even be a piss-pants drunk who can’t look beyond himself to the love he receives from the world. There’s something appealing, even charming, about that. It was important to me that one could read my protagonist, Cyrus, in that light.
BLVR: So the fragmentation is inflected by cubism but also by the tradition of hagiographies. Do you feel this offers a clearer sense of character than a first-person narration?
KA: These varying perspectives return to the idea of throwing flour on a ghost. Martin Buber writes about “I and Thou” in this regard. Our configuration right now is actually really strange, because we’re talking on Zoom, but if we were sitting across a coffee table, I would have a high-resolution, specialized vision of your face. I have only some vague sense of my own face, however, as a hole that moves periodically—it’s a much more low-res image. I’m interested in how this pertains to art, how writing can triangulate a singular identity from various external perspectives, and how that gets at character better than first-person narration ever could.
BLVR: Does the same apply to your poetry?
KA: I know I’m supposed to say that my poetic voice is completely different from my own—that the “I” of the speaker and the “I” of the poet are utterly distinct. My poetry editors might come break my kneecaps for saying this, but with my poetry, I’m not interested in creating a persona—I never really have been. It’s funny, actually: my recent poetic output has mostly been little goofy love poems for my spouse. Often I’ll give my spouse one and say, “I wrote you a love poem.” And they’ll read it and say, “But this is just about you.” I’ll refuse to believe that at first, but then I’ll re-read the thing and realize there’s a you that appears at the very end with about twenty-seven I’s preceding it. All of which is to say, I’m yoked to my subjectivity in poetry.
BLVR: That calls to mind Frank O’Hara’s “Personism” manifesto, which playfully argues that a poem should be a direct address to one specific reader: “the poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.”
KA: I agree with O’Hara: There’s no difference between a poem and a telephone. You’re just talking to one other person. Sometimes I’m talking to God but trying to impress my spouse; other times I’m talking to my spouse but trying to impress God.
BLVR: Maybe this is also a question about prayer. In your work, prayer isn’t a direct communication with a religious deity so much as a means to love what is in front of you, to recognize the “miraculous ordinary of life.” I wonder if perhaps you see prayer as a poetic format, in which fear and hope can be given meaning precisely because they are contained in a linguistic structure?
KA: What I can say is that prayer is a big part of my life. And it’s not really important to me that I understand if anything is on the other end of it. When I get on my knees, or when I do salat, I’m not trying to summon an interventionist god. That’s not how my conception of the divine works. For example, I don’t pray for the unhoused in my community and then say my job is done. I pray for the unhoused in my community and then I go buy socks and Clif Bars and maxi pads and I take them to the mission. Saint Teresa of Ávila said, “God has no hands but ours.” That is how prayer works—and that is how writing works also.
BLVR: It’s that same concept of “first fight, then fiddle” from Brooks.
KA: Exactly. I have not found prayer to be particularly effective at summoning an interventionist deity, but what I have found is that it often foregrounds in my mind something I care about, and I can carry that through the day as I make my decisions. My spouse and I are assiduous recyclers—separating and rinsing and leaving it out properly. A friend was over at our house watching us do this and said, “You know that all recycling just goes to the same landfill that your trash goes to, right?” And of course we know that—we read the same Google search results that everyone else does—but there’s a way in which the action of rinsing out every can is a kind of secular prayer. It reminds us that we are connected to a larger ecology that is influenced by our actions and our behaviors.
BLVR: It’s easy to think of prayer as deeply personal and internal, but your version of it points outward to the collective and social.
KA: These forms of secular prayer keep you connected to the sense that you’re part of a larger system of action, certainly. But it’s worth being very specific about what I mean here, because I think one of the greatest cons that late capitalism pulled on its denizens is putting the burden of guilt on consumers instead of on corporations. It seems absolutely absurd that Exxon can put 111 million metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year, but we’re policing one another over forgetting to take our reusable bags to the grocery store.
BLVR: Is prayer a way of practicing optimism in the face of abject existential despair?
KA: Optimism feels scary to me.
BLVR: Maybe hope is a better word?
