{"id":36669,"date":"2025-04-18T09:13:36","date_gmt":"2025-04-18T07:13:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/?p=36669"},"modified":"2025-08-19T15:41:56","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T13:41:56","slug":"an-immigrant-in-america-the-palace-of-forty-pillars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/an-immigrant-in-america-the-palace-of-forty-pillars\/","title":{"rendered":"An Immigrant in America: The Palace of Forty Pillars<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Palace of Forty Pillars<\/em> narrates the journey of a self-estranged gay adolescent, exploring his identity as an Armenian in Iran and later as an immigrant in America.<\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Palace of Forty Pillars<\/em> by Armen Davoudian
\nTin House<\/a>\u00a02024
\nISBN 9781959030362
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sean Casey<\/span><\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

Near the beginning <\/span>The Palace of Forty Pillars<\/span><\/i>, Armen Davoudian serves a cup of unfiltered coffee:<\/span><\/p>\n

Soorj<\/span><\/p>\n

Planted, ripened, hand-picked, dried,
\n<\/span>seeded, skinned, polished, and sorted,
\n<\/span>lesser crops disqualified,
\n<\/span>the balance graded and exported,
\n<\/span>tasted, or rather analyzed
\n<\/span>by slurping, then expectorated,
\n<\/span>roasted until pyrolyzed,
\n<\/span>ground up, potted, irrigated,
\n<\/span>simmered<\/span>,<\/span> poured, sipped, and inverted,
\n<\/span>sedimented and reverted,
\n<\/span>read and wildly fabricated
\n<\/span>(happy or sad, single or mated)
\n<\/span>and if illegible, no matter:
\n<\/span>the future\u2019s always black and bitter.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"The
The Palace of Forty Pillars<\/em> is published by Tin House<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Here is the story of <\/span>soorj<\/span><\/i>, Armenian coffee, from bean to cup to ritual reading of the future in muddy grounds. \u201cSoorj\u201d serves as a compelling and compact introduction to <\/span>The Palace of Forty Pillars<\/span><\/i>, Davoudian\u2019s debut poetry collection. In miniature, it showcases Davoudian\u2019s formal dexterity: the poem is both a sonnet, a form favored throughout <\/span>Forty Pillars<\/span><\/i>, and a list poem, packed with and paced by past participles: a vigorous, condensed form befitting its concentrated, bitter subject. The list of past participles, adjectives of the past tense, lasts until the final couplet, and the last line, delivered in the present tense, invokes the future. In so doing, the poem introduces one of the collection\u2019s central themes: that the past endures in the present, and that in its dark sediment lurks a bitter future. Past, present, and future jostle and overlap in Davoudian\u2019s poetry; humor cuts bitterness like sugar in <\/span>soorj<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Davoudian, an Armenian, grew up in Isfahan, Iran, before moving to the United States, where he is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University. His poetry emerges out of the bifurcations and distances of the emigrant experience, of a home made and split between, as he puts it in a later poem, \u201cill-matched countries.\u201d The poems of <\/span>The Palace of Forty Pillars<\/span><\/i> work to collapse distances between disparate worlds and their inhabitants: the distance between homeland and home; the distance between family here and there, here and gone; the distance between lovers separated by cultural prohibitions on love\u2019s expression.<\/span><\/p>\n

