 We are really fortunate to have Calvin Ackbar reading for us today on the occasion of his recently published second collection, Pilgrim Bell, with this thoroughly productive title. You can do many things with those shapes and their arrangement, just like this poet does so many things with arrangement on the page. I thought that I would talk a little bit about the series of eponymous poems, Pilgrim Bell, the Pilgrim Bells that are ringing throughout this collection, hoping to maybe hear at least one of them later in the event. So outside of the poems, but also inside of them, Calvin has talked about how difficult it is to opt to write in the language of empire, before to deploy expressions, phrases, single terms that carry so much weight of historical atrocity, and to try to imagine a way to speak counter to that while also knowing that it's flowing through everything one says. And in fact, rolling, right, that there can be a kind of ease of expression, which is itself a problem when using such language and everything that has transpired within it. So what to do? You can't get outside, you can't arrest that flow. Well, in these poems called Pilgrim Bell, the poet has sought to at least temporarily, briefly detain such language. And I use detain advisedly there as an example of how political but not only a certain kind of political such terms can be. In these poems, syntax is interrupted constantly by a period. Sympact is made terminal, even though it's short of the destiny of its complete utterance. It's sort of like importing line breaks into the middle of poems again and again and again. Sometimes it breaks with syntactic segments and feels comfortable. Sometimes it insists on breaking against them. In either case, though, it's interrupting flow, and it's making us abide with those words and their histories. But it's also sometimes making new syntax within the ostensible dominant syntax of line and sentence. It's doing things other than it is saying. And if that is not a way of defeating empire, and it assuredly is not, it's a way of not simply being its conduit or meekly being its conduit. A lot of those poems find ways to talk about the very method that they're using to arrest and interrupt and distress the language that they're curious about inhabiting and interested in reoccupying. There's one of these ones, let me get to it, that talks at the end about vibration of the violence in the middle year. It seems like the ringing of these bells is not about meeting violence with violence or meeting violence with non-violence. So much is just acknowledging it's there and seeing what other forms of the vibratory one can produce on the grounds of the already jostling and thronging. For this poet, I think that's what faith comes down to, actually. The faith that there's a reason to occupy and to stay, to reoccupy, but also to be a problem, to be an affectionate problem. Let's hear some of that and give you a call to Akbar. That was incredible. That was really incredible. Thank you so much for that. I hope that every poet in the world gets to be the beneficiary of such rigorous and searching attention. Attention is a measure of our most precious resource. It's a measure of time. The attention that you've given those poems is obviously substantive. It's so interesting what you say. You said the thing about the destiny of the utterance, which is so captivating to me. And yeah, I mean, those are poems that are so... Hi, everybody. My name is Kav and my pronouns are he, him. I'm coming to you from unceded Lenape territory in the middle of Indiana, West Lafayette, where I teach and live with my three cats and spouse. But I'm really interested in what you just said about the destiny of the utterance and the attempts to interrupt that. You know, those poems, for those of you who aren't familiar with the book, have periods appear variously throughout them. And when I was writing the book, I was really obsessed with... I became really... I mean, so much of the book is orbiting my attempts to disabuse myself of the load-bearing certainties upon which I had built my living. And the practice of learning to sit in uncertainty without groping desperately to resolve it was both a spiritual and creative practice for me. I found that such desperate groping tend to make everyone in my circle's life worse. You know, it tended to create suffering. And so those poems in a very, very sort of real and practical way were me trying to undetermine myself. You know, I found it really interesting that in English, in the English language, we speak to each other, like the two kinds of sentences that take the period in the English language are declarative and imperative, right? To declare something or to tell someone to do something, right? Those are the two things that the period does, right? And those are, you know, what's more certain than telling someone to do something, right? What's more certain than a declaration, right? And so in those poems, the kind of supersaturation of these grammatical demarcators of certainty sort of flayed them of their meaning, right? Flayed them of that meaning in a way that I was also trying to replicate in my living, right? So it's an instance of what is happening on the page mirroring what was happening in my real life or what is happening in my real life mirroring what is happening on the page in a way that was at the time