KA: I don’t know. I struggle to get to hope. I feel like an engine that runs on hope usually sputters when we’re talking about empire. You get a tiny little gain—but then Roe v. Wade is overturned. It’s not sustainable. And hope can be used as a cudgel—especially this idea that with sufficient training of the spirit, one should always be able to revert to hope and optimism. In that sense, hope can be used to suppress critiques of empire and its actions. When climate scientists tell us that we may be past the point of irreversible ecological collapse, for example, I have no reason not to believe them—I don’t think it serves me or my species to try to find ways to reframe that in order to produce hope or optimism. But this is something I struggle with. I endlessly reprocess my own thinking about it, because these are questions in which I’m really interested and invested.
III. A Moral World / Amoral World
BLVR: You’ve written about the Mosaic code as the moral groundwork on which Western society is built, pointing out that it’s primarily concerned with negation or abnegation. The “thou shalt not”s of the Ten Commandments suggest that we achieve goodness simply by avoiding evil. This came to mind recently when I heard Brandon Taylor speak on moral relativism, advocating for more villains that are as abjectly horrifying as some people are in reality. What’s your take on this notion of moral world-building?
KA: I think about this a lot. Can I get a little tinfoil-hat-esque with you?
BLVR: Please do. Putting mine on now.
KA: Within twelve months of 9/11, the first of the Harry Potter movies, the first Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie, and the first Lord of the Rings movie all debuted. There’s a reason that all three hit so massively: we were being fed these lines about how terrorists hate our freedom. But the terrorists who perpetrated 9/11 gave us a pretty extensive list, many thousands of words long, about what they hated—and freedom wasn’t anywhere on there. These movies, however, offered us obvious mustache-twirling villains pitted against purely good superheroes.
BLVR: An infantilizing moral duality—and one that is at the heart of a lot of America’s self-mythologizing.
KA: Right—and that dynamic dominated our culture for the next two decades—particularly with the Marvel movies. The fundamental formula is this: an interloper comes in from out of town and disrupts the status quo; the superhero punches the interloper back to the moon; and then everything reverts to the happy status quo again. Reversion to the status quo is a fundamentally regressive, conservative position. It’s “Make America Great Again.”
BLVR: So what was a reactionary position, post-9/11, became pop-cultural canon.
KA: Yes, and it started seeping into high art and literature. I’m not going to name names, but if you look at a lot of the really zeitgeist-y American fiction and poetry of the last ten years, moral complexity and nuanced ethical depth are not generally their strong points. Whereas if you read Toni Morrison or Nabokov or Virginia Woolf, their books feel like meals in terms of the ethical questions they are asking—the way the bad guys have moments of grace. That’s the sort of ethical rigor I find nourishing. As a person in recovery, I try to move through life taking fearless moral inventory every day. Frippery about one’s own morality is the dubious luxury of normal people, but I can’t get away with that shit anymore. I look to art to help me calibrate my own barometer, and I think it’s telling that in recent years I’ve been turning to Morrison and Nabokov and Woolf, rather than to contemporary fare.
BLVR: You’ve spoken about getting off social media after being pretty active, because it made you feel like you were no longer “in command of the distribution and focus of your rage.” Is rage a force you harness in constructing a complex moral world for your writing?
KA: Absolutely. I found that my rage was being made too diffuse by Twitter specifically, which is a brilliant monetization of the straw man fallacy. Everyone is desperate for a fight they can win in the moment, so instead of coming for the actual people putting billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year or the people ordering the rubbling of civilian refugee centers, we come for the well-intentioned but rhetorically clumsy person on Twitter. That seems like such a distraction to me when the stakes of the real problems are so high.
BLVR: So if that scattershot rage isn’t productive, what kind of rage do you seek to harness?