In \u201cComing Out of the Shower,\u201d the book\u2019s first poem, a shower trips a memory of the shower in his family\u2019s old home. Like many of the poems in <\/span>The Palace of Forty Pillars<\/span><\/i>, \u201cComing Out of the Shower\u201d conjugates memories into the present to superimpose the past onto the here and now; it operates in two places and two times in tandem. Far from his mother and old home, the speaker transforms absence into presence:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This time, it\u2019s really you. I\u2019m really here.
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0I blink. We do not disappear.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dad left, you say, to shower at the shop
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 so I don\u2019t need to stop
\n<\/span>just yet\u2014and yet I do, unable to
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 resume old customs, unlike you.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>In a one-bath four-person household, we
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 learn what we mustn\u2019t see,
\n<\/span>growing, in time, so coolly intimate
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0with one another\u2019s silhouette<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>behind the opaque frosted shower screen
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0that once more stands between
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0us two.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet, while the poem closes geographic distances with ease, a smaller distance remains that cannot be traversed. Partitions separate mother and son as they navigate life in close quarters: the bathroom, with its \u201copaque frosted shower screen,\u201d through which only silhouettes are visible, and the prejudices that dictate what family \u201cmustn\u2019t see.\u201d It is here that the \u201ccoming out\u201d of the poem\u2019s title resonates with new meaning, as the enforced distance between mother and son over sexual orientation prevents the son from sharing his life in full, instead of in silhouette, and the mother from loving without reservation:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Mama<\/span><\/i>, I shout, <\/span>I\u2019m coming out<\/span><\/i>.
\n<\/span>and as you look away I knot<\/span><\/p>\n

around me tight your lavender robe de chambre,
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0cinching my waist, and clamber
\n<\/span>out of the tub, taking care not to step
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 outside the cotton mat and drip<\/span><\/p>\n

on the cracked floor you\u2019ve polished with such zeal
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0we\u2019re mirrored in each tile.
\n<\/span>Yet, you\u2019d forgive the spillage, or forget.
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0What else will you love me despite?<\/span><\/p>\n

The Palace of Forty Pillars<\/span><\/i> is structured around two significant sonnet cycles. In the first, “<\/span>The Ring<\/span>,” the poems are interlaced in a garland, with each sonnet\u2019s last line becoming the first line of the next. The formal circularity accompanies the work\u2019s circular chronology, as the poems leap back and forth through the poet\u2019s life. “<\/span>The Ring”<\/span> begins at a wedding reception near the present, where the speaker tries on his father\u2019s wedding ring, \u201ca hand-me down \/ keepsake from his own father, now no longer.\u201d By the end of the sonnet and beginning of the next, the setting moves to Isfahan, 1989, and a wedding with \u201cdouble the hairspray\u201d: the poet\u2019s parents\u2019. That poem ends with a wish to dissolve the distances of past and present, there and here: \u201cI wish I could have been there by their side.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the third sonnet of “<\/span>The Ring,”<\/span>\u00a0which shuttles from 1989 to the present, the past lingers in the figure of the grandfather. The poet seeks to summon his late grandfather\u2019s voice, call the past into the present on speakerphone, and listen to his unkind assessment:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cStop that kid from reading. He\u2019ll go blind.\u201d
\n<\/span>Unhappy in his body, the kid\u2019s all mind,
\n<\/span>or so he thinks, turning from life to books,
\n<\/span>because he\u2019ll never get by on his looks?
\n<\/span>He loves his mother and other boys too much
\n<\/span>and everything he says will come out botched.
\n<\/span>Was it for this they abandoned everything
\n<\/span>in the Islamic Republic of Iran?<\/span><\/p>\n

In a cunning turn, Davoudian takes the grandfather\u2019s question and, in the next sonnet, transposes it to the voice of former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad\u2014who,<\/span> at a 2007 forum at Columbia University<\/span><\/a>, when asked about Iran\u2019s death penalty for gay people, said, \u201cIn Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon\u201d:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the Islamic Republic of Iran,
\n<\/span>we do not have such a phenomenon.
\n<\/span>The West is stealing clouds from Persian skies.
\n<\/span>Death to America! Militarize!
\n<\/span>Close all the mosques, lock up all the prayers
\n<\/span>in a No-Fly list to justify our wars.
\n<\/span>My ill-matched countries, \u2018tis of you I sing,
\n<\/span>as bombs and rockets bursting on the air-
\n<\/span>waves and our screens give proof to your common cause
\n<\/span>that flags exist, that god is still out there
\n<\/span>somewhere.
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/span> \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Recast the self-fulfilling ring
\n<\/span>Auden forecast Bin Laden by: that those
\n<\/span>to whom evil is done, must do preemptive evil\u2014
\n<\/span>the nonsense palindrome whereby we live.<\/span><\/p>\n

