How I turned to become an experimental poet:

 My talk at the British Library:

1

At the first step when I started my literary career the job was totally challenging for the range of set vocabulary was limited and not too many poets could generate a new style and create new metaphors or revitalise the themes used in Persian classics. I was born one year before the revolution and I grew up at the time of Iran-Iraq war, growing up at the most critical moment of Iran’s history made me a totally different person with a critical view towards the past and present. I usually create new metaphors facing the new subject matters of our society. Besides I felt that we need some new techniques to be much more creative, like narrating a poem through different voices or mingling a formal and informal language.




2

I’m from a generation living in a different milieu far from the classics and with a vague prospect of future for the mass immigration of Iranians. As a patriot there is a strong sense of local colour in my poetry with recurrent themes: Tehran has often been described as a lover, a metropolis with noise and pollution and massive highways, my concerns with the land and reminiscing the past have been expressed through the kind of condensed and language-based imagery I generally apply, allusive to our history.The outcome of such a hectic and traumatic background is that our fears and dreams are different from the generation past. They used to be hopeful,they used to have big goals, they believed in utopias and revolutions but they're all senseless to us and we’re obsessed with the trivial matters, I never judge the situations I usually describe in my poetry, I would let the reader feel and get it between the lines.




3

One of my main concerns is to revitalise the techniques of the past through some layers of intertextuality, there was a sort of writing in the past which was called visionary writing, it’s true to the essence of poetry, with a high sense of intuition to discover life by being through a mystic vision, a sort of trance-like state.In a comparative study the method could be taken as a sort of automatic writing which was a favourite of surrealist poets. I’m a lot influenced by this sort of writing in which you need to discover the unconscious side of the language or create the moment of being as Heidegger says. I still think that sufism is the main trend in Persian poetry which could be recreated through the objects within our everyday life.




4

Being obsessed with archetypes,I’ve been much inspired by a trend of mysticism in poetry which embodies the elements of nature and sees the manifestation of God in the nature and its harmony, a kind of phenomenological approach being seen in the visionary writings in which the boundaries like rhymes and rhythms haven't been considered, what matters is getting united with the whole universe through the words. I like the diction because it's far from the cliches and not so much repetitive as it is in mystical sonnets. In mystical sonnets the cup-bearer has always been taken as a medium of spirituality; as a result, a certain terminology has been created and applied for centuries. Unlike the sonnets in the visionary writings like the diary and letters of mystics the writer is free to apply any word he likes, whether inside the poetics or not, it doesn't matter much. I’ve also been inspired by Persian mythology and I usually mingle that within a modern atmosphere. The book of the kings contains mythological imagery which is quite appealing and surrealistic to my mind.

Iran in Writing: Past and Present
British Library, February 2015
Daljit Nagra, Rosa Jamali, Ahmad Karimi Hakkak, Shadab Vajdi, British Library's Speaker