very organic, right? Like, I wasn't like, ah, you know, what a grammatical demarcator of certainty is in the English language as the period, you know? So let me, you know, it wasn't like that, right? But I found myself doing it and sort of after the fact realized how I was doing it. So it's so interesting. I'm sorry for this lengthy preamble, but it's just so sort of interesting and uncanny to hear you talking about that so sharply and pointedly, Jeffrey, because it's so precisely what I was after, you know, and I've not heard it sort of said back to me with such kind of precision. It's just a gift to be read well. So thank you for it. I'll start with, there are six of those poems in the book called Pilgrim Bell, and I'll start with one of those. Okay, I can find the right one. Pilgrim Bell, how long can you speak without inhaling? How long can you inhale without bursting apart? History is wagging its ass at us, twirling in its silver cape. I want to kiss your gloves. I want you to kiss my friends. Can you see the wet azalea quivering on its vine? It's ripening dread. If it never rained again, I would still wear my coat, still wrap my socks in plastic. Doing one thing is a way of not doing everything else. Today, I answer only to my war name. Why salt? I can make a stone float off into the sky. I can make a whole family disappear. I know so many people have been awful to you, have given each one a number. When you're ready, I will ask you to draw me their hands. Thank you all for being here. I can't see your Cummly visages, but I'm sure that their Cummly is all get out and that whether this finds you doing the dishes or driving to pick up your son from ballet or whatever you're doing, I hope that you're having a good day and I'm glad to get to spend a bit of it with you. Thank you to Noah and to everyone who's responsible for my being here, Adrienne and my friend who told me not to touch my table too much because it wiggles the laptop. I'm trying very hard to not do that. I can't see your face anymore, but I'm imagining you glowering at me sternly every time I do it and it's helping. I'm grateful for that. This poem is called The Miracle. In Islam, the precipitating miracle of the faith is sort of literacy. It's sort of like parallel to the virgin birth and Christianity. The prophet was said to be just sort of camping in the mountains and the angel Gabriel comes to him and says, read and meant to read the word of God and transcribe what would become Oran. And the prophet like many people of his time and place in the world was illiterate and the angel grabs him and gives him literacy and then he's able to begin transcribing it. And it scares the shit out of him, which is like the best part of the story. If he was just like, oh, yeah, no, totally. I'm like super ready, but he like goes home and like gets in bed next to his wife and he's just like scared shitless, which is like, that's what's always charred me about the story. But anyway, so like literacy is like the sort of, it's a sort of ground upon which the whole faith is built, which obviously as a poet, I've always thought was pretty cool. So it's the only thing you really need to know. This is called the miracle Gabriel seizing the illiterate man alone and fasting in a cave and commanding read the man saying I can't Gabriel squeezing him tighter commanding read the man gasping I don't know how Gabriel squeezing him so tight he couldn't breathe squeezing out the air of protest the air of doubt crushing it out of his crushable human body saying read in the name of your Lord who created you from a clot and thus literacy revelation. It wasn't until Gabriel squeezed away what was empty in him that the prophet could be filled with miracle. Imagine the emptiness in you, the vast cavities you've spent your life trying to fill with fathers, mothers, lovers, language, drugs, money, art, praise and imagine them gone. What's left? Whatever you aren't, which is what makes you a house useful not because it's floor boards or ceilings or walls, but because the empty space between them. Gabriel isn't coming for you. If he did, would you call him Gabriel? Or Gabriel, like you are here? Who is this even for? One crisis at a time. Gabriel isn't coming for you. Cheese on a cracker, a bit of salty fish. Somewhere a man is steering a robotic plane into murder. Robot from the Czech Robata, meaning forced labor, murder labor, forced. He never sees the bodies which are implied by their absence like feathers on a paper bird. Gabriel isn't coming for you. In the absence of cloud parting trumpet blaring clarity, what? More living, more money, lazy sex, mother, brother, lover, you travel and bring back silk scarves, a bag of chocolates for you don't know who yet. Someone will want them. Deliver them to an empty field. You fall asleep facing the freckle on your wrist. Somewhere a woman presses a button that locks metal doors with people behind them. The locks are useful to her because there is an emptiness on the other side that holds the people's lives in place. She doesn't know the names of the people. Anonymity is an ancillary feature of the locks. Ancillary from the Latin enquila, meaning servant, an emptiness to hold all their living. You created from a clot. Gabriel isn't coming for you. You too full to eat. You too locked to door too cruel to wonder. Gabriel isn't coming. You too loved to love to