The Author: Armen Davoudian
The Book: The Palace of Forty Pillars (Tin House, 2024)
The Elevator Pitch: In formally charged verse, The Palace of Forty Pillars explores questions of belonging and alienation in the life of a gay adolescent, an Armenian in Iran, and an immigrant in America.
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The Rumpus: Where did the idea of your book come from?
Armen Davoudian: There is no single origin. For a long time, I would wake up in the wrong place. I’d go to bed in our rental apartment in the suburbs of Los Angeles, lulled to sleep by the incessant, soothing whoosh of cars on the 210, sounding exactly like the rhythmic noise of waves at the beach, and I’d wake up disoriented into the body of a ten-year old on a family vacation by the Caspian Sea. Or a few years later, but before we immigrated to the US, it was the sound of a soap opera suddenly crashing into relentless static that I thought I heard, having fallen asleep in front of the TV in my aunt’s house in Tehran, but opening my eyes in my new bed in LA.
It was this feeling of embodied dislocation that I wanted to capture in poetry. And I was attracted to those aspects of poetry where you can be in two places at once but also lost between them: rhyme, the pun, and “binary” forms like the sonnet.
Rumpus: How long did it take to write the book?
Davoudian: The oldest poem in the book began as a sestina ten years ago and eventually shrunk down into a sonnet. Serendipitously, it’s about how a jar of garlic transforms after years of pickling, yielding something saltier and more concentrated.
Rumpus: Is this the first book you’ve written? If not, what made it the first to be published?
Davoudian: Yes, this is my first full-length collection of poems.
Rumpus: In submitting the book, how many no’s did you get before your yes?
Davoudian: Several. But there’s no verse unserved by perseverance.
Rumpus: Which authors / writers buoyed you along the way? How?
Davoudian: Agha Shahid Ali, whose poetry is evidence that the overtly (and even overly) artful can also be heartfelt. James Merrill, in whose hands rhyme can do everything. But the poet I return to most often is Elizabeth Bishop, for the sense, in her work, that reticence is not merely the absence of speech, but the positive presence of . . . something.
The book’s epigraph, “The house is past,” is from Adorno’s Minima Moralia, in whose darkest pages all belonging comes to feel compromised.
While I was writing the poems in this book, I was also periodically translating the contemporary Iranian poet Fatemeh Shams. Shams’ poetry has kept me anchored in the Persian language, even as I keep drifting away from it (I write in English and speak Armenian with my family). I like to think this lifeline to Persian helps me maintain perspective on some the helpful but limiting ideals of American poetry: the imperative to subvert and surprise, the insistence on sounding “natural,” and the suspicion of artifice.
Rumpus: How did your book change over the course of working on it?
Davoudian: I arrived at the title early on, and it helped me envision and structure the rest of the collection. The Palace of Forty Pillars in Isfahan, Iran, actually has only twenty pillars. But, reflected in a pool, the twenty pillars become forty. Similarly, at the heart of my book is a sequence of twenty sonnets, which reimagine the traditional asymmetry within the form, prosodically divided between octave and sestet, as a liminal space of migration. Asymmetry implies hierarchy, and so the sequence interrogates the power relation between unequal halves: original and translation, home and exile, childhood innocence and adult experience, queerness and familial belonging.
But as I kept revising the book, swapping some of the older sonnets for new ones, and also writing in forms where this binary structure is manifested differently, like the more iterative couplets of the ghazal, or the missing rhyme that unbalances the quatrains of the rubaiyat, I found that the poems I liked best were those that betray the conceptual neatness outlined above. This used to bother me, but now I think it’s the whole point—to actually think in verse rather than to merely versify already formulated thoughts.
Rumpus: Before your first book, where has your work been published?
Davoudian: I published a chapbook, Swan Song, with Bull City Press in 2019, individual poems and translations in various literary journals, and an academic article on the tension between the integrity of each poem vs. the coherence of the collection in books of poetry.
Rumpus: What is the best advice someone gave you about publishing?
Davoudian: Writing poetry may lead to a career, but it’s primarily a vocation. Publishing falls under the career rubric, and its ups and downs don’t necessarily correspond to the vocational arc.
(But see the comment above about betraying such clear-cut distinctions!)
Rumpus: Who’s the reader you’re writing to—or tell us about your target audience and how you cultivated or found it?
Davoudian: I wonder where the phrase “target audience” comes from . . . “target” itself comes from a French word for shield. The implied metaphor, which puts the audience on defense, is suggestive. Miles Davis would famously turn his back on his audience, which was interpreted as a gesture of defiance. But it was also argued that he was actually just facing his band, so he could give them cues and, in a sense, conduct the music. Something about music, about poetry, prefers not so much to be listened to as to be eavesdropped upon. Wait, it’s actually like flirting, which somehow both discloses and deflects, and discloses most in deflecting.
I’m deflecting the question because it’s a complicated one for me. Part of the complication stems from writing in English about experiences that preceded the arrival of English in my life, about people many of whom don’t speak or read fluently in English. I don’t know the current scholarly consensus on linguistic determinism—the idea a particular language and its structures determine what you can think and say. I instinctively dislike and distrust that idea, but I also have to concede its partial validity.
P.S. I looked it up. The first example of “target audience” in the Oxford English Dictionary comes from a 1956 edition of the U.S. Air Force Dictionary: “Target audience: in psychological warfare, the people at whom propaganda is directed.”
Rumpus: What is one completely unexpected thing that surprised you about the process of getting your book published?
Brody: I really enjoyed having my book fact checked.
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Author photograph by Matthew Lansburgh
