India Ennenga and Kaveh Akbar at The Believer:
BLVR: You’ve said you want to honor all the poets “whose rapturous ecstasy overwhelmed even language’s ability to transcribe it.” Many of those, I imagine, are the authors you included as the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets and the Divine. Spiritual and religious writing offers some of the deepest considerations of the ineffable but feels a little taboo in our increasingly secular culture.
KA: It’s out of style, certainly. The standard belief is that if you’re smart, you have to be cynical. There’s an equivalency of skepticism with intelligence, and of belief with naivete, which is the height of hubris to me—as if we have suddenly landed upon an intelligence heretofore unavailable to Milton or Rabi’ah.
BLVR: That equivalency makes it easy to forget that spiritual verse is the origin of poetry—indeed, in many cultures there is no distinction whatsoever between poetry and prayer. Would you say that all poetry, even the most contemporary and secular, is still grappling with our earliest concerns of articulating a spiritual ineffability?
KA: In the anthology, I point to Enheduanna, born in 2286 BCE, a female priest who wrote often to the goddess Inanna, as the earliest attributable author in history. She was exiled from the Sumerian city-state of Ur by her brother when her dad, Sargon, died. So she was writing a lot of her hymns from exile, which immediately connected her to Ovid, and to Dante. And her themes feel very contemporary: she writes about man’s corrosive impact on the earth, for example, saying of Inanna, “In your thunder, nothing green could live.” Putting together The Book of Spiritual Verse gave me this sense of utter humility for just that reason. It forced me to recognize that for forty-three centuries, literary titans—from Enheduanna, to Rabi’ah, to Lao-tzu, to Donne, to Keats—have all been talking about the same shit that we’re still talking about.
My novel is interested in the most ineffable subjects that can occur to us, like how we can apply language to something as big as the possibility of a capital-G God. But I feel that, with any of the things I’m interested in writing about—life, death, love, justice—if something useful could be said about them with something as insufficient as language, it would have been done already. Which is to say that if Milton couldn’t figure it out, and Mahadevi couldn’t figure it out, and Enheduanna couldn’t figure it out, then Kaveh in his Houston hotel room isn’t going to be the one to land upon the pristine verse that will, for example, stop empire from lurching us into irreversible ecological collapse, right?
More here.