speak to hear too wet to drink. No, Gabriel, you too pride to weep. You too play to still you too high to come. No, Gabriel won't be coming for you too fear to move you too pebble to stone to saddle to horse to crime to pay Gabriel. No, not anymore. You too gone to save too bloodless to martyr to diamond to charcoal to nation to earth you brute cruel pebble Gabriel God of man no cheese on a cracker mercy mercy. I'm going to set my book down for a second and I'm actually going to read you a poem written by a not me person, which is something that I like to do sometimes. You know, I think that over this quarantine, we've all spent a lot of time with ourselves. And, and it's fun sometimes to spend time with not ourselves in poems and otherwise. This poem is by the post or Polish poet, fish law was in Borscha. I sort of like, I sort of ride this carousel of like which one of the big post or Polish poets is my favorite at any given moment. I think most usually it's Herbert, who's related to George Herbert, which I just learned recently. They're like distant relations, which is just a fun, weird, true thing. But yeah, it's a beginning of Herbert was always is always sort of been my favorite, but I go through, I go through phases and I just read Shamborshka has a new book coming out of her Claire Kavanaugh translated book of her writer. She ran out like a column where young writers could write in and she would tell them advice and like generally her advice is like, you're not a writer give up, which is like a really brutal thing to tell to 16 year olds. But I was so like, fascinated by this like weird and kind of brusque book. And somehow she's very charming in it, even while she's being like, again, like quite, quite intense. But I was really enamored of this book. And so I've sort of been revisiting her. So like she's, you know, one of the most well known poets in the book, for good reason. This poem is called True Love. And it's translated by Claire Kavanaugh. And again, it's by Vishlawa Shamborshka, if you'd like to Google it. True love. Is it normal? Is it serious? Is it practical? What does the world get from two people who exist in a world of their own? Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason, drawn randomly from millions, but convinced it had to happen this way in reward for what? For nothing. The light descends from nowhere. Why on these two and not on others? Doesn't this outrage justice? Yes, it does. Doesn't it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles and cast the moral from the peak? Yes, on both accounts. Look at the happy couple. Couldn't they at least try to hide it? Fake a little depression for their friends' sake? Listen to them laughing. It's an insult. The language they use. Deceptively clear. And their little celebrations, rituals, the elaborate mutual routines. It's obviously a plot behind the human race is back. It's hard even to guess how far things might go if people start to follow their example. What could religion and poetry count on? What would be remembered? What renounced? Who'd want to stay within bounds? True love. Is it really necessary? Tacked in common sense tell us to pass over it in silence, like a scandal in life's highest circles. Perfectly good children are born without its help. It couldn't populate the planet in a million years. It comes along so rarely. Let the people who never find true love keep saying there's no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die. Again, that poem is by the poet Vishalawa Shimborshka, S-Z-Y-M-B-O-R-S-K-A. It's good to read non-me poems at readings, too, because if you came to this reading and you're like, yeah, I'm going to get to hear some poetry and then you hear my poetry and you're like, that's not for me at all. At least maybe you can leave with a cool Shimborshka poem that really does it for you. Maybe on that poem, actually, I've been sort of like everyone else. I've been sort of naturally immobilized by so much of what is happening in the world and finding it hard to write into it. And Jeffrey touched on this, especially using the English language. It feels particularly compromised. M. Norbessa Phillips talks about how the one has to decontaminate the language in order to use it with credibility and that work has been sort of horizontal for me, like the horizon. You never actually get there. You just kind of march towards it forever. But anyways, because I still like to write, but I have no idea how to do so, it's like I forget after every poem I write, I forget how it works. I've just been writing love poems to my spouse who I've been hanging out a lot with over quarantine and who I think is really cool. And so this is just like one of those from last week. It'll probably never be anywhere or be anything, but just in the spirit of like sharing something like genuinely new and not just like new the way a book is new, but it's actually like several years old. I'm going to share this. This is called Love Poem with Lines from Jesus and Muhammad. How provincial to want to be the best living anything. How embarrassing really as I stand atop the innumerable faceless dead. Literally as I boil water in a good blue pot, someone died and left us. How provincial and frankly small. Do not think I came to bring peace, but a sword. That's the Jesus one by the way, another terror in a language I'll never know. Yes, obedient