![]() It seems to be a driving force in your mindset. ![]() TS: When we first met, you introduced me to this neologism called pronoia, which is the opposite state of mind to paranoia, where one believes there exists a conspiracy in place to help them. He continues, “Kazim was, I think, the first American poet I knew who was writing about Islam who was writing about being interested, and in love with, Islam in ways that were complicated by his identity and experience. ![]() “ That’s big brother for me,” Akbar says over the phone in October. Writing these poems, which Akbar calls his “fundamental bedrock,” has earned him a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.Īkbar and I first met earlier this summer at a poetry reading of his in New York City, where he shared the bill with several poets including Kazim Ali. ![]() Among their myriad themes are the inherently paradoxical nature of being a grateful, recovering, sober alcoholic. Though it’s the province of his work––in his chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, and his debut collection of poems, Calling A Wolf A Wolf, both released this year––it’s hard to imagine the charming voice at the other end of the line belonging to someone in the throes of the “deeply miserable” life he speaks to in his poems. ![]() “I was not a good person,” Kaveh Akbar tells me. ![]()
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