Kaveh Akbar’s Calling a Wolf a Wolf is a “necessary chronicle” of addiction and recovery in verse.

The poems map Akbar’s “long walk” towards recovery while contemplating god, love, family, and violence. The images, visceral and devastating, are lessons in how the body remembers and heals, in how a reader can be led to another person’s deepest inner life. This début is an invaluable addition to poetry on restoration, mental health and choosing to begin again.

Was it difficult to write about something as personal as your addiction and recovery? Aside from people who read and enjoy poetry, would addicts, present or former, be an intended audience for this book?

The great aspiration for Calling a Wolf a Wolf is that it will find itself into the hands of other people suffering from addiction, whether in active addiction or in recovery. That’s all the book wants — to be useful to those people. That is the single great ambition of the collection. It was the only thing I could write about, only thing I could think about. When I started writing this book, I had no idea how to be a person. I had no experiential reference on how to be an adult and how to lead an adult life that wasn’t precipitated on the pursuit of narcotic experience. So, the book is very much a necessary chronicle of me trying to figure that out.

Though it is deeply personal, the book doesn’t narrate too many specific instances, instead stays in the realm of metaphor and imagery. Was that a conscious choice?

Yes, I think we see portrayals of addiction all the time in movies and books. We’re very familiar with the cliché of a guy snorting cocaine off a bathroom tile. I have a million of those stories. But those are just not as interesting to me. They’re so common to everyone’s experience. One thing that I go to poetry for is accounts of unprecedented experience. The poet Vijay Seshadri talked to me about this once — that poetry is where we examine and celebrate unprecedented experience. There is nothing unprecedented about snorting coke off a bathroom tile or drinking yourself into a stupor or waking up in an alley. Those are also part of my lived experience, but they’re also to me today the least interesting parts of that era.

What influence, if any, has your extensive interviewing of contemporary poets had on your writing?

The interviewing of poets has always been an attempt for me to go under the hood of my heroes and figure out what makes them work. The interviews are very much a supplement of my studies in the academic and the poetry world. They’re a huge part of my education. How could you not learn about poetry by talking to the people who are the best at it?

In ‘Portrait of the Alcoholic with Withdrawal’, “everyone wants to know/ what I saw on the long walk/ away from you.” How much of poetry, would you say, is trying to answer in a subversive way what people want to know?

That’s a smart question. My answer goes back to what I was saying about unprecedented experience. People want to know about that because it is a part of my lived experience that they may not share. What makes up your voice as a poet is your unprecedented experience. Li-Young Lee says, “syntax is identity”, which is to say that the way you speak is a result and synthesis of everywhere you’ve ever lived, every person you’ve ever spoken to, every voice you’ve ever heard. All that shines through the prism of your consciousness to become your singular voice. What people want to know about you or want to hear from you is that singular voice that they can’t hear from anyone else. So, yes, I’m interested in how to get at that in my poems.

You're one of the few contemporary poets who don't shy away from words like ‘skull’ ‘Christ’, ‘god’, ‘saint’, ‘grace’. Were you ever concerned about the weight of those individual words on a page?

Poets have been writing about these things since the advent of poetry. As far back as Gilgamesh, as far back as the holy texts, we’ve been wondering about god and faith and the soul and doubt. It’s the longest-standing poetic tradition there is. So much of what poetry is for me is this desire to tap into this conversation that has preceded me by millennia, and will continue for ages and ages after the last person has forgotten my name. It’s a great privilege to be part of that conversation. In tapping into that conversation, I want to bring all of me. I don’t want to wall off or partition any part of myself from my contribution to that conversation. My spiritual life and my cosmological yearning are big parts of who I am, so I want to bring those into the poems.

What do the next few months look like for you?

I’m teaching at Purdue University at the MFA programme with a group of truly brilliant students and faculty who inspire me every day. I’ve thrown myself into my teaching. I’m also travelling quite a bit to read from the book, to support the book, to talk to communities of poets all around the country, and that’s thrilling to me. I’m also getting married next summer to my fiancé, the poet Paige Lewis. So, a lot of spinning plates — plates I’m grateful to be spinning.

Urvashi Bahugunais a poet based in Delhi

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