A version of the following was delivered by Kaveh Akbar as the 2025 Blaney Lecture on May 29, 2025.
Today the great weapon used to stifle critical thinking is a raw overwhelm of meaningless language at every turn—on our phones, on our TVs, in our periphery on billboards and subways. So often the language is passionately absolute: immigrants are evil, climate change is a hoax, and this new Rolex will make you irresistible. Interesting poetry awakens us, asks us to slow down our metabolization of language, to become aware of its materiality, how it enters into us. Sacred poetry, from antiquity to the present, teaches us to be comfortable sitting in mystery without trying to resolve it, to be skeptical of unqualified certitudes. This lecture will orbit poems drawn from the past forty-three centuries, poems that remind us language has history, density, complexity. In surveying these examples, we’ll discuss how language art might serve as a potent antidote against an empire that would use empty, vapid language to cudgel us into inaction.
In 1989, I was born in the middle of a snowstorm in Tehran. My first two languages were Farsi and English, in that order. My first full sentence was “Gimmee ob,” ob being the Farsi word for “water.” I have always been a bit thirsty. I have always been a bit enamored of the materiality of language, trying to snap together parts that don’t exactly click but might if coaxed just right, like sticking a Mega Blok into a Lego.
My third language was Arabic, but Arabic gets an asterisk because I never really spoke it, I just learned to pray in it. When we came to America, Islam’s five daily prayers became one long prayer to say at the end of the day. We were full of these kinds of new-world workarounds—my mother never ate pork except, secretly, in the form of pepperoni pizza. Once every evening, my father would announce it was time for namaz (prayer), and he, my mother, my older brother, and I would assemble to do our wuzu (a kind of pre-prayer ablution), drawing water to wash our faces, our hair, our heads, our arms, our feet. Then, we’d gather as a family in the kitchen or living room or a bedroom to lay out mats and move through the prayers, saying them quietly to ourselves as we cycled through the various postures of devotion.
In my very early childhood, I would just watch my family, mimicking their movements as best as I could. Mostly, their prayers were whispered, barely audible, so instead of sounding like them I focused entirely on moving like them—cupping my hands before my face as if they were full of water, then “splashing” my hands up to my ears, bending at the waist, kneeling, touching my head to my janamaz, my own tiny embroidered prayer mat.
However, when I was six or seven, my father decided it was time to teach me to say the prayers on my own. He wrote out the Arabic words using the English alphabet, spelled phonetically, in various colorful inks. He laminated the pages, and every day he and I would spend an hour together sitting on the couch, studying the plastic pages. The line would say “bismillah ah rahmana rahim,” and slowly we would make the sounds together, me leaning up toward my father’s stubbly lips, blissing in the magical music that came from them. We’d practice saying it all together, moving through the postures right there on the old couch, us both laughing at my forgetfulness, growing tired and eventually hungry. It didn’t take long before I had mastered it, could offer fifteen minutes of continuous prayer in this gorgeous, mysterious language. I was so proud, and so was my father—it was the exact same language spoken by The Prophet himself.
The poet Kazim Ali writes, “If prayers can make a place holy, then it must mean there’s some divine energy that moves through a human body.” I learned from Kazim that the Arabic word ruh means both “breath” and “spirit,” and this seems absolutely essential to my understanding of prayer—a way of directing, bridling the breath-spirit through a kind of focused music.
This music, this way of hymning directly to God, was my first conscious experience of mellifluous charged language, and it’s the bedrock upon which my understanding of poetry has been built.
I had no dictionary sense of what the words actually meant. Arabic was a private tongue reserved for God—God’s own tongue—and I understood if I spoke it to God earnestly, mellifluously, it would thin the membrane between us.
Poets have invested themselves in this promise for millenia. The idea that mellifluous, earnest language might thin the partition between our world and the next, our world and the divine. That there might, in our breath, exist a bit of spirit that could be harnessed, bridled. It’s an idea as old as language, as old as incantation.
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. 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’s written word? Inanna, an ecstatic and often desperate awe at the divine.
Here’s an excerpt from one of her hymns to Inanna, translated by Jane Hirshfield:
Lady of all powers
In whom light appears,
Radiant one
Beloved of Heaven and Earth,
Tiara-crowned
Priestess of the Highest God,
My Lady, you are the guardian
Of all greatness.
