The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine, ed. Kaveh Akbar

 

            The earliest attributable author in all of human literature is an ancient Sumerian priestess named Enheduanna. The daughter of King Sargon, Enheduanna wrote sensual, desperate hymns to the goddess Inanna: ‘My beautiful mouth knows only confusion. / Even my sex is dust.’ Written around 2300 BCE, Enheduanna’s poems were the bedrock upon which much of ancient poetics was built. And her obsession? The precipitating subject of all our species’ written word? Inanna, an ecstatic awe at the divine.
            A year after I got sober, I learned from a routine physical that my liver was behaving abnormally, teetering on the precipice of pre-cirrhosis. This was after a year of excruciating recovery, a year in which nothing harder than Ibuprofen passed through my body. If it’s this bad after a year of healing, a nurse told me, imagine how bad it must have been a year ago when you quit.
            My earliest formulating of prayer was in Arabic, that beautiful, mysterious language of my childhood. I’d be called away from whatever trivia book I was reading or Simpsons episode I was watching to join my family in our ritual of collectively pushing these enigmatic sounds through our mouths. Moving through the postures of devotion in our kitchen, watching my older brother, my mother, my father, I had no idea what any of it meant, but I knew it all meant intensely. (“Introduction”)

The biggest reason I requested a copy of the new anthology The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets on the Divine (Penguin Random House UK, 2023) was due to the book’s editor, Tehran-born American poet and editor Kaveh Akbar. If you know anything about Akbar’s work, whether his bestselling full-length poetry debut Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Farmington ME: Alice James Books, 2017) [see my review of such here] or follow-up, Pilgrim Bell: Poems (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2021) [see my review of such here], it would be fair to suggest that anything he does is very much worth paying attention to (and honestly, his introduction to this collection is worth the price of admission alone). The range of writing that Akbar includes here is breathtaking, moving across and beyond canonical poets from a purely Western tradition and perspective—one poem per author, given there are one hundred and ten contributors, with a short summary-sketch to accompany each contribution, composed by Akbar—into an array of multiple cultures and languages, expanding not only the lyric sense of the divine, but of poetry and literature itself. As Iraq poet Rabi’a al-Basri (c. 717-801) writes in an untitled piece included in the collection, as translated by Charles Upton:

O my Lord,
the stars glitter
and the eyes of men are closed.
Kings have locked their doors
and each lover is alone with his love.

Here, I am alone with You.

As Akbar’s note to accompany writes: “Freed from slavery at a young age, when her master saw her praying alone surrounded by celestial light, Rabi’a became an early Muslim ascetic, spiritual leader and poet. Late in her life, when asked about the origin of her wisdom, she replied: ‘You know of the how, I know of the how-less.’” Akbar includes works by Virgil, King David, Sappho and Li Po, and by Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, W.B. Yeats and Constantine Cavafy, but also from Patacara (Sixth century BCE, India), Shenoute (c. 360-c. 450 CE, Egypt), Kakinomoto Hitomaro (c. 653-c. 707, Japan), Uvavnuk (Nineteenth century, Igloolik), Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920-1993, Australia) and Toronto poet M. NourbeSe Philip, among a wealth of others. As Akbar writes of the poet Uvavnuk, from Igloolik, an Inuit hamlet in Nunavut, Northern Canada: “The great Inuit poet and spiritual healer Uvavnuk was said to have been struck by a meteor that bestowed her with visionary powers. The movement of the divines celebrated in this poem – the sea and the wind – feel in her language like ecstatic occasions for great celebration.” And her short poem, as translated by Jane Hirshfield:

The Great Sea

The great sea
frees me, moves me,
as a strong river carries a weed.
Earth and her strong winds
move me, take me away,
and my soul is swept up in joy.

