Our Faith in Writing Podcast Episode Eleven and Episode Twelve: Kaveh Akbar & Ashley M. Jones on Pilgrim Bell and Belonging through Poetry
Listen to Our Faith in Writing Podcast Episode Eleven: Kaveh Akbar & Ashley M. Jones on Pilgrim Bell and Belonging through Poetry Part One
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Listen to Our Faith in Writing Podcast Episode Twelve: Kaveh Akbar & Ashley M. Jones on Pilgrim Bell and Belonging through Poetry Part Two
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Show Notes
Our Faith in Writing explores the intersection of writing and faith through conversations about the writing process, the reading life, contemplative practices, and more. Host Charlotte Donlon is a writer and a certified spiritual director for writers, and she believes writing and reading help us belong to ourselves, others, God, and the world.
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Kaveh Akbar and Ashley M. Jones joined Charlotte for a conversation about Kaveh’s newest book of poems, Pilgrim Bell which is available now wherever books are sold. Kaveh and Ashley discussed a few of Kaveh’s poems from Pilgrim Bell, explored how poems help us feel connected to our loved ones who have died, shared what it’s like to write about their parents, and more. The three also talked about how writing and reading help us belong to ourselves, others, the world, and the divine.
Poets, Books, and Additional Show Notes Requests from Art and Faith Unplugged Episode 11 and Episode 12 in the Order in Which They Appeared
Nabila Lovelace
Sons of Achilles
Nate Marshall
Finna
Wild Hundreds
The Poetry Magazine Podcast
The Poetry Magazine Podcast Conversation with Ashley M. Jones and Faisal Mohyuddin
Faisal Mohyuddin
The Displaced Children of Displaced Children
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Some poems from Pilgrim Bell discussed in these episodes:
Reza's Restaurant, Chicago, 1997
Mothers I Once Was
Cotton Candy
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Links to Some of Ashley's Recent Essays (A show notes request from Kaveh)
Amanda Gorman Reminded America What Poetry Can Do
When God Calls My Name
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Paul Celan
Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry: A Bilingual Edition
(Not Alfred Corn)
Kazim Ali
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Kaveh said something really great that Ashley said we need to write down:
The truth is, again, the poems go out ahead of me. I mean, I think that this form, the sound came to me as I was just messing around with a draft at some point in the past five years and it seemed interesting. It seemed like it allowed silence to be a load bearing element of the poem, and maybe the language is sort of the negative space around which the silence is given shape. So the silence is actually the substance and the language is just sort of like the plaster mold poured over it.
I also think that the clanging of a bell happens in this way that resonates infinitely. There's no end to the sound a bell makes and so there was something interesting to me about trying to visually or grammatically impose order upon a sentence that sort of refuses to end. The stillness you prize, period, won't prize you back, and so it's like, okay, the bell sound is over and then the next line is like, no, it's not, you know what I'm saying, and there's something about the way that the poem sort of rejects the certainty of the period that was interesting to me in a book that is so much about learning to sit in uncertainty—learning to sit in uncertainty without groping desperately to resolve it. There was something useful about that practice for me, that practice of showing how impotent my attempts to contain the uncontainable are.
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A comment from Kaveh: “My spouse talks about they teach a course on epic poetry by women and non-binary poets.”
Ashley’s spoken response: “Can you get that syllabus?”
Charlotte’s silent response: “I think a lot of people are going to want that syllabus.”
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Some Big News That Was Mentioned Earlier and Then Mentioned Again So It’s Going in the Show Notes:
SOMEONE ON THIS EPISODE IS WRITING A MEMOIR.
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Lucille Clifton
Gwendolyn Brooks
Nabila Lovelace (Again because yes.)
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How Prayer Works by Kaveh Akbar
(A note from Charlotte: Someone tweeted a photo of this poem so I’m linking to it. Kaveh, let me know if you want me to kill the link. I don’t think you’ll care. Update from Kaveh: Of course the link to the poem is okay Charlotte—can you imagine someone being upset about something like that????)
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Another show notes request from Kaveh: Kaveh wants people to know Charlotte accidentally said the word prayer when she meant to say poem which makes a lot of sense because poems are prayers for Charlotte.
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A statement from Kaveh about Charlotte’s spiritual direction practice that she’s going to add to her Writing Life Spiritual Direction website soon in the testimonials section: “I feel like your spiritual direction clients are really lucky to get to work with you based on this conversation.”