Your hand holds the seven powers:
You lift the powers of being,
You have hung them over your fingers,
You have gathered the many powers,
You have clasped them now
Like necklaces onto your breast.Like a dragon,
You poisoned the land—
When you roared at the earth
In your thunder,
Nothing green could live.
A flood fell from the mountain:
You, Inanna,
Foremost in Heaven and Earth.
Lady riding a beast,
You rained fire on the heads of men.
Taking your power from the Highest,
Following the commands of the highest,
Lady of all the great rites,
Who can understand all that is yours?In the forefront
Of the battle,
All is struck down by you—
O winged Lady,
Like a bird
You scavenge the land.
Like a charging storm
You charge,
Like a roaring storm
You roar,
You thunder in thunder,
Snort in rampaging winds.
Your feet are continually restless.
Carrying your harp of sighs,
You breathe out the music of mourning.It was in your service
That I first entered
The holy temple,
I, Enheduanna,
The highest priestess.
I carried the ritual basket,
I chanted your praise.
Now I have been cast out
To the place of lepers.
Day comes,
And the brightness
Is hidden around me.
Shadows cover the light,
Drape it in sandstorms.
My beautiful mouth knows only confusion.
Even my sex is dust.
I could spend our whole time together just marveling at this artifact with you. Enheduanna has been one of my most treasured companions through this quarantine. A woman who lived roughly forty-three centuries ago writing about the same things I’ve spent my life wondering about, wandering toward. What language can and cannot do. Doubt, exile, bewilderment.
There is, in the vast shadow of a pandemic, of a fascistic regime, of total irreversible ecological collapse, a sense of the utter unprecedentedness of our moment. It’s easy to feel rudderless, like there is no path forward that includes the survival of our humanity.
But then, reading a poet like Enheduanna who wrote her verse roughly forty-three centuries before this date, I feel, more than anything else, utterly precedented. She writes:
Like a dragon,
You poisoned the land—
When you roared at the earth
In your thunder,
Nothing green could live.
She was writing to Inanna, the ancient Sumerian goddess of love and fertility and war. But she may as well have been writing to the American god too, the money god, whose reign of destruction has also “poisoned the land” and ensured “nothing green could live.” Fracking and Monsanto and microbeads are all twenty-first century faces on a species-old problem—mankind’s corrosive impact on the Earth.
She writes in the poem of exile, saying,
I carried the ritual basket,
I chanted your praise.
Now I have been cast out
To the place of lepers.
Day comes,
And the brightness
Is hidden around me
It is unclear when or why Enheduanna was exiled, only that after her father’s death her brother took over the kingdom of Ur, and she was, for a time, banished. The great moral tests of the twenty first century will be refugee crises, which will only grow more dire over time as the effects of climate change continue to displace populations. Thus far, we as a species have failed these tests miserably. Brexit, children in cages. What can an ancient Sumerian poet teach us about immigration reform?
Track the rage in the excerpt’s final moments:
And the brightness
Is hidden around me.
Shadows cover the light,
Drape it in sandstorms.
My beautiful mouth knows only confusion.
Even my sex is dust.
I find myself unaccountably moved by this language. For one, it is clearly the language of a poet throwing her hands up, saying “I don’t know what language can or can’t do, but I am desperate, and I need someone to hear this.” It’s the promise I found inside language as a boy praying with my family in Arabic—here I am, speaking earnestly, mellifluously, believing such speech can be an end to itself.
But I am also drawn to Enheduanna’s rage. Today, more than anything else, it’s rage that seems to govern me. I am an Iranian mostly raised in America, caught between two national regimes actively toxic to hope. To quote Audre Lorde: “It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, [pushes opera singers off rooftops], slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs […]” Hope comes and goes in a world that actively conspires against it. But occasions for anger bloom in both my nations daily—state murder of civilians, voter suppression, murderous foreign policies. In such a world, an engine that runs on rage will never sputter. And ultimately, I do think rage is a measure of tenderness. Rage is our ability to imagine wholly the humanity of the harmed. And Enheduanna trains us in that imagining.
That I’m in recovery is no secret; my whole first book largely orbits my getting clean. 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.”
