Kaveh Akbar is an openhearted young poet with a taste for mannerism. His second book, Pilgrim Bell, reveals a sneaky wit at times infiltrated by faith, wit that longs to overthrow the wisdom of the ages:
Watch: the devil enters Adam’s lips, crawls through his throat, through his guts to finally emerge out his anus.
He’s all hollow! the devil giggles. He knows his job will be easy, a human just one long desperation to be filled.
Akbar’s family immigrated from Iran in the early nineties, when he was a toddler; English came, apparently, at some cost to his Farsi. His mother never makes much impression, though she has walk-on parts in a few poems; but his father manages, like a great character actor, to steal every scene he gets:
To be an American my father left his siblings
believing
he’d never see them again. My father
wanted to be Mick Jagger. My father
went full ghost,
ended up working on duck farms for thirty years.
What an entrance! He’s the Dennis Hopper or Danny Trejo of these poems—and, if not Mick Jagger, surely the Lou Reed.
Akbar’s poetry tends to go all ways at once. He rejects one sort of convention while embracing another, loading poems with strategies from the Avant-Garde Playbook, first published in 1920. Mostly his work is avant-garde lite. Take his delirium over sentences shattered by punctuation:
Almost everyone is. Younger than I pretend to be. I am a threat. Even in my joy. Like a cat who. Playing kills. A mouse and tongues. It back to life.
Amazon must have sent him an extra steamer trunk of periods. Punctuation here serves the purpose of Milton’s enjambment—teasing the reader into misinterpreting what follows or calling into question the way the syntax will suffer to complete itself. This forces an extreme form of attention, though Akbar’s first-grade-reader sentences (the children’s reader from hell) don’t offer much to work with. The poem elsewhere makes mock claims, mock boasts (“All day I hammer the distance. / Between earth and me. / Into faith”), ending with a thunderclap (“The way air. / Vibrates. The violence. / In your middle ear”). When so much of the content is trivial, however, the saying betrays the said. The play, as they used to say, isn’t worth the candle.
There’s nothing wrong with adding avant-garde tics and tricks to spice up a poem, but many young poets now pick and choose such things as if they were the only items on the menu at poetry’s Greasy Spoon Diner. Every choice in staging a poem, including rhyme and meter, has advantages; but the disadvantages often thwart what technique must supplement or engage. In Pilgrim Bell, we’re given a mirror-written (or -printed) poem far more disturbing unread than when a mirror is handy, a concrete poem of the dullest concrete sort, a poem right-justified for no particular reason, another in single-line stanzas, another that has banned punctuation entirely (Merwin-style), and a number murdered by words shotgunned (twelve-gauge, I think) onto the page. Most rely on current clichés of poem building—they’re poetic in a high-schoolish way. A critic could argue that even a gimcrack form conditions content, but to avoid paying damages he’d have to convince a jury that the method adds something compelling.
So many of Akbar’s poems bang on tediously, they force his manner into self-parody. In the final stanzas of a ghazal, for instance:
The hungry bear won’t dance. Bad milk burnt her tongue. How to find your voice: try. You’re bound to it like a knight to his century. Everything forgets like that.
The key, filed smooth to fit every lock, opens none. The bitter mourning uselessly in the rain. In the beginning was the eye, and the eye was wet like that.
Like a pin pushed through a pane of glass. Like life lasting longer than you can bear. Like a sundial gone bad. Like your own name. Dead set like that.
The images are striking half the time, but to lay out this chorus line of apothegms like a rank of lead soldiers deadens the effect. Much of the poetry looks like riffing with too little focus—Akbar could continue this manner forever, saying less and less with every breath. Seemingly the mark of steely self-confidence, riffing usually succumbs to a lot of dithering. (Allen Ginsberg’s “first thought, best thought” was all too soon the end of him.) Like a lot of contemporary poetry, Akbar’s work seems written to be performed by Method actors. The riff poems ask too little of the imagination and too much of the reader’s patience. Having broached an aggressive subject in his title (“Despite My Efforts Even My Prayers Have Turned into Threats,” for instance), Akbar soon kills off the poor thing. The rambling begins right at the start:
Holy father I can’t pretend I’m not afraid to see you again but when the time comes I believe my courage will expand like a sponge cowboy in water.