KA: Rage that is a measure of tenderness. Rage that rises out of a surfeit of compassion. Rage that emerges from an ability to perceive the interiority of the harmed. I feel that an engine that runs on rage, the right sort of rage, will never sputter in empire. There’s never a day in which you can’t see a state murder of an unarmed civilian in this country, or the corrosive effects of empire on lands abroad, even as empire tries to minimize or conceal those corrosive missives, those deleterious effects. So harnessing that kind of rage is one of the projects of Martyr!, which is animated by the Iran Air flight 655 disaster, which endlessly pisses me off. At best, if you mention it to an elder, they’ll say, Oh yeah, the Vincennes incident—what was that again? I feel that that kind of response—even using the term incident to describe the US shooting a passenger flight carrying 290 innocent people out of the sky—just confirms the fact that we take the imprecision of American justice for granted, that killing women and children is simply the unpleasant but necessary cost of doing business.
BLVR: You’ve spoken before about the number of people killed—290—as a difficult quantity for us to grasp, saying that it’s at once too small to seem catastrophic and too big to feel poignant. Can art forge an emotional response to what we usually metabolize from the news as disembodied numbers of casualties?
KA: Art is capable of returning to the atrocity its atrociousness. Writing this book was a way of illuminating one imaginary life of the 290 people killed. Even to my mind, 290 is a middle-large number: it’s in that zone where if you said 292 or 278, it wouldn’t make a difference somatically in how my brain registers it. But that one life—that one life is this novel. Fiction can work as a channel of action this way, lending the granularity of individual narrative to the abstraction of collective grief.
BLVR: Does the rage you were describing earlier ever get in the way of creating nuanced, even empathetic villains? And should rage still make room for a character’s redemption, even if they are deeply immoral?
KA: Well, I believe absolutely in rehabilitation. I work with people every day who have done truly vile shit and are now making their lives useful. So the zenith of that belief is the idea that the world and its bad actors can be… rehabilitated? I say that, but even hearing it come out of my mouth sounds so absurdly naive. When I hear the harrowing accounts from my Palestinian friends, for example, I long for a comforting belief in a literal, lake-of-fire, punitive hell for their tormentors. So even though I say I believe in rehabilitation absolutely, I have trouble truly applying that all the time. I’m still a work in progress. Art helps.
BLVR: I’m wondering if those two responses to evil map onto the difference between a saint and a martyr. A saint is perfect in the face of personal suffering. She exists in a realm of absolute good versus absolute evil. Whereas martyrs, and specifically the kind that you’ve termed “earth martyrs”—people, like Emily Davison or Bhagat Singh, who are killed for the sake of other people, rather than out of an impulse toward the divine—act from a belief in rehabilitation, a belief that their deaths can produce change. They grapple with their rage at injustice, but approach it from a place of care. Might that be why the figure of the martyr is more appealing or fascinating to us than that of a saint, given the current state of our world?
KA: I think that’s beautiful. I mean, I love reading and learning about the saints. I have a pin on my backpack right this second that has a quote on it from Saint Augustine: “Lord, grant me chastity and continence, but not yet!” That sort of saintliness is the kind of saintliness I can get behind. When you read about the saints, those flaws are what make them aspirational. This is why I think it’s important for us to never erase Martin Luther King Jr.’s philandering, or Mother Teresa’s racism—because if they are just these divine good guys put on Earth to do some good-guy shit, then none of us can aspire toward them. But when you recognize your flawed humanity in the lives of these people who did mammoth, sweepingly good deeds, aspiration becomes a little more available.
BLVR: Yes—and despite this, both martyrs and saints become monolithic, incredibly fraught figures in our world. People shy away from addressing them, or their flaws, directly. Which raises the question of risk. Do you see risk as essential to ethics?
KA: One of my favorite authors is Nicholson Baker. He’s this very sweet, sixty-something-year-old, white Quaker guy who also wrote Checkpoint, which I would say is one of the most politically volatile, risky novels I’ve ever encountered. I read it in high school, and the impression it left on me—the sense of its radioactivity—has never diminished. The whole novel is a book-length conversation with a guy who is debating the ethics of assassinating George W. Bush during the escalation of the Iraq War. It’s almost treated like the trolley problem: the character asks himself, If I give up my life and Bush’s life to save countless hundreds of thousands of others, is that an ethical good? As a guy named Kaveh Akbar, reading this book about assassinating George W. Bush in post-9/11 America felt really, really risky—like it was something I needed to hide under my bed. I couldn’t believe Baker was saying these things in print, especially in the days after 9/11.
