India Ennenga and Kaveh Akbar at The Believer:
BLVR: You’ve said you want to honor all the poets “whose rapturous ecstasy overwhelmed even language’s ability to transcribe it.” Many of those, I imagine, are the authors you included as the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 110 Poets and the Divine. Spiritual and religious writing offers some of the deepest considerations of the ineffable but feels a little taboo in our increasingly secular culture.
KA: It’s out of style, certainly. The standard belief is that if you’re smart, you have to be cynical. There’s an equivalency of skepticism with intelligence, and of belief with naivete, which is the height of hubris to me—as if we have suddenly landed upon an intelligence heretofore unavailable to Milton or Rabi’ah.
BLVR: That equivalency makes it easy to forget that spiritual verse is the origin of poetry—indeed, in many cultures there is no distinction whatsoever between poetry and prayer. Would you say that all poetry, even the most contemporary and secular, is still grappling with our earliest concerns of articulating a spiritual ineffability?
KA: In the anthology, I point to Enheduanna, born in 2286 BCE, a female priest who wrote often to the goddess Inanna, as the earliest attributable author in history. She was exiled from the Sumerian city-state of Ur by her brother when her dad, Sargon, died. So she was writing a lot of her hymns from exile, which immediately connected her to Ovid, and to Dante.
more here.
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