Alexander Pope in Peri Bathous never thought of that. The poem goes on almost forty lines more, getting to the point, I suppose, by never having a point to get to.
Too often the poems disintegrate into snippets, all hand-waving gesture and braggadocio, as if the poet’s mind were drawn toward distraction. Akbar apparently believes that every poet is a seer, someone to explain the times to the times—yet the poems shy from wrestling with the political except in clumsy, sidelong ways.
Somewhere a man is steering a robotic plane into murder. “Robot” from the Czech robota, meaning forced labor. Murder labor, forced. He never sees the bodies, which are implied by their absence.
You don’t have to love armed drones to think this cheats a bit. The labor the Czech word refers to was forced in the sense of obligatory, one of the distasteful aspects of serfdom common through Europe during the Middle Ages. In Old Czech it could also mean hard work, and in modern simply drudgery. “Murder labor” puts the poet’s thumb on the scale. (Can a robotic plane in any meaningful sense be forced to murder? Is “murder” even relevant if the targets are armed combatants?) I’m not sure how absence here implies anything but poor resolution on the Reaper drone-cam.
There are other ways in which the poet doesn’t quite comprehend his means. It’s no crime not to know a thing about meter, but you shouldn’t pretend you do. Akbar texts a line in Farsi to his dad, who translates it as “We have lost whatever we had to lose.” Akbar responds, somewhat grandly, “Hammering / pentameter. // Whatever we / had.” Dad's translation is not iambic, unfortunately, just loose iambic tetrameter with anapestic substitutions.
A poet in Romantic garb may wish himself Keats, as Akbar apparently does; but the dress-up makes a reader wince:
Hello, this is Kaveh speaking: I wanted to be Keats (but I’ve already lived six years too long).
Hello, this is Keats speaking: it is absurd to say anything now (much less anything new).
The tone is cruelly embarrassing. You wonder whether Akbar would write so facetiously of someone who died of AIDS rather than tuberculosis.
Akbar’s tortured rhetoric is less evident in poems that catch the disjunctions of immigrant life. On the battleground of family, there’s always more to be said:
My father’s white undershirt peeking out through his collar. My father’s hand slicing skin, gristle, from a chicken carcass I hold still against the cutting board.
Sometimes he bites his bottom lip to suppress what must be rage. It must be rage
because it makes no sound. My vast terror at what I can’t hear,
at my ignorance, is untranslatable. My father speaks in perfect English.
This is Akbar’s most productive and compelling subject, a strong advance on his first book, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (2017), whose sharp-edged phrases and rare gift for metaphor were sunk in a morass of self-pity amid a garden-variety addict’s tale.
Though his poems have often been giddily praised, Akbar has yet to make much use of his talent. The blurbs touting Pilgrim Bell are sweetly absurd—as if an out-of-work script-doctor or two had been hired to punch them up. Nothing else explains the following:
Working at and along the outer edges of language, Pilgrim Bell calls us to attention and to attend to that which poetry and prayer share, while simultaneously demanding that we tend to the political, the social, the erotic—all that is quotidian and human.
Despite the Barnum-esque puffery, these poems are neither notably demanding nor within a country mile of prayer. Consider another blurb: “Pilgrim Bell is destined to become a classic, another blazing torch added to the eternal flames.” That sounds suspiciously like an invitation to burn the book. Charity forbids me to reveal the names of the guilty.
The most hilarious pages of Pilgrim Bell are devoted to Akbar’s acknowledgments, which thank ninety-two people, two foundations, and his “students and colleagues” at one university and a pair of colleges. That’s enough to fill a small football stadium. “Thank you” is repeated ten times. He doesn’t forget to thank the reader, of course. It’s like an Oscar ceremony where the winner can’t shut up.
❂
WILLIAM LOGAN’s most recent book of poems is Rift of Light (Penguin, 2017). His new book of criticism, Broken Ground: Poetry and the Demon of History, was published last spring by Columbia University Press.