Kaveh Akbar is one of those poets that— as best as I can explain it— quite suddenly has always been in the world, and in my world, and your world, and yours too, and we can’t stop reading (with) him. His book Calling a Wolf a Wolf is forthcoming from Alice James Books, and over at Divedapper, which he founded and edits, he’s interviewed some of the most remarkable contemporary poets today. Akbar is the kind of conversationalist who knows when and what to say, how little and how much, in order to draw out the poet’s ideas, reveries, convictions. He’s receiving the other as both transmitter and synthesizer— one gets the sense that he’s really listening, that he wants to understand. His conversation with Max Ritvo was so powerful that I rearranged my fall syllabus so we’d begin the class with our own dialogue on why “it’s unclear why we humans are here —if we’re here to be bodies, or to be language.”
In Akbar’s own poetry, we experience his ability to transform the body/bodies into something sublime through language. In “Orchids are Sprouting From the Floorboards,” the speaker’s longing transfigures everything he sees into orchids, and everything he sees must surrender to this vision. There is a joy here that is more ecstatic than joyous in the lighthearted sense, one which consumes the world entire, whether natural (“The clouds are all orchids./They are raining orchids”) or synthetic (“Teenagers are texting each other pictures/ of orchids on their phones, which are also orchids.”) What is one to make of this transformation? On the surface, who would not want a world full of orchids, a flower associated less with loss than desire and opulence? Yet this is not a poem of ornamental beauty. Orchids, at least in my experience, have a much more complex relationship to humans because they are so fragile yet headstrong in their ability to withstand captivity, our human desire to possess them.
In The Orchid Thief, journalist Susan Orlean searches for why orchids bewitch us. She examines the case of a horticulturalist named John Laroche who was arrested for poaching the flower in Florida in order to clone the very rare ghost orchid. Some have said his main motivation was money, but Orlean argues a much deeper struggle: “To desire orchids is to have a desire that can never be fully requited.” Better yet is the answer she’s given by a park ranger:
‘Oh, mystery, beauty, unknowability, I suppose… Besides, I think the real reason is that life has no meaning. I mean, no obvious meaning. You wake up, you go to work, you do stuff. I think everybody’s always looking for something a little unusual that can preoccupy them and help pass the time.’
Lately I’ve begun to see orchids everywhere. Designer Tom Ford seems to be obsessed with them: he has released a variety of perfumes like Black Orchid, Orchid Soleil, Velvet Orchid. In 2014, Pantone chose Radiant Orchid as Color of the Year. And do you recall one of The White Stripes’s very first singles “Blue Orchid” in which Jack White sang acridly: “You got a reaction, didn’t you?/ You took a white orchid/You took a white orchid turned it blue.” And that time poet Mary Bidding gave poet Jason Koo some sage advice in order to save his orchid, which he then dedicated to Akron University Press, which was saved from budget cuts. I think I’m beginning to get it. I see the strange hope that follows first attempts unreturned. I see the going past the no guarantees. I see resurrection. I see possibility.
And it is then, it is finally then, that I remember my own orchid which I’ve written about here and here. My once wayward orchid, half in bloom and half wilted, is now merely two headless stems and green and browning leaves, its roots pushing out of the larger pot I purchased only a month ago. I can’t seem to get anything to grow past this.
Orchids are notoriously difficult flowers; they are not for the plant novice, and yet it’s the real first plant, real first green anything, that was ever entrusted to me. My husband bought it for me as a gift, and now it sits sullenly on my desk, without a flower or face to read. I long for the beginning, when it was a string of blooms, and I used to speak it to every morning and marvel at the ease in which it seemed to have come into the world.
How easy it would be, I’d foolish thought, from here on out. How easy to care for something so allegedly arduous.
Somewhere along the way, between trips abroad to Iceland and Hong Kong, among household chores and making deadlines and preparing class reading lists and course syllabi, I forgot my orchid. I stopped paying attention to its subtle signs of decline; I stopped listening to advice that watering it too much as too little can cause irreversible damage, that it needs that “just right” touch of a flora enthusiast. Orchids are temperamental and take offense to the slightest neglect. They need dedication. They are not for someone like me who until only recently has lived itinerant. I’ve never had a garden of my own. I’ve never even kept a small cactus, which might have been a better choice. Now I worry it’s too late. I consult the internet. I talk with my husband’s mother who has grown orchids for years. I check its roots. I look for a sign, when I have no idea what one would look like. I worry. I worry I’ll forget again, in the near future, and return to mornings and evenings in which I no longer see it sitting on my desk, my mind pre-occupied with newer, more pressing things.
Today I worried enough to sit down for a moment and read it this poem. I worried enough to play the audio so that Kaveh (yes, first name Kaveh) might read to the orchid, to its roots most exposed, to its leaves slightly drooping. I realize you must think of the people you most long for, and transfer those feelings, in order to care for an orchid.
I listen to Kaveh read his poem online, and I wonder if it’s too late, and if it has been too late for a long time. But how would I ever bury such a life? My practical husband tells me it’s just one plant, and that plants never really die anyway, completely, as animals and humans do. They simply return to the earth; they have infinite chances. He squeezes my hand, and adds that at least it seems this way to him. I resist asking him if he’s saying this because it’s something I’d like to hear. I listen to the silence that follows in his embrace, his knowing that I’m still learning to care for things that need complete and utter devotion. My heart is in it– this at least I know for sure. There is an instinct somewhere within me to nurture beyond the page. “Mothers fill bottles with warm orchids,” Kaveh Akbar writes, “to feed their infants, who are orchids themselves./Their coos are a kind of orchid.”
And I imagine the moment my husband bought me the orchid in the spur of the moment is an orchid itself. That we were simply passing by a Korean store that sells everything from food to beauty products to plants and my husband stopped without reason is an orchid. That that longing for the moment itself, when it was in full flower on a perfect day in which I walked alongside my husband who carried it, upright, in his arms for the twenty block walk home under the 7 Train, is also an orchid. There should be such a world of Kaveh Akbar’s orchids which become people and poetry presses and poetry itself. There is such a world, when you think there is not enough time in the world, to save the things you want most but require so much more of you. There is, quite suddenly, has always been.
This is the first of a two-part series on Kaveh Akbar’s work. Read part two here.