When I got sober, it wasn’t because I punched a cop or drove my car into a Wendy’s or anything dramatic like that. I had a dozen potential bottoms that would have awakened any reasonable person to the severity of my problem, but I was not a reasonable person. The day I finally lurched my way towards help was a day like any other. I woke up alone on my floor still drunk from the night before. I remember taking a pull from a nearly-empty bottle of Old Crow by my mattress, then searching for my glasses and car keys. Finding them, I calmly drove myself to help.
The Greek poet Sappho, born roughly 630 BCE, was by all accounts one of history’s greatest poets, but the entire corpus of her work burned with the great Library of Alexandria, so today we only know her through the bits other writers quoted. We know that in “Fragment 22” she wrote, “because I prayed / this word: / I want,” but we don’t have the entirety of the poem preceding it, her “because” hanging there to explain some now unimaginable consequence of desire.
I am, understandably I think, obsessed with desire and its consequences. If my liver function was still so erratic after a year of healing, then at the end of my active addiction I must have been near some sort of Rubicon from which there could be no return. Some awareness permeated my dense fog of destruction. That awareness might have been bodily, the way an iron deficiency sometimes provokes in a person an unconscious desire to eat dirt. It might have been fatigue, a cumulative sense that the corrosive manner of my living had become untenable. Or, it might have been something else. I’ll never know, which I think is the point.
A common formulation states that prayer is a way of speaking to the divine and meditation is a way of listening for it. Poetry synthesizes these, the silence of active composition being a time even the most skeptical writers describe using the language of the metaphysical, saying “such-and-such a phrase just came to me,” or “those hours just flew by.” And then reading, a process through which dark runes on a page or strange vocalizations in the air can provoke us to laugh, to weep, to call our mothers or donate to Greenpeace or shiver with awe.
It is wrong to think of God as a debt to luck. But I could have died, and then I didn’t. I haven’t. When so many around me, like me, did and have. The grief of survivor’s guilt is real. The omnipresent grief of still being here and not knowing what to make of it.
Most of us are probably familiar with the Kübler-Ross model of grief, named for Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross who wrote about it in her 1969 book On Death and Dying, based on her work with terminally ill patients. The model states that dying people, or those who love dying people, will often pass through five main terminals of grief: denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance.
David Kessler, a psychiatrist who coauthored a book with Kübler-Ross while she was alive, expanding the model to apply to major trauamatic life events such as divorce or incarceration, recently wrote that the model could be applied to the Covid crisis as well:
There’s denial, which we saw a lot of early on: “This virus won’t affect us.” There’s anger: “You’re making me stay home and taking away my activities.” There’s bargaining: “Okay, if I social distance for two weeks everything will be better, right?” There’s sadness: I don’t know when this will end. And finally there’s acceptance. “This is happening; I have to figure out how to proceed.” Acceptance, as you might imagine, is where the power lies. We find control in acceptance. “I can wash my hands. I can keep a safe distance. I can learn how to work virtually.”1
Most of us have some familiarity with this way of thinking. But again, the model is utterly precedented.
Here is a poem from the indigenous, Mesoamerican Nahuatl people, orbiting a mother’s death in childbirth, first recorded in the sixteenth-century but likely quite a bit older.
[Akbar reads “The Midwife Addresses the Woman …” (1574), translated by John Bierhorst.]
This ancient poem of Indigenous Mesoamerica preceded the Kübler-Ross model by at least five hundred years, but you can map the five stages of grief almost directly onto the poem.
Denial: “Wake! Rise! Stand up!”
Anger: “You went away and left us, you deserted us, and we are but old men and old women.
You have cast aside your mother and your father.”
Depression:
“Yet without you, how can we survive?
How painful will it be, this hard old age?
Down what alleys or in what doorways will we perish?”
Bargaining:
“You as living flesh can see him, you as living flesh can call to him.
Pray to him for us!
Call to him for us!”
Acceptance:
“This is the end,
We leave the rest to you.”
It’s astonishing. I’m getting goosebumps right now typing about it, about this poem I’ve read a billion times. What can ancient spiritual poetry teach us about our living? A living that so often feels governed by grief? Half [a] millennium before Kübler-Ross studied this phenomenon clinically, the Nahuatl people were already teaching it.