With its comic imperatives and remixed samples from \u201cThe Star Spangled Banner\u201d and “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” the sonnet becomes the impossible anthem of a dual citizen of warring nations. There are two \u201cnonsense palindrome[s]\u201d at work: the final couplet\u2019s \u201cevil\u201d and \u201clive,\u201d and the poem\u2019s reworking of W.H Auden\u2019s lines from \u201cSeptember 1, 1939\u201d: \u201cThose to whom evil is done \/ Do evil in return,\u201d which Auden wrote on Germany\u2019s invasion of Poland to start World War II, and which Davoudian retrofits for Bush and Bin Laden.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The <\/span>culminating sonnet of “The Ring” is built of these \u201cnonsense palindromes,\u201d and opens on the theme of the inalterable movement of time:<\/span><\/p>\n

The nonsense palindrome whereby we live
\n<\/span>the future as already past, back<\/span>WARD<\/span>,
\n<\/span>fooled even Shakespeare. No poet can re<\/span>DRAW
\n<\/span>or <\/span>EDIT<\/span> the <\/span>TIDE<\/span> of <\/span>TIME<\/span> al<\/span>MIGHT<\/span>y, no <\/span>VERSE
\n<\/span>re<\/span>VERSE<\/span> the flow or add to the re<\/span>SERVE
\n<\/span>of hours trickling through the cracks.<\/span><\/p>\n

Davoudian addresses the reader in the second half, and makes clear his poetic purpose: while the \u201ctide of time\u201d may resist editing, in his work, the past is unwound and rewound and reworked. The poem speaks to poetry\u2019s ability to sustain the past in the present and into the future\u2014to endure, like a ring passed down through generations:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span> \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 But <\/span>DEAR
\n<\/span>READ<\/span>er, as we hang briefly on this th<\/span>READ<\/span>,
\n<\/span>I feel in my <\/span>GUT<\/span> the <\/span>TUG<\/span> of each dark <\/span>LINE
\n<\/span>made taut before it breaks against th<\/span>E NIL
\n<\/span>margin where all life goes. And so I\u2019ll <\/span>LOOP
\n<\/span>the unwinding tapes back onto the s<\/span>POOL
\n<\/span>of my one reel, my father\u2019s wedding <\/span>RING<\/span>,
\n<\/span>admitting I was wrong, and with a <\/span>GRIN<\/span>,
\n<\/span>accept the future I\u2019ve been given to live.<\/span><\/p>\n

The volume\u2019s second cycle, “<\/span>The Palace of Forty Pillars<\/span>,” with twenty sonnets, is the collection\u2019s heart and ballast. The title invokes Chehel Sotoun, a 17th century palace in Isfahan whose twenty pillars, set before a large pool, are made forty by reflection. Motifs of duplication and bifurcation and partition cut through the sequence, as Davoudian delineates how an emigrant\u2019s life splits between locations, how presence in a new home is absence in another. A boy stands before the pool at Chehel Sotoun:\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Twenty pillars drip into the pool<\/span>
\n<\/span>their likenesses, where the likeness of a boy<\/span>
\n<\/span>wavers among the clouds, eyeing the boy<\/span>
\n<\/span>who\u2019s waiting for another. All is dual:<\/span>
\n<\/span>two rows of roses frame the pool, in twos<\/span>
\n<\/span>the swans glide, each on another\u2019s breast, then fuse<\/span>
\n<\/span>in a headless embrace. All is dissolved:<\/span>
\n<\/span>the boy outside the water is no more<\/span><\/p>\n

a boy inside the water\u2014his no more<\/span>
\n<\/span>the face defaced by its own lines on shattered<\/span>
\n<\/span>waves overlapping like a rose, the tattered<\/span>
\n<\/span>pillars strewn like petals. All is halved,<\/span>
\n<\/span>severed, like home and school, like love and being<\/span>
\n<\/span>loved\u2014the boy no more than a way of seeing.<\/span><\/p>\n