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Because Kaveh is one of the most generous writers out there he gave a shoutout to Ashley’s new book, Reparations Now! that’s coming September 7, 2021. (And look for another episode of Art and Faith Unplugged with Kaveh and Ashley discussing Reparations Now!)
AND. Because Kaveh and Ashley are awesome, they gave a shoutout to Charlotte’s first book that came out in November 2020—The Great Belonging: How Loneliness Leads Us to Each Other.
More about Pilgrim Bell
With formal virtuosity and ruthless precision, Kaveh Akbar’s second collection takes its readers on a spiritual journey of disavowal, fiercely attendant to the presence of divinity where artifacts of self and belonging have been shed. How does one recover from addiction without destroying the self-as-addict? And if living justly in a nation that would see them erased is, too, a kind of self-destruction, what does one do with the body’s question, “what now shall I repair?” Here, Akbar responds with prayer as an act of devotion to dissonance—the infinite void of a loved one’s absence, the indulgence of austerity, making a life as a Muslim in an Islamophobic nation—teasing the sacred out of silence and stillness.
Richly crafted and generous, Pilgrim Bell’s linguistic rigor is tuned to the register of this moment and any moment. As the swinging soul crashes into its limits, against the atrocities of the American empire, and through a profoundly human capacity for cruelty and grace, these brilliant poems dare to exist in the empty space where song lives—resonant, revelatory, and holy.
More about Kaveh Akbar
Kaveh Akbar’s poems appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. His second full-length volume of poetry, Pilgrim Bell, will be published by Graywolf in August 2021. His debut, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, is out now with Alice James in the US and Penguin in the UK. He is also the author of the chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, published in 2016 by Sibling Rivalry Press. In 2022, Penguin Classics will publish a new anthology edited by Kaveh: The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine
In 2020 Kaveh was named Poetry Editor of The Nation. The recipient of honors including multiple Pushcart Prizes, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, and the Levis Reading Prize, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson. In 2014, Kaveh founded Divedapper, a home for dialogues with the most vital voices in American poetry. With Sarah Kay and Claire Schwartz, he wrote a weekly column for the Paris Review called "Poetry RX."
More about Ashley M. Jones
Ashley M. Jones received an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University (FIU), where she was a John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Fellow. She served as Official Poet for the City of Sunrise, Florida’s Little Free Libraries Initiative from 2013-2015, and her work was recognized in the 2014 Poets and Writers Maureen Egen Writer’s Exchange Contest and the 2015 Academy of American Poets Contest at FIU. She was also a finalist in the 2015 Hub City Press New Southern Voices Contest, the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award Contest, and the National Poetry Series. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in many journals and anthologies, including CNN, the Academy of American Poets, POETRY, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Steel Toe Review, Fjords Review, and elsewhere. She received a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a 2015 B-Metro Magazine Fusion Award. She was an editor of PANK Magazine. Her debut poetry collection, Magic City Gospel, was published by Hub City Press in January 2017, and it won the silver medal in poetry in the 2017 Independent Publishers Book Awards. Her second book, dark // thing, won the 2018 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry from Pleiades Press. Her third collection, REPARATIONS NOW! is forthcoming in Fall 2021 from Hub City Press. Ashley has won several prizes including the 2018 Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize from Backbone Press and a Poetry Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts.She currently lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where she is founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, board member of the Alabama Writers Cooperative and the Alabama Writers Forum, co-director of PEN Birmingham, and a faculty member in the Creative Writing Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts. Jones is also a member of the Core Faculty at the Converse College Low Residency MFA Program. She recently served as a guest editor for Poetry Magazine.
Charlotte Donlon helps her readers and clients notice how they belong to themselves, others, God, and the world. Charlotte is a writer, a spiritual director for writers, and the founder of Spiritual Direction for Writers™ and Parenting with Art™. She is also the founder and host of the Our Faith in Writing podcast and website. Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, The Curator, The Christian Century, Christianity Today, Catapult, The Millions, Mockingbird, and elsewhere. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Seattle Pacific University where she studied creative nonfiction with Paula Huston and Lauren F. Winner. She holds a certificate in spiritual direction from Selah Center for Spiritual Formation. Her first book is The Great Belonging: How Loneliness Leads Us to Each Other. To receive Charlotte’s latest updates, news, announcements, and other good things, subscribe to her email newsletter.