The Wide Question

THERE are two kinds of doubt. There is doubt that swells the ego—self-deprecation as a mode of enlargement, every coordinate in the infinite field of not-knowing fixing a route back to the self. And there is doubt that dissolves the ego—spinning the self into inquiry at the limits of one’s knowing until the boundaries become permeable. Here, it is not the ego but the wide question that is the centrifugal force. In Pilgrim Bell, out from Graywolf Press in August, Kaveh Akbar moves inside this second kind of doubt to interrogate common sense so that the we who enters these poems might be other than the we who exits them.

Akbar has long been engaged with work that disassembles the pretense of a self’s fixed form and with it the binding of dominant social arrangements so that family, nation, and empire are set out for questioning. In his debut collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, 2017), Akbar constellated concerns about recovery from alcoholism, the possibilities and limits of language, and the meanings of the divine. Caesuras abound in that book, and when I read those poems I often feel I’m leaping from language to language, changed by my brief suspension in the space between. If I were to thematically describe Pilgrim Bell, I might use the same words: recovery, language, the divine. Empire, I would add, becomes a differently frontal concern in the new work, engaged more explicitly across the collection.

But to think only in words, Akbar’s poems teach me, misses the mark. In Pilgrim Bell the space outside language becomes fundamental, language only the brief landing. If the caesura was a primary gesture in Akbar’s debut, in his second book, the period comes to the fore—but not as an enclosure of meaning. Instead the period’s pretense and swift rupture of certainty makes perceptible that space outside language, the proliferation of possibility. In the book’s opening title poem, Akbar writes: “Dark on both sides. / Makes a window. / Into a mirror. A man. / Holds his palms out. / To gather dew.” It is one of a series of poems by that title; in each, every line ends with a period. What ordinary speech reduces to singular meaning is here passed through the prism of doubt toward infinite becomings.

Of course there aren’t only two kinds of doubt (or, probably, of anything), but, as Akbar’s poems insist, language isn’t the reminds me, so might we be together otherwise.