My own sense of the spiritual, of the divine, has always remained at a distance: I was raised attending religion but never garnered a faith (I write poems for a living, so I don’t think I can claim to live without faith), growing up amongst the dour, stoic and unspoken ripples of old-style Scottish Protestantism. It was years before I understood my father’s own devotion, let alone the depth of it, attending weekly services as far more than a matter of routine or cultural habit, always appearing to me as a matter of custom, gesture and rote. I’ve long repeated that I’m somewhere between atheist and agnostic – I’m not sure what I don’t believe – but hold an admiration for those who carry spirituality as a matter of good faith, instead of, say, those who believe uncritically (including a refusal to question, which seems unsettling), or use any of their beliefs as bludgeon, or as a false sense of entitlement or superiority. Listen to Stephen Colbert, for example, speak of his Catholicism: an interview he did with Jim Gaffigan a couple of years back on The Late Show I thought quite compelling, in which they spoke of their shared faith. There are ways to be positive, and through this collection, Akbar not only finds it, but seeks it out, and embraces it.

There is such a lightness, a delicate touch to the poems assembled here, one that broadcasts a sense of song and a sense of praise to the notion of finding that single spark of light in the dark. “Somehow eternity / almost seems possible / as you embrace.” writes Ranier Maria Rilke, as part of ‘The Second Duino Elegy’ (as translated by David Young), “And yet / when you’ve got past / the fear in that first / exchange of glances / the mooning at the window / and that first walk / together in the garden / one time: / lovers, are you the same?” There is such a sense of joy, and hope, and celebration across this collection of lyrics, traditions, cultures, languages and faiths. If there is a thread that connects us all together, might it be the very notion of hope? If this collection is anything to go by, that might just be the case. Whether spiritual or otherwise, this is an impressive and wonderfully-expansive collection that can only strengthen the heart.

Kaveh Akbar, Pilgrim Bell: Poems

 

PILGRIM BELL 

My savior has powers and he needs.
To be convinced to use them.
Up until now he has been.
A no-call no-show. Curious menace.
Like a hornet’s nest buzzing.
On a plane wing. Savior. Younger than.
I pretend to be. 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. The cat lives.
Somewhere between wonder.
And shame. I live in a great mosque.
Built on top of a flagpole.
Whatever happens happens.
Loudly. All day I hammer the distance.
Between earth and me.
Into faith. Blue light pulls in through.
The long crack in my wall. braids.
Into a net. The difference between.
A real voice and the other kind.
The way its air vibrates.
Through you. The way air.
Vibrates. The violence.
In your middle ear.

The follow-up to Tehran-born American poet and editor Kaveh Akbar’s bestselling debut Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Farmington ME: Alice James Books, 2017) [see my review of such here] is Pilgrim Bell: Poems (Minneapolis MN: Graywolf Press, 2021). Writing on the pandemic, sobriety, emergencies, memories, mothers and history, Akbar offers poems that seek to return to the origins of prayer, citing both personal difficulty and acknowledging those who have fallen through the cracks; composing a lyric as a call to the divine. “In what world does any of it seem credible?” he writes, to close the poem “I WOULDN’T EVEN KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH A THIRD CHANCE,” “God’s word is a melody, and melody requires repetition. / God’s word is a melody I sang once then forgot.” Akbar’s lyric revels in what has been long seen across multiple cultures as the traditional role of the poet: to speak both to history and faith, writing a poetry of social conscience and spiritual foundations. “They say it’s not / faith if you can hold it in your hands,” he writes, as part of the poem “AN OVERSIGHT,” “but I suspect the opposite may be true, // that real faith passes first through the body // like an arrow.”

Pilgrim Bell is constructed as three untitled groupings of poems, each of which opens and near-closes with a different poem underneath the title “PILGRIM BELL.” Whereas many of the other poems in the collection are comparatively more open in the breath of their structures, the title poems are more compact, and sit akin to pillars, upon which the rest of the collection rests. As the second title poem ends: “The difference between. / a real voice and the other kind. / The way its air vibrates. / Through you. The way air. / Vibrates. The violence. / In your middle ear.”