BLVR: The author’s risk actually infected or implicated you, the reader.
KA: Exactly. There’s also a great editorial by Susan Sontag that came out just a few days after 9/11—it was part of a roundtable in The New Yorker, for which John Updike and Jonathan Franzen, et cetera, wrote thousand-word statements. And Susan Sontag was just like, What the fuck are you all doing? You’re calling them cowards—and they may be a lot of things, but to fly a plane into a building, and give your life for that, is not cowardice. Her ability to articulate that, at a moment when Walmart was selling out of American flags, felt like bravery and risk-taking to me. I talk to my students a lot about risk. And there’s a way in which writing about doing x, y, or z drug, or doing a, b, or c sex act, passes for risk. But Allen Ginsberg was doing all that in the ’50s. That subject matter hasn’t been risky for seventy-five years, at least not in a way that would shock a reader of contemporary literature. But what did shock this reader of contemporary literature was Sontag’s essay and Baker’s Checkpoint. I have always had this in my mind as a thing to aspire to: What would actually be risky for me to do?
BLVR: Across your work, you’ve described love or joy as a flower blooming straight in your face. There’s something insistent and rebellious about this image of joy continuing, despite whatever personal preoccupations we may have. Do you sometimes find the world’s oblivious happiness to be deeply annoying, given the state of human morality?
KA: I am frequently looking to the world to corroborate my shitty cynicism, my despair. And instead the world just thrusts its flower in my face. Literally and figuratively. At my most depressed, the world will give me a FaceTime from my niece instead of reflecting my gloom—and it’s obnoxious! I want to believe absolutely in one tidy monolithic truth, and the world denies me that.
BLVR: It gets at the complexity we were talking about, with how one lives in this world today. There’s a constant push and pull in your work—a character can be existentially depressed about the state of the world and then go outside and find spring blooming in beauty. That feels very true to lived experience, but it isn’t often reflected in narrative fiction.
KA: I have to say, we rescued this dog, Galilee, a little over a year ago from a dying farmer—he’s the first dog of my entire life. We naively thought we would just watch some YouTube tutorials and integrate him into our house with our three cats, but obviously it’s more complicated than that. I take him to the dog park literally every day. I need to pick up his shit. I need to make him a chicken-and-vegetable stew that I put on top of his kibble. I just always have a thing to be doing with him—and that gives me this sublime sense of purpose. I’m sure that’s something to which a lot of people can relate, whether they’re a parent or a caregiver or a teacher: the persistence of things that need us and that are utterly quotidian.
BLVR: Like practicing an ethics of care every day?
KA: Yes, exactly. So many of my students are so immobilized by a very different sense of responsibility: every poem has to arrest the global specter of fascism, and also end nuclear proliferation, and also make restitution for the legacies of Indigenous genocide—basically all of humanity’s worst hits. Language can speak to those things and illuminate them—but as the Iraqi poet Dunya Mikhail says, “I still feel that poetry is not medicine—it’s an X-ray.” I think people believe they have to stand in front of a tank in order to be useful. But if I’m waiting until the tanks roll down my street in Iowa City before I do anything, I’m going to be waiting a long time. I’m not going to be doing any good for anyone.
IV. Mining the Personal
BLVR: You speak quite openly about your own addiction and recovery, but it’s incredibly hard to mine such personal experiences, especially for fictional narratives. What’s your approach to drawing from your own life in your work?
KA: I’m yoked to my subjectivity, like anyone else, and I don’t choose my obsessions. To speak purely mechanically, I write a lot without worrying about what I’m going to publish until way later. The act of composition is so distinct from the idea of publication that I’ll write anything. I can write about the most intimate details of my life without any sort of reservation.
BLVR: Does the decision-making happen in editing, then?
KA: Yes, it’s not until I’m retro-engineering poems or narratives that I have to figure out how much of this very explicit, personally revelatory data I want to include. A lot of the time, I don’t mind putting it in, because it’s amid so much nonautobiographical stuff that it feels like it’s hiding in plain sight.
