Kaveh Akbar’s “Calling a Wolf a Wolf” is a Masterwork
It’s hard to not be envious of Kaveh Akbar.
He’s 28 — my age — and Calling a Wolf a Wolf, his recent collection, feels like the culmination of a long career filled with dazzling linguistic feats. But he’s only getting started.
First of all, Calling a Wolf a Wolf is a deeply personal addiction and recovery narrative. In interviews, Akbar has said this, along with Portrait of the Alcoholic, his chapbook, was his way of making sense of his sobriety — and, of course, to process everything that went on when he was an addict.
Still, this is not mere confessional poetry, although it certainly is that. Akbar, like other great chroniclers of addiction, understands that addiction is surreal. It separates you from reality and from yourself, making you totally rely on whatever substance or habit or person has power over you. That thing becomes your identity. To separate from it means to plunge back into the real.
And Akbar is extremely gifted. He’s a craftsman. So his collection reaches another level. Calling a Wolf a Wolf, I’d say, soars beyond the traditional addiction narrative and becomes something ethereal, transcendent. When you read the collection in its entirety, it’s as if you are attempting to stare at Reality Itself. The language Akbar uses in his poems seems to have been drawn from somewhere deep within the earth. It feels primordial.
I’m not sure I’ve encountered anyone like Akbar, but the closet comparisons I can make are to Denis Johnson and Cormac McCarthy. Like Johnson, Akbar starts his poems simply enough, and then he sends readers off into the surreal, with language that spins and dances. I’m reminded of Johnson’s seminal Jesus’ Son, another addiction narrative. Akbar, you might say, knows every raindrop by name.
And like McCarthy, Akbar, at times, seems to be the re-embodiment of the antique oral storyteller. Consider his poem “Rimrock,” the last few lines of which read thusly: “As long as the earth continues/its stony breathing, I will breathe/When it stops I will shatter back/into gravity. Into quartz” (39). We might twin these lines with the following from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: “He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt”(220). If you listen closely, you can hear the whisper of time in their lines. You can hear the power of the ancients.
Comparison, though, can only get you so far. Akbar is an original. You can see the unique stuff he does with line breaks, with word choices, with rhythms in any number of his poems. Take, for instance, “My Kingdom for a Murmur of Fanfare,” which is placed near the end of Calling a Wolf a Wolf. It begins like this: “It’s common to live properly, to pretend/you don’t feel heat or grief” (69). Okay. Pretty straightforward. But then this happens: “What I’m trying/to say is I think it’s okay to accelerate around/corners, to grunt back at the mailman and swallow all/your laundry quarters” (69). And, at the end, this: “All I want is to finally/take off my cowboy hat and how you my jeweled/ horns. If we slow dance I will ask you not to tug/on them, but secretly I will want that very much” (70). There are many ways we could read this poem: life is a lot more interesting than we think it is, so let’s bring back a sense of enchantment; we need to embrace everything about ourselves, even the “horns” we keep hidden under cowboy hats. But the presentation here is fascinating. It’s as if Guillermo del Toro decided to stop making films and instead moved into poetry.
I’ve rarely been at a loss for words after reading something, whether it be a short story, a poetry collection, an essay, or a novel. This is one of those times.
I eagerly await his next collection.