Akbar writes on empire, history and perspective, and of cultural anxiety, approaching his meditations with the intimacy and humility of the pilgrim. As the poem “MY EMPIRE” opens: “My empire made me / happy because it was an empire / and mine. // I was too stupid to rage at anything.” He writes on joy, eruptions and the men he once was, composing lyric narratives that examine gestures, movement and foundation. Akbar is the pilgrim, working his slow way through the dark. “The algorithms for living,” he writes, as part of “FORFEITING MY MYSTIQUE,” “have always been / delicious and hollow, / like a beetle husk in a / spider’s paw. Hafez says // fear is the cheapest room / in a house, that we ought / to live in better / conditions.” He writes on faith, as he writes to open the poem “DESPITE MY EFFORTS EVEN MY PRAYERS HAVE TURNED / INTO THREATS”: “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.” His poems seek a way through the knowing and the unknowing, as a spiritual journey that is as much physical and intellectual; of language and human interaction, of compassion and a boundless faith that still acknowledges the times at which it begins to falter.

Twice through the collection, Akbar utilizes the ghazal—“GHAZAL FOR THE MEN I ONCE WAS” and “GHAZAL FOR A NATIONAL EMERGENCY”—a traditional poetic form that originated in Arabic poetry in the 7^th century, and has been long adapted into English vernacular, including early explorations by poet Sharon Olds in the United States, and John Thompson and Phyllis Webb in Canada. Structurally, Akbar’s variations seem closer to the purpose of the form than how it has evolved, as the second couplet of his “GHAZAL FOR THE MEN I ONCE WAS” reads: “Dip a finger in your bourbon, tap it to your lip. Bad water. Bedwetter. Now watch / these hands through your blood—jealous moths. How do they heaven, upset like that?” Akbar writes of anxiety, of the complicated between-ness of belonging to two different countries, two different cultures, aware of the tensions between both. “To be an American is to be a scholar / of opportunity.” he writes, as part of “THE PALACE,” adding: “Opportunity costs.” A bit further into this extended sequence of short fragments:

I have a kitchen device
that lets me spin lettuce.

There is no elegant way
            to say this—people
            with living hearts
            that could fit in my chest
want to melt the city where I was born. 

At his elementary school in an American suburb,
a boy’s shirt says: “We Did It to Hiroshima, We Can Do It to Tehran!”

Akbar explores his two countries not as in opposition, but as two spaces of separate complication, anxiety, conflict. Both sides are problematic, packed with beauty and a load-bearing grief. In the poem “READING FARROKHZAD IN A PANDEMIC,” he writes: “This is a real fact too wretched for / letters. And yet: // My uncle jailed. // His daughter killed. // Waving world, / the other flag— // there is room in the language for being / without language.” The poem ends:

I want both my countries
to be right

to fear me. 

We have lost
whatever

we had to lose.

When one speaks of poetry in terms of meditative and spiritual, or even of a lyric of messiness and uglyiness, Pilgrim Bell might be the new standard-bearer. This is a remarkable collection, one that reveals itself with humility and openness, and a lyric intimacy that bears enormous weight.

Jos Charles, feeld

III.

there is noting

funye bout this / u

alowne /          on a tip

that is the tip of whorld

teemd inn / no biger

                                                than a goodsizd fiste

/ ur growndling hart /             fission in round

                                                               lisen /

                                    1 daye u wil be all ere /

a ewe alowne / inn a feeld

      off mare / i am older /        & the sayme /

      than the naymes u gave / this

is the corse / a tran /

a feeld /       a corpse

Selected by Fady Joudah as a winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series is Jos Charles’ second full-length poetry title, feeld (Milkweed Editions, 2018), following her remarkable debut, Safe Space (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2016) [see my review of such here]. As the online press release for the new collection informs, feeld

[…] is a lyrical unraveling of the circuitry of gender and speech, defiantly making space for bodies that have been historically denied their own vocabulary.