It’s also important to note here that “American spiritual poetry” didn’t begin with [Emily] Dickinson or [Walt] Whitman or anyone else writing in English, but with the Mesoamerican and Native American people who inhabited the land that would be later called “America,” passing their sacred texts along for centuries. Relative to how long those texts were a part of the earth’s spiritual history, Anglo American writers like Dickinson (who I love!) and Whitman (who has his uses) are relatively brand new.
To flatten the project of “spiritual poetry” to a bunch of white Romantic and Metaphysical poets is to erase the Ethiopian epic Kebra Negast, to wash away Li Po and Rabi’a and Mahadeviyakka and Teresa of Ávila and Bashō and Gilgamesh. It’s a colonization, one that erases not only the bodies and lands, but actual spirits.
One of the questions you can ask a poem: to what do I owe my being here? Li Po says: “I sing, and moon rocks back and forth; / I dance, and shadow tumbles into pieces.” Anna Akhmatova: “The word dropped like a stone / on my still living breast.”
My working definition of sacred poetry rises directly out of my experience as a child praying in Arabic: earnest, musical language meant to thin the partition between a person and a divine, whether that divine is God or the universe or desire or land or family or justice or community or sex or or or.… As with my early prayers in Arabic, a one-to-one denotative understanding of the language isn’t important—what matters is the making of music and the sincerity of the making.
When I was getting sober, I found no easy prayers, no poems to sing me well. What I did find was that, during the early days of my recovery, when sobriety was minute-to-minute—white knuckles and endless pacing and cheap coffee by the pot—poetry was a place I could put myself. I could read a book of poems and for an hour, two hours, I didn’t have to worry about accidentally killing myself. I could write a poem and the language for what was happening would just come to me. Hours would just fly by.
Rabi’a al-Basri, writing in 717 CE: “Kings have locked their doors / and each lover is alone with his love. / Here, I am alone with you.”
My active addiction was a time of absolute certainty—certainty of my own victimhood, of my convictions, of what I was owed by a universe that had split me from the land of my birth and dropped me into an America that was actively hostile to my presence. That certainty destroyed whatever it touched, corroding my own life and the lives of people who loved me. In recovery when I threw myself into poetry, I was drawn to poems that were certain of nothing, poems that embraced mystery instead of trying to resolve it.
W. B. Yeats: “The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
It’s not just writers from antiquity who take up the challenge of unknowing. Even today, when irony remains the default posture of the public intellectual, poets remain relentlessly sincere in their explorations of the spirit and faith, of the mysteries that make and shape us. Here’s Lucille Clifton:
“my dream about the second coming”
mary is an old woman without shoes.
she doesn’t believe it.
not when her belly starts to bubble
and leave the print of a finger where
no man touches.
not when the snow in her hair melts away.
not when the stranger she used to wait for
appears dressed in lights at her
kitchen table.
she is an old woman and
doesn’t believe it.
when Something drops onto her toes one night
she calls it a fox
but she feeds it.
The capitalization in the third to last line is Clifton’s preserved, it’s Clifton’s poem within the poem. Something. A proper noun, despite its own mystery. When I talk about engagement with spiritual poetics being an exercise in sitting in mystery without trying to resolve it, this is what I mean. A capital “S” Something drops onto your toes one night, and you don’t know how or why, but you feed it. Clifton has an entire suite of “fox” poems orbiting this mysterious Something fox, delving into its mystery without ever really diminishing it. Clifton teaches me to wander into mystery without galloping toward some hasty and inorganic conclusion. Which in turn informs my living.
I am trying to persuade you of the contemporary utility of writing that orbits what G. K. Chesterton called a “vertigo of the infinite,” what Clifton called “the lip of our understanding.” Inquiries into the divine still connect contemporary poets to their ancestors. In one poem, the twelfth-century Kannada poet-saint Mahadeviyakka writes:
When the body becomes Your mirror,
how can it serve?When the mind becomes your mind,
what is left to remember?
(from “When the body …,” trans. by Jane Hirshfield)
In her “Astonishment,” written over eight hundred years later, twentieth-century Polish Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska seems almost to pick up where the ancient Kannada poet left off, wrapping question after question around the immobilizing strangeness of being anything:
Why after all this one and not the rest?
Why this specific self, not in a nest,
but a house? Sewn up not in scales, but skin?