instrument, remote will and the tooth biting through gold, gold sap glowing in us. Yes, that good gold supple looking at our phones while I go soft inside you obliterate me into that forever and forgive me my Puritan heart brittle as an Ottoman vase as even the light lies. Our deep night was a blaze and the long shadow we thought was a wolf was just a man's hands abstract belief finally turning into action like it's supposed to and what comes next of course is all I've kept from you saying it out loud and watching it shrink like a shrinking flute. Those you worship beside him are just names which you have named. How ridiculous a name being just one syllable God sword peace asked the best living noun viper maybe him. Yes, him how to learn this know how to remember. I forgot I had put that that's the Jesus one by the way line in the home and it made me laugh as I was reading it, which is a fun thing for a poem to do is to like I just do not think I came to bring peace but a sword sounds like such a like cliche of like what sort of Islamophobe would think that the auron is full of and it's like a funny thing to be like Jesus said that gotcha you know, but I forgot that I forgot that that was in there which made me smile. It's one of the fun things about reading really really new work is you write it quickly and you put it away and then you read it and it's like kind of new to you still. Okay, I'll read another pilgrim bell poem maybe because now I'm sort of I feel like Jeffrey sort of made them. You know that thing that happens when you when you spend a lot of time with with a piece and it becomes almost like an ideogram of itself like you can just like glance at it and like summon all of the psycho spiritual experiential data that you put into that piece right at a glance without actually having to but I feel like you've turned these poems back into the you know tiny machines made of words again you know and and that's a cool thing for me. Not to be like I'm really interested in reading my own work pretty cool what I did here you know but it's just I don't know what it kind of is like I'm interested in it like thinking about it the way that you framed it. Anyways this poem is called pilgrim bell the stillness you prize won't prize you back two beef steaks ripening on a windowsill a purple tray piled with coal become the many room house you walk through in dreams show me on the great blue door where it hurts this is the season where grace is the likeliest where the utter most angels way down our galaxy with sound a silver ring lost in the bedsheets is still a silver ring you can either be more holy or more full but not both see how the hot element glows red how honey cools the tea suppose there was a reason for it suppose there wasn't I'm going to read maybe three or four more poems um yeah and and one of them will be a non-meat poem again but this one is a meat poem it's called my empire my empire made me happy because it was an empire and mine I was too stupid to rage at anything babies cried at birth it was said because the devil pricked them as introduction to knowledge I sat fingering my gilded frame counting grievances like toes here my mother here my ring here my sex and here my king all still there wrath is the desire to repay what you've suffered kneeling on coins before the minor deity in the mirror clueless as a pearl that the prophets arrived not to ease our suffering but to experience it seems can I say this waste my empire made me happy so I loved easily its citizens such loving a kind of birth an introduction to pain whatever I learned makes me angry to have learned it the new missiles can detect the flies heartbeat atop a pile of rubble from 6000 miles away that flies have hearts 104 cells big that beat and because of this knowing a pile of rubble the prophets came to participate in suffering as if to an amusement park which makes our suffering the main attraction in our brochure a father's grief over his dead father the thorn broken off in a hand my empire made me happy because it was an empire cruel and the suffering wasn't my own I think I'm I think I'm just gonna read two more poems I became a like as I said I was gonna read three or four more poems I was also immediately then self-conscious that if I said that and read four I would be one of those poets who's like I'm gonna read n or n plus one more poems and then always inevitably read n plus one more poems so I'm just gonna read two more poems and this poem is by a non me poet I just read this book I just read the galleys of this book and it really pulled me over there's this press in in Minneapolis that the publisher that publishes chat books by autistic and neurodivergent poets and they just have started this partnership with milkweed to publish full length out of those chat books and this is the first full length in that series it's by this poet named Hannah Emerson who is an incredible poet new to me with this book but she I guess she's a non-speaking autistic woman but her poems are like it's like Molly Bloom's soliloquy like for an entire book and there's like sort of like stein in here and there's like I don't know Whitman and maybe Ross Gay but it's just it's so it's just it doesn't sound like anything I've heard in contemporary poetry and I and I sort of have I mean I work as an editor for a magazine and sort of have a IV drip of poetry coming into me