![]() ![]() This idea that language can manifest the self constitutes the heart of the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s essay “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” According to Benjamin, naming demonstrates the capacity of language to convey “the mental being of man,” and he, too, alludes to name-making in Genesis. In “Rimrock,” the speaker suggests that language is an idealized form of existence that can be inhabited: But their almost obsessive meditation on how language creates the self and vice versa unites them. ![]() But as in the story of the Fall, knowledge comes at a price.Īkbar’s poems acquaint us with his speaker’s plural selves-as an immigrant, alcoholic, man, child, son, lover, and artist. ![]() Writing something into existence is to perform the supreme act of creation. If the world Akbar paints is a sort of paradise, then his speaker is a modern-day version of Adam, eager to discover and name all that it contains. After cataloguing the parts of what seems to be a garden, the poet-speaker writes in “Exciting the Canvas”: Kaveh Akbar performs a similar miracle with his utterly original debut collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, which won the 2018 Levis Reading Prize. In the Bible, naming assumes world-making powers: we are told in Genesis that Adam named all the animals on earth in a single day. It’s the poet’s job to name things-that is, to not just assign, but invent a new language for that which is unprecedented. ![]()
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