“i care so much abot the whord i cant reed.” In feeld, Charles stakes her claim on the language available to speak about trans experience, reckoning with the narratives that have come before by reclaiming the language of the past. In Charles’s electrifying transliteration of English—Chaucerian in affect, but revolutionary in effect—what is old is made new again. “gendre is not the tran organe / gendre is yes a hemorage.” “did u kno not a monthe goes bye / a tran i kno doesnt dye.” The world of feeld is our own, but off kilter, distinctly queer—making visible what was formerly and forcefully hidden: trauma, liberation, strength, and joy.

The effect of her language is both jarring and musical, and quickly forces the reader to slow down considerably, comparable to first experiencing the work of Canadian poet bill bissett, or Anthony Burgess’ classic novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). How does one easily read, except for slow, and with a deep attention? For Charles’s feeld, language is the engine that propels the work, as well as a means with which to examine, as she writes as part of the “Author’s Note”:

A tran learns early such resemblances, familial or otherwise, will leave us. Only some garment left, stuffed in our open mouths. At best, and after much labor, a tran may be assigned the I of woman, while also having, to varying degrees, to receive and reject the violences constituting it. It’s aesthetics: a tran is a thing exactly the size we demand. And her promise—of legibility, of entrance—is likewise an assignment, requires gatekeepers, equivalences, and pharmacies.

The limits of this scene, like any totalizing structure—gender, property, and so on—construct an interior as much as they obstruct one. Not just possibly, but essentially. It is true, especially now, when political representation is overdeterminative, when interest in conflated with access, visibility with autonomy, we must remember the line we trace conceals even as it discloses.

There are elements of feeld, also, utilizing an older language (and all the implied, inherent baggage that comes along with) as an exploration of being transgender (reclaiming that language, as well as utilizing as a counterpoint) that are comparable to Chase Berggrun’s recent erasure of the Victorian novel Dracula, reworked as a reclamation and reconstruction of gender and the body. Composed during Berggrun’s own gender transition, the result was the stunning debut poetry title, R E D (Minneapolis, New York, Raleigh: Birds, LLC.: 2018) [see my review of such here].

    interpolation is a skirte

    i ware / & inn a hiv / u r born

boye /                   grl / or worker

be / all this bad det /

betweene

me (“X”)

Composed as a single unit, constructed in sixty numbered lyrics (numbered via Roman numerals), all but one that exist on a single page, the lyric of Charles’ feeld is staccato, whip-smart and inventive, fearless in its intimacy, and declaration of an open heart, writing not of becoming, but revealing. In a recent interview at Divedapper, conducted by Kaveh Akbar, Charles responds:

With feeld, it’s slightly different because it’s less like an exaggeration of this world. It’s a world that exists quite like ours, but it took a slight turn, so things are off-kilter. That’s reflective of how anyone comes to write or speak, I think. You choose, or you come across, or are given the texts, your sex, your family. And maybe you choose a different family, imagine other texts or sexes, or maybe you take up what you’re given. You reject it or choose it, or any number of possibilities, and you end up with something like a history that, yes, participates in these broad structures, but also remains quite distinct and idiosyncratic.

I wanted to embrace and run with all of the idiosyncrasies, the ways that gender or language are or aren’t similar to what they are presumed to be for me, and to push that as far as I can. Of course, I wanted to keep it within the realm of intelligibility to a reader, or at least clear enough that it doesn’t shove them out of the work at any point. Like, in Safe Space there’s this line, “red like an apple or photograph of an apple,” where the ‘I’ is a child and they’re embarrassed or ashamed or whatever it means as an expression for someone to be ‘red.’ Which, of course, carries with it tons of other connotations and power and so on. But for me, this idea of the photograph of the apple has a personal resonance. It needn’t be explained, and I find it much more effective unexplained. The challenge is to render the image in a way that’s immediate and carries that weight without betraying it in language. To me, that’s the same gesture that’s happening again and again in feeld, it’s just that I’m taking a little bit more liberty, which means I have to back off with taking liberties in some other instances, so as to keep it intelligible.