Episode 40: Kaveh Akbar
Commonplace: Conversations with Poets (and Other People)
English - November 02, 2017 10:00 - 2 hours - ★★★★★ - 206 ratingsArts Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Rachel Zucker speaks with Kaveh Akbar about his first full-length poetry collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf. They talk about recovery, addiction, Ellen Bryant Voigt’s unpunctuated line, teaching, his writing process for poetry or prose, the hutzpah and/or cluelessness that enabled him to reach out to established poets, the founding and process of running Divedapper.com (Kaveh’s interview site), the art of interviewing, using poetry to press the pleasure button, social media, white poets writing about whiteness, writing to delight, writing with compassion, his poem “Heritage” (about Reyhaneh Jabbari), the potential violence of erasure poems, and the intersection of power and poetry.
Rachel Zucker speaks with Kaveh Akbar about his first full-length poetry collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf. They talk about recovery, addiction, Ellen Bryant Voigt’s unpunctuated line, teaching, his writing process for poetry or prose, the hutzpah and/or cluelessness that enabled him to reach out to established poets, the founding and process of running Divedapper.com (Kaveh’s interview site), the art of interviewing, using poetry to press the pleasure button, social media, white poets writing about whiteness, writing to delight, writing with compassion, his poem “Heritage” (about Reyhaneh Jabbari), the potential violence of erasure poems, and the intersection of power and poetry.
EXTRA MATERIALS FOR EPISODE 40Books by Kaveh Akbar
Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James, 2017)
Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017)
Other Books and Writers Mentioned in the EpisodeEllen Bryant Voigt’s Headwaters (W.W. Norton, 2014)
The Rag-Picker's Guide to Poetry: Poems, Poets, Process (University of Michigan Press, 2013)
Robert Olen Butler’s Severance (Chronicle Books, 2008)
Lauren Oliver’s ROOMS (Ecco, 2015)
Tom Phillips’ A Humument (Thames and Hudson, 2017)
Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony (Black Sparrow Press, 2015)
Major Jackson “A Mystifying Silence: Big and Black”
Other Relevant MaterialsAll Up in Your Ears (Jonathan Farmer, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, francine j. Harris and Kaveh Akbar)
Kaveh writing about his poem “Heritage” on Poetry Society
Transcription of the final voice message of Reyhaneh Jabbari
Eula Biss talking about opportunity hoarding on the podcast The Longest Shortest Time