like contemporary poetry coming in at any moment and it just this doesn't sound like anything else that I've read in a long long time so I was really excited about it and and I've been sort of like proselytizing it for a minute and and this seemed like a good opportunity to get to share her with or get to share this thing that was exciting to me with a few more people so again this poet's name is Hannah Emerson Hannah like the poindromic spelling and then Emerson like Ralph Waldo and this book is called the kissing of kissing it comes out in March 2022 I think you can pre-order it now on milkweed's website I'm sure I mean if you just google like milkweed Hannah Emerson you'll find it but this poem is called Hannah is never only Hannah Hannah is never only Hannah please get that I am the trying breeze going through the really great great great world yes yes please get that I am the drowning helpful freedom of the storm yes yes please get that I am the very hot great great great son yes yes please get that I am the great great great great ice that gives you the freeze that you need to get to melt into nothing yes yes yes yes please get that I am the sky great great great blue nothing yes yes please get that I am the ground, great, great, great place helping you, helping you stand and grateful, helpful, helpful, helpful, kissing her, her, her, her, yes. Please get that you and I greet the great, great life from this place of great, great kissing life, life, life, yes, yes, yes. Please get that you are great form, great, formless, helping, kissing, kissing, great, knowing the great, great, great, helpful, kissing the trying, yes, yes, yes. Please get that the helpful, loving thinking you help just help kissing helpful, loving, great, great, great world turn upside down, yes, yes. Please get that you help me by helping me turn upside down to yes, yes, yes. Please get the great, great, helpful kissing people need to get that great helpful kissing is turning kissing upside down, yes, yes. Please get that helpful kissing just needs to be gathered into this helpful kissing trying hell of this life to go forward to help me Hannah, Hannah, Hannah, yes, yes. Please get that you need loving kissing to make you like me, yes, yes. Please get that the kissing must be great nodding of you, me, great, us together in this hell, yes, yes, yes. Please get that you kiss me helping me kiss you, yes, yes. Again, that's the poet Hannah Emerson, H-A-N-N-A-H-E-M-E-R-S-O-N. That book is called The Kissing of Kissing. And I just I'm so enamored of it right now. Okay, I'm going to read one more poem. Thank you, Jeffrey. Thank you, Noah. Thank you, everyone so much for being here with me. I hope that all of our paths bend across corporeally someday and we can we can talk over coffee or, you know, in a more substantive non two dimensional way. But this has been a luckiness. Thank you guys. I'm going to this is the last poem that I'll read. I think I'm supposed to say that and then like wink or something so that the the, you know, the hands behind the curtains can move. But yeah, so this is called reading phatoxod in a pandemic. Foruk Phatoxod was the most important Iranian poet of the 20th century. And over the over the Farsi was my first language, but I never learned to read it. So that was one of my projects over over quarantine was like teaching myself, well, not teaching myself, I had a tutor, but learning the learning to read. And now I read Farsi better than I speak it, but which is still not very good. But but so this poem is sort of orbiting that and trying to read phatoxod in Farsi, which I didn't do a very good job of reading phatoxod in a pandemic. The title is a lie. I can't read Farsi. I can make out we lose, we lose. I type it into a translation app. We have lost everything we need to lose. In between what I read and what is written need everything here, the waving flag. Here, the other world. Because we need mail, people die. Because we need groceries. People die. I write, we need knowing we dilutes my responsibility, like watercolors dipped in a fast river. Get behind me English. When I text my heart share okay boy as that that machine as that team to my dad he writes back, we have lost whatever we had to lose hammering pentameter. Whatever we had, people die because they look like him. My uncle jail, his daughter killed. This is a real fact too wretched for letters. And yet my uncle jailed. His daughter killed. Waving world. The other flag. There is room in the language for being without language. So much of wet is cold. So much of diamond is light. I want both my countries to be right to fear me. We have lost whatever we had to lose. Thank you, Kava. Well, I love how you create these communities and continuities and bring us in. Those poems are exceptional. Thank you for joining us today. And thank you everyone for coming out. It's been a pleasure as always. And I hope you'll join us for our next reading with Callie Garnett on December 2. In the meantime, I want to thank also our funders at the library. I encourage you to join our mailing list. If you haven't already, the link, the email link is on our website, what you see before you. Finally, you can catch this reading and all prior readings on our YouTube channel. We're easily searchable. Lunch poems readings. So be well. And we hope to see you on December 2. Thank you all. Thank you, Kava.