“Empire works to disenchant us”: An Interview with Kaveh Akbar

Kaveh Akbar, our 2026 Poetry Contest judge, is interviewed by Abdulkareem Abdulkareem, our 2026 Poetry Editor.

ABDULKAREEM ABDULKAREEM: For a long time, BWR has embraced what is often called “the experimental,” while allowing editors and guest editors to define that term in their own ways. As a poet, how do you understand experimentation, whether within the context of BWR or beyond it?

KAVEH AKBAR: Thus far in life, my ambition for what I want to do on the page has constantly dwarfed my ability to do it. I think of experimentation as how I navigate that delta.

ABDULKAREEM ABDULKAREEM: Different writers approach craft in different ways. In past interviews, particularly your recent conversation with So to Speak, where you discussed your practice of creating a “word bank,” and your interview with Iowa Now, where you describe yourself as an “ox writer” who pulls the plow dutifully every day, you offer a glimpse into the habits and disciplines that shape your work. I’m curious about the sensibility behind these practices. How do they inform your writing process, and how are they reflected in your craft as a poet?

KAVEH AKBAR: I write every day because I feel like shit if I don’t. It’s a value-neutral thing. The ox-poet / cat poet-thing is Zbigniew Herbert’s binary. No hierarchy between the two, and like any binary it’s reductive, but this particular one is fun to think about. When I first asked my spouse Paige Lewis whether they were an ox or a cat, they said, “I’m a porcupine.” They went on to explain that in medieval bestiaries, people wrote that mother porcupines would go into berry bushes and roll around, sticking the berries to their quills, then take them back to their hungry children. It really is exactly right to describe how Paige, who always writes while also half-reading a giant stack of books at their side, works.

ABDULKAREEM ABDULKAREEM: Are there specific writers you return to who have a grand idea that helps you out whenever your creative process feels muffled—for guidance?

KAVEH AKBAR: Oh so many, too many to name. Borges is a lodestar. Amos Tutuola, Nabokov, Woolf, Mann, Morrison. Emily Dickinson, Robert Hayden, Franz Wright, Adelia Prado. Heather Christle. Ted Chiang. My friends!

ABDULKAREEM ABDULKAREEM: When you’re trying to approach a new poem, is there a specific thought, a process or key you hold on to which must be represented in a poem?

KAVEH AKBAR: It’s almost always a scrap of language. With poetry, I’m trying to get at the thing underneath my thinking, my knowing. I’m trying to get away from representation too, really. If I hold the reigns loosely enough, the poem will drag me to a discovery I couldn’t have made on my own. They’re always smarter than I am. If they weren’t, I’d just dictate my poems into a voice recorder and be done with it. There’s something in the synapse between pen and paper that lets the writing go out a little ahead. It’s one of the many many reasons I wrote everything—poetry and fiction—by hand.

ABDULKAREEM ABDULKAREEM: One thing I’m always carefully looking for in your work is the sense of awe and curiosity that seems tied to the subjects you write about: addiction, displacement, and loneliness. In so many of your poems, I find myself returning to this quality. I see it in “Learning to Pray,” “The Palace,” and even in your recent love poems, such as “With Big Head, With Tumor and Petrified Dog, With Lines From Jesus and Muhammed,” among many others. There is a sense of radical awe running through them. How do you cultivate or lean into that sense of awe in your work?

KAVEH AKBAR: Empire works to disenchant us. We accept the destruction of the earth only when we can no longer perceive its dizzy bounty. We accept the destruction of our neighbors only when we can no longer perceive their unprecedented, irreplaceably singular humanity. Keeping myself permeable to wonder keeps me mindful of the stakes. I’m moved by you saying the poems reflect that, thank you.

ABDULKAREEM ABDULKAREEM: What are the things you look forward to in the poems that leave you wowed or rather, the poems that lit your consciousness?

KAVEH AKBAR: Surprise me! I just want to encounter something new.

ABDULKAREEM ABDULKAREEM: Can you talk a little about the things outside of reading and writing that fuel your work? I’m curious about the non writing hobbies, interests, or routines that shape your imagination and creative practice.

KAVEH AKBAR: I’m a pretty boring person, I fear. I watch a lot of movies. I like to exercise, I like the stillness in my higher brain it brings. Basketball is important to me. I have two dogs and two cats who are inexhaustible wells of delight and instruction. At any given moment, they occupy at least fifty percent of my consciousness. I have great friends, a great recovery community. It’s a very lucky, very small life.

ABDULKAREEM ABDULKAREEM: What are you currently reading?

KAVEH AKBAR: I’m teaching a class on Mann, Nabokov, and Woolf in the Fall, so have been working my way through their oeuvres in advance of the school year. After reading the three of them, everyone else kind of sounds like chirping and burping for a while. New this year, I loved Tom Lin’s Babylon, South Dakota. P. Scott Cunningham’s “Self Portrait as the I in Florida.” Ann Patchett’s Whistler, Lauren Groff’s Brawler. Sakinah Hoffler’s “Stable,” Harriet Clark’s “The Hill.” I liked Paige Lewis’s “Canon” a lot, and not just because I’m married to them.

Kaveh Akbar is the author of two full-length poetry collections—Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf—and the author of a poetry chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic. To read more about him and his work, you can check out his website here. If you’d like to learn more about BWR’s 2026 contest, you can read the guidelines on our Submittable page, or check out our most recent contest issue, 51.2, by grabbing yourself a copy from our online store.