Welcome back to Words That Burn, the poetry podcast taking a closer look at poetry. In this episode, host Benjamin Collopy offers a close reading of Kaveh Akbar's "Famous Americans and Why They Were Wrong", from his 2021 collection Pilgrim Bell.
The poem runs to seven couplets and moves from a ribbon tied around an oak tree to a wish that somebody forgets you today. Benjamin situates Akbar as a poet formed by prayer and by place, tracing the poet's biography from a boy reciting Arabic he could not translate to a writer preoccupied with what empire does to language.
In This Episode, I Explore:
- The Ribbon and the Hostage Crisis: Why the opening image reads so strangely to a non American audience, and how the yellow ribbon curdled from a welcome into a warning after 1979. We follow the poem discussion through the oak's roots sinking into the dirt and the heart that sinks alongside them, and ask what exactly is seeping into whom.
- Akbar's Ghazal: A look at the form, its couplets, its refrains, and the strict rules Akbar declines to follow. The ghazal is famous for what Agha Shahid Ali called its formal disunity, and that disunity turns out to be the literary technique doing the heaviest lifting here. We break down how enjambment carries meaning across couplets that seem unrelated on the page, one of several literary devices worth slowing down for.
- Data at the Centre of a Heart: The sinking library, the architect who forgot the weight of the books, and Akbar's argument that empire uses abstraction to cudgel us into idleness. We look at what the word "data" is doing in a poem that also treats untranslated prayer as a kind of data, and why only one of those is sacred.
- The Mercy of Being Forgotten: Why a poem about erasure ends by wishing for it. Visibility inside an empire is rarely a gift, and Akbar's closing hope is offered in the grammar of prayer, which is to say with no guarantee anyone is listening.
Accessible enough for poetry for beginners and no prior reading required. As always, this poetry interpretation belongs to Benjamin and is very much up for debate. Full script with citations and references on Substack, linked below.
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The Music In This Week's Episode:
'Hydra' by Huda - released under CC-BY 4.0.
Time Stamps:
00:00 Poetry Reading
00:51 Poetry as Prayer
01:43 Kaveh Akbar's Background
03:39 The Iranian Hostage Crisis
05:04 Iranian Identity in America
06:43 Understanding the Title
08:28 Ribbons and Patriotic Symbols
09:50 The Ghazal Form
13:00 Weaponisation of Language
15:25 Data and Dehumanisation
18:52 The Final Couplet
20:58 Empire and Prayer
21:39 Closing Thoughts
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