All is dual<\/span><\/i>. <\/span>All is dissolved<\/span><\/i>. <\/span>All is halved<\/span><\/i>. There and not there, duplicated and halved and dissolved, the boy\u2019s very presence before the pool is tenuous\u2014as if to say that one who leaves a homeland never fully resettles into an existence, and is reduced to a disembodied form, a \u201cway of seeing\u201d that is never seen.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As the sequence moves on, poems of Isfahan yield to poems of departure and loss. A dove\u2019s fatal collision with a window opens sonnet ten:<\/span><\/p>\n

And then a rock dove, astonished midair, dove
\n<\/span>from its own ghost that stamped upon the pane,
\n<\/span>in dovetailed detail, a short-lived afterlife,
\n<\/span>before it all came avalanching down
\n<\/span>and I was left to split the difference
\n<\/span>between transparence and sheer emptiness.
\n<\/span>Lifting a palm, I spread it on the pane<\/span><\/p>\n

of your still-lifted palm, spreading in pain
\n<\/span>behind the far side of the fading moon
\n<\/span>of breath now misting up the wall of glass
\n<\/span>which splits the terminal in half. <\/span>Isfahan
\n<\/span><\/i>nesfe jahan<\/span><\/i>, you\u2019d boast, lifting a glass.
\n<\/span>If you\u2019ve seen Isfahan, then you\u2019ve seen half
\n<\/span><\/i>the world. I\u2019ll see you in the other half.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

The poem pivots halfway through: the pane of glass on which the dove stamps its ghost transforms first into the hand of the poet\u2019s grandfather, then into an airport terminal\u2019s glass partition. This is the moment the poet departs Iran, leaving his grandfather, who promises a reunion that never comes, and whose absence echoes plaintively throughout the collection. The poem attends to the partitions that separate the emigrant from those who remain, the dove a reminder that departure is one-way, that one never reaches a destination in tact. Except, that is, in poetry: for Davoudian, poetry has the power to summon family from disparate geographic and chronological locations, to fulfill his grandfather\u2019s promise.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Despite the emotional gravity of <\/span>The Palace of Forty Pillars<\/span><\/i>, Davoudian\u2019s poetry retains a playfulness, and his work achieves a stirring, lyrical power at its most ludic. Near the end of the sequence comes a poem that employs only the letters of \u201cpomegranate\u201d:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Granpa no more, granma no more, nor mama
\n<\/span>nor papa near. Amo ergo pango.
\n<\/span>O pomegranate, tear apart to rap
\n<\/span>a protean argot to a tap-tap meter
\n<\/span>(no monotone) to trap me a meager poem.
\n<\/span>No tame game nor mere program. Tap an engram
\n<\/span>to reap a pomegranate anagram
\n<\/span>to earn me peer agon. Part ear, part peep.<\/span><\/p>\n

Part open, part tangram. Part germane, part perm.
\n<\/span>To amo pero no me ama\u2019. Mope not.
\n<\/span>O pomegranate, grant me great amor
\n<\/span>(not agap\u0113) ere ego am no man.
\n<\/span>O garnet page, O mater mea eterna,
\n<\/span>name me Armen, name me poet. Amen.<\/span><\/p>\n

Davoudian foregrounds the sonnet\u2019s formal apparatus, while, with a deft hand, depicting the transmutation of loss and absence and distance into poetry\u2014and no where so much as at the second line\u2019s end, which in three words captures the genesis and charm of Davoudian\u2019s poetry. <\/span>Amo ergo pango:<\/span><\/i> I love therefore I compose.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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