Kaveh Akbar: Crushed Glass and Medusa’s Veil: Exploring the Revelatory Break (January 2020)

If we accept as American writers that our medium, the English language, is one of the deadliest colonial weapons ever invented, then its breaking becomes a political urgency. How do we undermine our language’s inherent corrosiveness, turn a violent technology against itself to speak to things it would rather us leave unspoken? Drawing upon work by Robert Hayden, Jean Valentine, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Jos Charles, Akbar discusses how these poems use revelatory breaks in idiom, form, and syntax to render with clarity what is too urgent, too momentous, for mere rhetorical speech.