BLVR: Something I’m really struck by throughout your work is the nuance with which you manage to capture addiction and recovery—as a series of physical, emotional, even spiritual contradictions. In your poem “I Won’t Lie This Plague of Gratitude,” the narrator is surprised to find gratitude for the utterly mundane things flooding their being during recovery. On the other hand, when you describe intoxication in your novel, you liken it to a paradise that’s come too early, which one then has to learn how to live past during the quotidianness of recovery.
KA: Well, in my novel, almost every main character perceives themselves to be living past their peak. For Cyrus, that peak was a narcotic high where he could just summon these experiences that felt like elevens on a one-to-ten scale, and now he has to live between the fives. Or Orkideh, who certainly believes herself to be living past a peak. Or Arash, who had found purpose riding around the battlefield as the Angel of Death, but now is ravaged by that experience. All these people are thinking about what to do when you’re left alive after you’ve already been to heaven. I think this is something that most humans, if they live long enough, will experience—that’s why the book ends the way it does, with a coda where another character speaks directly about what she perceives to be her zenith. She says she wishes she could have stored those peak feelings away like fat in her meat, so she could draw from them during the long seasons ahead. She is also one of the few characters who is capable of realizing happiness as it unfolds in the present. I wanted to end with a character who’s capable of recognizing a peak while it is happening.
BLVR: Recognizing a peak in all its ephemerality feels very enlightened—it’s an acknowledgment that life doesn’t always add up to a satisfying whole. Cyrus’s version of martyrdom, on the other hand, revolves around an insistence that death gives life its meaning. Is that contrast also related to a recovery mind-set versus an addiction mind-set?
KA: Martyrdom is like a button you can push to externally impose meaning on a life in an instant, retroactively. And in that sense, it is very related to addiction, which is about always wanting to push the button that can make you feel good instantaneously. I’ve been sober for ten years, but the addiction mind-set still feels utterly rational to me—that is, if feeling good is as easy as taking a pill or having a drink or snorting a line, why does anyone ever choose to do anything else? I look at my spouse, for example, who has never had a problem with drinking or using at any point in their life, but, since meeting me, they’ve been sober too. They tell me they felt it might make recovery easier for me. But it almost pisses me off—it’s like: You’re just wasting your ability to get drunk! You’re allowed to, and you’re not even using it! It’s almost annoying to me.
BLVR: [Laughs] You haven’t personally come to terms with that final piece of the novel you described—allowing peaks of happiness to simply come and go.
KA: And that’s how I know that God is still working on my soul.
V. A Language Artist
BLVR: We’ve focused mostly on your poetry and prose, but you’re also a teacher and an editor. Do you see all your various modes of working as related?
KA: This is going to sound pretentious, but the most honest way I’ve found to describe myself is as a language artist. I like how it foregrounds the medium and the materiality of the medium. And luckily for me, for whatever reason, writing doesn’t seem to draw from the same reservoir as editing. I can write and compose and then edit something for another half of the day without one extinguishing the ability to do the other. And then teaching is actually a source of energy. I sincerely love teaching, to the point that I would do it—and have done it—for free.
BLVR: What does your discipline as a language artist look like in a very practical, daily sense?
KA: My days are pretty variable. The postwar Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert says there are “cat writers” and “ox writers”: the ox writer is out in the fields every day, dutifully pulling the plow no matter how hard the soil. Meanwhile, the cat writer patrols the house, and stares out the window attentively, and takes important naps, and then, when a mote of dust catches the light, they pounce on it. I’m an ox writer constitutionally, but circumstances—like traveling on book tours and teaching at the University of Iowa—have recently forced me to learn more catlike tendencies. And so every day looks pretty different.
BLVR: Do you move seamlessly in your writing between verse and prose—for example, did you consciously decide to write a novel, or was it more intuitive?
KA: It was a natural progression. I just found I was starting to write characters and scenes that were talking to each other in a way my poetry never had. During this process, I was also trading pages with Tommy Orange, and our pages got crazier and crazier, more and more like prose. When I realized what was happening, I put myself on this diet of two novels a week and a movie a day, just to learn how narrative functions. I’d been reading novels and watching movies my whole life, of course, but I was just a happy seal, clapping and enjoying being told stories. I had never really thought critically—or rather, kleptomaniacally—about those texts before.
