Kaveh Akbar: First Fight, Then Fiddle: Toward a Revolutionary Poetics (January 2021)

Audre Lorde’s words, “Revolution is not a one-time event,” provide a frame for Kaveh Akbar’s exploration of poetic revolution against form, against line, against grammar. He discusses works by Gwendolyn Brooks, Forough Farrokhzad, Vijay Seshadri, and others to see how they push not only to rout convention, but to tear it down and offer up something better.