A POETIC ENGINEERING OF LANGUAGE
Armen Davoudian’s debut poetry collection, “The Palace Of Forty Pillars,’’ is an impressive feat of linguistic engineering. Through the blending of formal poetic structures and tight lyrical control, Mr. Davoudian is able to capture the intersectionality of being Iranian and gay, of growing love while coming from a culture that doesn’t hold many places for a man like him to do so.
Using formal poetic forms like ghazals, rubaiyats, and sonnets, Mr. Davoudian examines the tension between the expected and reality. But the real maneuver that he pulls off is in using form expertly to fit the feeling of his poetry.
The Chehel Sotoun is a palace with 20 pillars in front of a reflecting pool. In the water’s reflection, the palace appears to have 40 pillars, and between the two runs the thin line of the pool’s edge. What’s changed when we delve into the other side? What happens when readers see the reflection and the real image together?
In this in-between space of introspection and externalization, Mr. Davoudian threads the feeling of translation into more than just words: “To translate means to carry / from one place to another, like a jet.”
Mr. Davoudian is curious about the way a person is translated across different cultures. What reality looks like for a gay Iranian in Iran looks different than it does for a gay Iranian in America. In that translation of personhood, as with literary translations, pieces are lost and gained. And even with what’s lost or gained, a person must be alive through the transition.
But where Mr. Davoudian shines is in his use of the volta, a line in a sonnet where the poem shifts in some way, whether through image, tone, or rhetoric. Mr. Davoudian uses the turns to create moments of self-reflection within his sonnets. In this way, the poems feel more like meditative guides of wisdom leading you through the life of a speaker whose only desire is to bridge the gap between who they are and who they see themselves as.
This philosophy in craft holds most true in Mr. Davoudian’s string of 20 interlocking sonnets, the title piece in “The Palace of Forty Pillars,” where the story of a speaker who grows up in one land and is transplanted into another.
The sonnets weave through time and place, the voltas finely tuned as a way to jump through time, moments, emotions, knotting them into a tapestry of love and loss and lessons learned along the speaker’s journeys. Does a person transition after change, or does a person change and transition towards who they truly are? Mr. Davoudian examines both sides of this coin that he flips over and over again with eachturn of the page.
Within the formalist structure, Mr. Davoudian still finds plenty of room for deep images that create thoughtful metaphors. In his poem “Harper’s Ferry,” he writes: “two rivers / that met but did not mix, like a simile / for simile, cleaving like from like.”
In this simple moment of two rivers joining, Mr. Davoudian speaks to the soul of this poetry collection: intersection can create less as much as it can create more, and it’s only upon reflection and honest work that folds the two selves into one truer self.
Mr. Davoudian pulls off creative gumption through the melding of formalist poetics and pointed observation. “The Palace of Forty Pillars” is filled with moments of awareness and reaching out, a speaker whose desire to reach their reflection creates a whirlwind of separations that feel impossible yet real. And through it all, Mr. Davoudian holds both together and finds a way to make them his.