Rosebud Ben-Oni Looks at the Work of Kaveh Akbar in Two-Part Series

Rosebud Ben-Oni writes about Kaveh Akbar for the Kenyon Review, considering happiness and survival: "Is to understand yourself survival and to understand another happiness? Does understanding another complicate one’s survival? Or does it sustain us?" More:

Forgive me—
I tried to write a poem.

— Kaveh Akbar, “A Failed Poem"

Written in a series of couplets, the speaker in Akbar’s “A Failed Poem” has driven half a day to write a poem about a beached whale’s death and then asks for forgiveness for doing so. This is a poet admitting something most people, let alone poets, would not admit: intention, the original intention. This is far as we go in terms of personal confession, however. “A Failed Poem” concerns the death of whale, and whales, after all, are some of the most intelligent yet enigmatic creatures in the world. Our relationship with them is complicated and contentious, although there have been some incredible interactions between humans and whales in the wild, such as the story of a humpback whale tangled up in fishing lines and saved by divers: “When the whale realized it was free, it began swimming around in circles… swam to each diver, nuzzled him and then swam to the next one.” There’s the story of the baby humpback whale who was found stranded and successfully returned to the ocean off Queensland’s Gold Coast.

And there’s the story of the twenty or so pilot whales stranded off the Gulf of California. Although rescue crews managed to draw some of the whales deeper into the ocean, those whales would go back to the beach where the rest of their pod lay dying. One whale in particular began flapping its large tail hard on the wet sand, as a rescuer explained to the camera that the animal was in deep distress, that this was just before its final moment. Watching a whale die, when it had been lured back into the water but was unable to desert its pod, was not easy to watch; it chose death, knowingly. Pilot whales are known for their intense social bonds; there’s another instance where a mother carried her dead calf for days in her mouth, and “kept on trying to bring it up to the surface so that it could breathe.”

“A Failed Poem” is not an easy read, nor is it a failed poem...

Read all of "Even If Parts of You Go Missing Forever." This is part two of a two-part series on Akbar's work. Read part one here.