It is the artist’s job to remind the world of the magic all around us, New York Times-bestselling poet novelist, and editor Kaveh Akbar told the packed-to-capacity Bryant University Master Class — to break through readers’ complacency and help them to see the ordinary as rightfully miraculous.
Consider the natural world, he advised. We are surrounded every day by flowers and trees, yet because of that familiarity, our brains tend to forget the miracle of photosynthesis, which sees weightless photons from a star 93 million miles away to help create a living organism.
“That is capital M magic,” Akbar noted.
But writers can harness a magic of their own. Language, he reminded the students, can transform a reader's perspective with even a simple turn of phrase. “I could call a poem ‘Crowded Orange Room’… or I could call it “On the 10th anniversary of your death’,” Akbar stated.
“Ooh!” Izzy Keise ’30 exclaimed involuntarily from the room’s back row, prompting a burst of laughter from the audience and a smile from Akbar.
“You see what I’m saying?” he asked.
A window to the world
Akbar’s workshop, part of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ Visiting Writers Series, was made possible by a generous donation from Dr. Barbara Allardice, a mini grant from Bryant’s Office of Community and Belonging, and support from the university’s Department of History, Literature, and the Arts. In addition to providing students with the opportunity to learn from and speak with a wide range of exceptional writers, the Visiting Writers Series focuses on difficult dialogues and the inclusion of people of many experiences and identities. Previous writers in the series have included Grace Lin, Tyler Merritt, and Jamal Joseph, among many others.
Born in Iran, Akbar first gained widespread recognition for his poetry collections, including Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Pilgrim Bell, which earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and multiple Pushcart Prizes. His bestselling debut novel, Martyr!, was a finalist for the National Book Award, won the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize, the American Book Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was named one of The New York Times Ten Best Books of the Year.
Beyond his writing, Akbar has helped to shape the literary landscape by serving as the poetry editor for The Nation, founding the poetry interview platform Divedapper, editing major anthologies like The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse, and serving as the Roy J. Carver Professor of English and Scholar of the Year at the University of Iowa.
“In other words, he is incredibly impressive,” noted Professor of History, Literature, and the Arts Amber Day in her introduction.
The Master Class
Drawing on poems by a range of writers, Akbar challenged students to think about language as more than a means of communication, but as an artistic medium capable of transforming how people see and experience the world. He described himself as a language artist, explaining that “in the same way that a carpenter is someone who works with wood, a painter is someone who works with paint, I am someone who works with language.”
That tool, and technology, of language, he suggested, was both incredibly limited and infinitely powerful. “We only have 26 shapes, 26 letters, but we can endlessly rearrange them.”
The challenge, he explained, is to arrange those familiar letters and words in ways that reveal something true about our lived experiences from an unfamiliar perspective. “The crisis as a language artist is trying to make you feel unprecedented, relatable feelings while using familiar language,” Akbar told the students.
The language artist’s ability to defamiliarize can also be a force for good, Akbar suggested.To demonstrate, he read to the students Francine J. Harris’s "katherine with the lazy eye. short. and not a good poet," in which the narrator comes to terms with the passing of a disliked acquaintance and discovers her humanity in the process.
“You're consumed by this sense of protagonism, and like everyone around you is an NPC or whatever, and then you read a poem like this, what might that do?” Akbar asked the audience.
“It’s about shifting your perspective,” Keise answered.
That shift, Akbar suggested, means everything. “Every abstract casualty statistic you see in genocide data was a person who loved their kids just as much as your parents loved you,” he reminded the students.
“What I want to do is write a poem that cries on the page,” Akbar noted.
He closed the session by taking questions from the audience about both his craft and his own journey as a writer.
Bennet Stindsen ’29’s question was contemplative: “How do you know if an idea is any good?” he asked.
That’s a common question that plagues all writers, Akbar conceded. In the end, though, he advised the class to always err on the side of pursuing the ideas and concepts that truly mean something to them, rather than settle for what feels easier or safer.
What was the secret, Rogel Romao ’29 asked, to finding that flow state where writing comes easy?
“If I knew that, I’d have written so many more books than I have. I’d have 50,000 books,” Akbar said with a laugh.
“The key is showing up,” he argued. To keep on pushing until you feel the pull.
An opportunity for innovation
The conversation continued later on that evening with a similarly crowded “Book Talk” in the Heidi and Walter Stepan Grand Hall of Bryant’s George E. Bello Center for Information and Technology. This time, members from throughout the community including students, faculty, staff, guests, and President Ross Gittell, Ph.D. — gathered for readings of Akbar’s work and a wide-ranging discussion with the author and poet.
Over the course of an hour, Akbar shared the stories behind Martyr! and several of his poems, reflections on the difference between writing poetry and prose, and glimpses into the life of a working author. He also encouraged students to recognize the talent of their own professors, reading “Lawnmower,” a poem by Lecturer of History, Literature, and the Arts Eric Paul, to whom Akbar once wrote fan letters and has since become a longtime friend.
And as in the afternoon's Master Class, audience questions became an important part of the conversation. A query on processing the enormity of the world, for instance, led to meditation on what it means to live and create in the 21st century.
“As a species, our apertures have never been wider, and thus we are able to take in so much information about what is happening in the world, but we still have the same sort of clunky organs with which to process it, right?” Akbar observed. “This is a crisis for language, and anytime there's a crisis for language, there is an opportunity for innovation for language.”