Join me in this live, 90-minute class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about the ways antiquity’s spiritual verse can help us to better understand ourselves – and to sit more comfortably in our own uncertain times.

Hey, my name is Kaveh Akbar. 

I’m the author of the novel Martyr and several books of poetry. I’m a teacher, professor, scholar, and editor and a happy parent of dog and cats and husband and uncle. 

I hope that you will join me for my upcoming two-hour class, Five Things I’ve Learned about Sacred Poetics. It’s a class in which we will take a look at spiritual verse from antiquity, some old and sacred poems, and discuss why they feel good to be reading right now. I’m hoping that in the process, you’ll discover as I have the lasting power and contemporary relevance of these deeply spiritual, sacred verses, each written long ago under very different circumstances. 

As I’ll explain when we talk, sacred poetry ­– from antiquity to the present – teaches us to be comfortable sitting in mystery without trying to resolve it, to be skeptical of unqualified certitudes. It also awakens us, asks us to slow down how we metabolize language, to become aware of its materiality and how language enters us. 

In our time together, I’ll share some poems with you from across the centuries—from “Hymn to Inanna” to Szymborska—in which we are consistently reminded that language has history, density, complexity. We’ll also get into the archives from around the world, into Mesoamerican indigenous poetries, sub-Saharan African poetries, Aboriginal poetries, and poetries from ancient Sumeria—from Gilgamesh and the Bhagavad Gita to the Psalms and Song of Solomon all the way through to the present. 

These poems remind me how much we’ve always been talking about the same human infirmities, and how people have persisted and written through them. These poems have been companions to me through the darkest hours, helping me when I felt like there was no path forward that included my survival or the survival of the people that I loved. Understanding how common these ideas are in our history as a species and our history as writers, as readers, as thinkers, has been one of the most profound gifts that I’ve been given in these days. It has shown me how to continue putting one foot in front of the other and making action where I can make action.

For all these reasons, we’re going to talk about why these poems feel urgent, what we can learn from them, and how to sit in uncertainty without groping desperately to resolve it, which feels like the root of a lot of strife, cognitive dissonance, cynicism, doom and hopelessness.

My hope is that in our current age ­– one of climate apocalypses, apocalypses of genocide, the rising global specter of fascism, and the domestic rise of fascistic governance that feels to us unprecedented – these poems help us understand ourselves to be preceded in history. 

I hope that these poems will do for you what they do for me: make this moment feel more tenable.

Please join me. 

– Kaveh Akbar

We’re pleased to offer this class in partnership with Conscious Writers Collective, the online writing platform and global writing community designed around the belief that rigorous writing instruction, a dedicated community of writers, and opportunities to learn from visiting experts should not be exclusive to an MFA. Find out more, and join CWC Poetry or CWC Fiction