BLVR: Were there certain films or books that you lived with over the course of writing Martyr! that consistently informed the work for you?
KA: Borges is one of my Mount Rushmore writers. He’s in everything I do—I made a Borges zine a couple years ago, actually.
BLVR: I had no idea you made zines—or was that a one-off Borges project?
KA: I often make zines between larger writing projects. They’re places to put my obsessions. For example, after I turned Martyr! in, I was still obsessing over story lines and details. I didn’t want the book to get bloated with it all, so I made a zine filled with drawings, paintings, a little extra scene, and riffs on stuff that I’d cut from the novel. I made an edition of about five hundred of those and asked Knopf to “Willy Wonka” them into random preorders, which they did.
BLVR: So we can add “visual artist” to your long list of occupations.
KA: I wouldn’t call myself a visual artist—it’s just a nice creative practice that isn’t tethered in any way to the rest of my life. My spouse is a writer. I’m a writer. My job is teaching writers. It’s beautiful. But it’s nice to have one thing that’s separate. I’ve never sold a painting—I just give them away to people.
BLVR: Sorry, I took us away from Borges there. I think you were about to tell me a story?
KA: Yes! So all his life, Borges wrote about infinity and approximations of infinity. And one of his favorite approximations of infinity was the Sahara. He was also a little bit of an Orientalist, by the way, but I think I’m allowed to forgive him for that. Anyway, late in his life, he actually got to visit the Sahara. He scooped up a palmful of sand, let it slip through his fingers, and said, “I’m modifying the Sahara!” That was his epiphany. And I feel like every text I’ve inhaled over the course of my life has modified my Sahara—whether it was an Antonioni film or Pineapple Express, Cabeza de Vaca’s writings or a sci-fi novel. I can’t point to the work they’re doing any more directly than I can tell you where the croissant I ate two days ago is in my body right now, but it’s all in there doing its work.
BLVR: Some of that internal, mysterious processing is actually visible in the novel itself. I’m thinking of your use of dream sequences, where these pop-cultural characters crop up and interact. I love that laying bare of our internal workings.
KA: I’m so grateful to you for you saying that, because I have my ear to the soil of the “contemporary literary zeitgeist,” and I know you’re not supposed to put dream sequences in a book—I know that. But I’m fascinated by them. Your brain spends a third of your life staging these performances for you, but you’re not supposed to talk about them? When I wake up, I always ask my spouse what they dreamed about, because it means starting my day with my favorite person telling me a story. Why is that not the most interesting thing? [Laughs] So I think I’m right and everyone else is wrong! But I’m aware that you have to create a sense of stakes, a sense of narrative buy-in. And so the dreams that occur in the book—they’re playful, but they’re also part of the narrative bedrock upon which the novel is built.
BLVR: They also do emotional work in the book—as moments of insight and even of humor. My favorite, for example, has Lisa Simpson discussing ethics with the protagonist’s dead mother.
KA: Yes! OK, I’m kind of self-conscious about this reference, so I didn’t mention it when you asked about inspirations earlier, but more than any other single aesthetic thing, The Simpsons has probably shaped the person that I am today. It was my introduction to Kubrick, to Shakespeare—I mean, because of The Simpsons, I knew the plot of Hamlet before I ever read it; I knew about the Trojan War before I ever read the Iliad. I even met my spouse because of The Simpsons.
BLVR: Wait, what?
KA: In grad school, my spouse had this side hustle painting photorealistic stills from The Simpsons and selling them on Etsy. I saw one of Lisa Simpson holding a copy of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and I was like, What the hell? This is my person! So I slid into their DMs, as one does. We started talking at about 6 p.m. and we were still talking when the sun came up the next morning. And we just never really stopped after that. So The Simpsons is maybe the most important aesthetic thing in my life, if I’m honest. Borges and The Simpsons. Peas in a pod.
BLVR: That’s incredible. Thank you so much, Kaveh.