Not topped off by a leaf, but by a face?
(from “Astonishment,” trans. by Clare Cavanagh)
The great Persian poet Hafez wrote, “Start seeing everything as God, but keep it a secret.” I still have no idea what I mean when I say God, but I see it everywhere. I mean it intensely. I write poems and, yes, books about it. I read about it constantly which seems, counterintuitively, to only deepen its secret. Close your eyes. Imagine in your head a bladeless knife with no handle. Do you see how the image recedes from view the more language I add to it? A bladeless knife. With no handle.
Today the great weapon used to stifle critical thinking is a raw overwhelm of meaningless language at every turn—on our phones, on our TVs, in our periphery on billboards and subways. So often the language is passionately absolute: immigrants are evil, climate change is a hoax, and this new Rolex will make you sexually irresistible. Poetry opposes these things, asks us to slow down our metabolization of language, to become aware of it entering us. Sacred poetry teaches us to be comfortable with complexity, to be skeptical of unqualified certitude. In reminding us that language has history, density, integrity, such poetry is a potent antidote against a late-capitalist empire that would use empty, vapid language to cudgel us into inaction.
The bladeless knife. With no handle. I can’t think of a more useful skill to arm yourself with in the year 2020 than the ability to sit in mystery without trying to resolve it. Carolyn Forché writes about poets who “don’t easily extricate morality, ethics, the sacred, and the political. For them, it’s not possible to think of these as isolated categories, but rather as modes of human contemplation and action which are inextricably bound to one another.” An attuned permeability to wonder compels the curious poet to rigorously examine their stations, both cosmic and civic.
So many of my students, my friends, have articulated some version of one particular anxiety to me over the past few months. Perhaps you in the audience have experienced it too. The anxiety is: how can my writing matter right now? How can anything I have to say be timely or worthwhile.
To them, I continually point toward Enheduanna, whose four-millenia-old poetry feels utterly, miraculously prescient to me in my living today. I point to the Mesoamericans who taught us how to move through grief, centuries before the advent of psychiatry and psychotherapy became serious medical disciplines. I point to Clifton, to Szymborska, to Rabi’a and Mahadeviyakka, and all the other poets discussed here. Writing Tik Tok or Taylor Swift into a poem doesn’t make it timely. Writing in humanity, in all its endless mysterious baffle, does.
I want to end with a poem by the eighteenth-century Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa, as translated by Robert Hass. The poem, in its entirety, reads:
The man pulling radishes
Pointed my way
With a radish.
The first time I read this poem it felt like a trick, like a silly one off (the great masters wrote those, too). Something about it stuck with me, though. Something about its repetition. [Martin] Heidegger wrote:
Language itself is—language and nothing else besides […] The understanding [that is] schooled in logic […] calls this proposition an empty tautology. Merely to say the identical twice—language is language—how is that supposed to get us anywhere? But we do not want to get anywhere. We would like only, for once, to get to just where we already are.2
To get to just where we already are. The man pulling radishes is strapped to his living like anyone else. What does a man pulling radishes have to point the way? Well, a radish of course.
We are inheritors of a murderous age. As writers, we’ve deputized ourselves wardens of our species’s most dangerous technology: the English language. A language invented by men. A language deployed throughout history in service of colonization, genocide, ecological decimation, chattel slavery, the building and deployment of nuclear weapons, drone warfare, and more. That’s our paint. That’s our radish.
What are we to do, then? We who are tethered to language like a plant to the soil. We who write into a country run by religious zealots to their one true God, the late-capitalist Money God, to whom they would sacrifice our lives, the lives of the people we love and people who love the way we love. What are we to do amidst such zealotry?
Well, our ancestors have given us models. Reject certainty, which exists only in the rhetoric of zealots and tyrants. Reject false equivalencies, the vapid argle-bargle of empire. Adjust our metabolization of language to remind us of its materiality, its power. Our task as wardens of our species’s most dangerous technology? To treat our materials seriously. Embrace the mystery of earnest, mellifluous language. Embrace its infinite potential to thin the partition between us and the world we seek.
1Scott Berinato, “That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief,” Harvard Business Review, March 23, 2020. https://https://hbr.org/2020/03/that-discomfort-youre-feeling-is-grief.
2 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (HarperPerennial, 1971), 188.