Learning to Pray
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Kaveh Akbar. From Portrait of the Alcoholic. Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017.
In an essay for Lithub about learning to pray as a child in Arabic—a language that no one in his family spoke—Kaveh Akbar writes, “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 I’ve built my understanding of poetry as a craft and as a meditative practice. There is no way to divorce my writing life from my spiritual life; that Venn diagram would just be one big circle. Whichever Divine I address in my poems today—love, fear, death, family, God, or anything else—first needs to be courted. I learned from an early age language was a way to court the great unknowables, provided it was charged and earnest and true. It’s irrelevant if I understand consciously exactly what I am saying, only that I say it urgently enough, speak it with enough beauty of breath and spirit to earn a tiny moment of God’s attention.”