“What Now Shall I Repair?”: an interview with Kaveh Akbar

Poetry faculty member Kaveh Akbar was recently interviewed for Orion Magazine. Read an excerpt of Akbar’s conversation with Camille Dungy below:

What Now Shall I Repair?: an interview with Kaveh Akbar

Camille: What do you think causes the hunger for poetry, that allows that translation from you writing sentences to you going to see people in the world, to share your poems?

Kaveh: Do you mean the intrinsic hunger for poetry within myself? Or the hunger for poetry that catalyzes people to ask me to come bang my pots and pans?

Camille: I think I was going for the latter, but I’m interested in the former also.

Kaveh: Hmm. I mean, the writing is in and of itself. I was doing it long before anyone cared that I was doing it. I spent many years writing poems that nobody read unless I really forced it upon people. So you know, that has been more or less a constant in my life since . . . I mean my mom has pictures of poems that I wrote when I was like four and five years old. Some of my earliest writing in the English language is poetry. In terms of the hunger for poems, just as a human enterprise, or the hunger for encountering illumination that is not of yourself —that’s just art. That’s just our species’ desire for narratives. Our brains got too big for our heads. Our heads couldn’t get any bigger or we wouldn’t be able to get born, so we invented this technology of language and writing and it’s the third lobe of our brain, right, that we just keep in libraries? That’s as old as language.

Read the rest of this interview here: https://orionmagazine.org/article/what-now-shall-i-repair/