Kaveh Akbar was balancing on his toes. It was the first thing I noticed about him, despite his other striking qualities—the lopsided bun that could hardly contain a mass of dark curls, the nimble fingers riffling pages. But it was the balletic stance that got me right away, the fact that his feet barely touched the ground as he stood en pointe at the front of the room. He punctuated the ends of particularly compelling sentences by bobbing his heels toward the floor, only to spring upward once again. It was the time of day that usually draws a soporific, scholarly crowd to a reading—middle-aged locals with little else to do on a Tuesday evening at happy hour—except today the room was packed and the faces attentive, some, stranger still, even young.

It was Akbar’s poetry that had brought me to the reading. His first two major collections, Calling a Wolf a Wolf and Pilgrim Bell, debuted to great acclaim, and won him fellowships, Pushcart Prizes, and the kind of pop-cultural enthusiasm that seems elusive for other contemporary poets. His hyper-attuned literary taste—as a poetry editor first at The Paris Review and then at The Nation—solidified his following and proved his ability to reinvent poetry as a relevant art form. My own admiration stemmed from his commitment to a rigorous historical excavation of the poetic tradition, and his interest in advocating for the continued value of spiritual verse in our secular literary world.