Replay: Kaveh Akbar shares Five Things He's Learned about Sacred Poetics
Check out the first five minutes of his recent class.
“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.”
– Kaveh Akbar, Five Things I’ve Learned about Sacred Poetics
On June 1st, award-winning poet, novelist, teacher, and scholar Kaveh Akbar joined us on Five Things to share all he’s 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.
Kaveh is one of the best-known poets in America, with work appearing in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Paris Review, and Best American Poetry, among others. His poetry serves as a powerful reminder that art and literature can save lives and sustain the soul. He is the author of two acclaimed poetry collections—Pilgrim Bell and Calling a Wolf a Wolf—as well as a chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, and the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine. In 2024, he published his first novel, Martyr!, which John Green described as “so stunning, so wrenching, and so beautifully written that reading it for the first time, I kept forgetting to breathe.”
Born in Tehran, Iran, Kaveh was named Poetry Editor of The Nation in 2020 and has received numerous honors, including multiple Pushcart Prizes, a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, and the Levis Reading Prize. He teaches at the University of Iowa and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson. In 2014, he founded Divedapper, a platform for interviews with major voices in American poetry, and co-wrote the Paris Review column “Poetry RX” with Sarah Kay and Claire Schwartz.
His class, Five Things I’ve Learned about Sacred Poetics, offered in partnership with Conscious Writers Collective, invites participants into a two-hour exploration of spiritual verse across time and geography. Through a close reading of ancient and sacred poems—from Sumerian hymns to contemporary spiritual writings—Kaveh guides us in understanding how these verses remain strikingly relevant today. He emphasizes how sacred poetry teaches us to embrace mystery, question certainty, and attend more deeply to language itself. By slowing down our reading and engaging with the materiality of words, we begin to see how language can enter us, challenge us, and help us metabolize a chaotic world.
More than a literary seminar, this class is also a personal offering. Akbar shares how sacred poetry has been a steadying force in his own life—helping him navigate moments of despair and reconnect with a larger, enduring human story. Ultimately, the class offers not just historical insight or aesthetic appreciation, but tools for emotional and spiritual survival in a time of global uncertainty. It’s for anyone who turns to poetry for meaning, clarity, or companionship—and wants to better understand how sacred verse has helped people endure and create across millennia.
Thanks for being part of Five Things I’ve Learned on Substack. Visit myfivethings.com to view personal video invitations from more than 120 more writers, thinkers, and artists we admire – and to get special discounted pricing with our Five Things I’ve Learned Multi Pass.
I can't find any way to comment on Kaveh Akbar's "My Five Things," other than this field, so it will have to do. I was disappointed, to say the least. In his rambling preamble he informed us he wasn't going to stick to the class that was advertised, and he had already delivered it at Poetry.org. I signed up (and paid) for the advertised class. In the ninety minutes that followed he presented a disjointed session that seemed to be improvised, i.e. not well planned. Mr. Akbar even mumbled something about having not prepared as he was searching for a video. I expected much better, especially after experiencing Jane Hershfield's illuminating presentation a few weeks prior. I will be unlikely to try "My Five Things," again. As an afterthought, the level of professionalism was underscored as we watched the moderator eating her dessert before she remembered to block her video.