00:00 The name of the poem is the Flintstone.
00:02 Block number one.
00:04 A whole nation has created this kindling which owes you desperately but it hasn't been specified
00:13 whether it's the Flintstone or a firestorm.
00:24 Welcome to Outlook Bibliophile.
00:25 We are here with Rosa Jamali.
00:28 Hello ma'am.
00:29 Hello and thank you for having me.
00:32 So could you talk about some of your recent books that have been published?
00:36 Let me talk about all my books.
00:39 I've been recognized as a kind of avant-garde poet.
00:44 The first book I published called This Dead Body is Not an Apple.
00:49 It's either a cucumber or a pear.
00:52 So Persian generally has got this tradition of poetry like set phrases, set similes, set
01:02 metaphors.
01:03 It's been repeated through the history for more than 1,000 years of Persian poetry.
01:10 Being creative in Persian poetry is really hard.
01:13 Anyone tries poetry could come to a kind of cliche stereotype.
01:19 Persian poetry repeating the imagery of roses and nightingales, a kind of ornamental, oriental
01:26 literature.
01:27 So I was a little bit bored with that type of literature, that type of poetry.
01:33 It was really hard for me to just think about new metaphors, new similes, new set phrases,
01:41 how to collocate words in a way that is different from what is kind of cliche in Persian poetry.
01:52 So the first book was really bold and creative and innovative, but I had my own critics for
01:59 a while.
02:00 And actually, just in the newspapers and magazines and literature journals, they wrote lots and
02:06 lots about my first book and the title of the book.
02:09 It was a kind of shocking book among literati.
02:14 And at that time, English poetry was not very well known, like avant-garde poetry, mostly
02:23 political poets, left poets, like the ones Ahmad al-Shamlou translated, mostly left poets
02:29 like Pablo Neruda or, I don't know, Elvar, or some...
02:37 But poetry as a kind of art for three or four decades, mostly intellectuals, poets talked
02:46 about politics, freedom, or such stuff.
02:51 And then I turned to become a kind of formalist poet, and some didn't like this notion of
02:57 being a formalist poet.
02:59 They said, "A poet should be for people, and you're not writing about people.
03:03 You're just writing poetry, and we don't know the meaning of this kind of poetry."
03:09 Then perhaps it was interesting for me as a kind of rebellion at that time.
03:15 I tried to take their advice and read more, and then I tried to mingle different things,
03:22 different types of discourses, like one part of poetry, an abstract piece, then the other.
03:29 I tried to adopt some fragments, and then my poetry turned to collage, bricolage, a
03:42 kind of discourse which could fragment itself.
03:45 One part is just abstract, the other part I have some lines, some perhaps quotations
03:53 from people in the street, like a carnival-esque poetry.
03:57 I have the voices of people in the street, and I have some formal discourse of language.
04:04 I've got some new metaphors, new similes, and I tried to delve into myth.
04:13 And so when did you start writing?
04:16 When did you know that you want to become a poet?
04:22 I published my first book when I was quite young.
04:26 I was 20.
04:29 So since that time I've been working as a kind of professional poet, being among the
04:38 literary...
04:41 I've been involved in literary sessions, poetry sessions, and quite often I read in literary
04:50 journals, I write in literary journals, and my poetry is published quite often.
04:56 And that's it.
04:58 And recently my poems have been translated to different languages, different anthologies,
05:03 like in Sweden it's been published in the Kritiker, and then in the United States it's
05:10 been published in the Metropolitan Anthology of Avant-Garde Poetry.
05:18 And then in Czech, in different countries.
05:24 So perhaps I can say Dick Davis and Franklin Lewis are among the best translators who translated
05:32 my poetry.
05:33 One is the translator of Ferdow's Seed, the other one is the translator of Rumi, and the
05:41 head of Near Eastern Studies in Chicago University.
05:47 And how would you describe the poetry scene in Iran?
05:52 There are different trends, but I can say the time I started, language poetry became
05:59 fashionable.
06:00 You know, actually for two or three decades, like after the revolution or so, this kind
06:08 of grand narrative, just a kind of describing utopia in poetry became a sort of cliché
06:17 for our generation.
06:19 So we don't talk about big, big, big things like freedom, like changing the world or so.
06:28 My generation mostly like to write about the details of life or some simple things in life,
06:34 not big, big things like a kind of creating messages in poetry or just trying to change
06:47 the society or so.
06:49 No, it's not like that.
06:50 But I can say, but this decade, the language of poetry has become a little bit simplified
07:00 because I see there are two trends in Persian poetry.
07:07 The first trend belongs to, actually elites and those who know poetry very well.
07:18 And the second trend is for, I mean, the professionals read a kind of poetry which is sophisticated
07:26 and people like people who want to just enjoy a piece of writing or so read a simplified
07:34 poetry.
07:35 Just there are lots of collections these days.
07:38 You can see kind of, they are bestsellers perhaps, very simple poems about simple things
07:48 and they have their own readers.
07:51 And so you studied drama.
07:53 Yeah, bachelor drama and master English literature.
07:59 So while you were studying drama, there has been, you know, like poetry involved in play
08:07 writing and drama so much.
08:11 So are there any plays that you performed perhaps that had some of the poems?
08:18 Drama helped me to create different voices, to understand the meaning of persona in poetry,
08:24 the speaker in poetry.
08:27 So actually when there are different speakers, in a way you can mingle the subject, the object,
08:34 you can have your interior monologue and your dramatic monologue and the voices of people.
08:42 And then later just I try to put them in different fragments in a whole poem, a kind of collage,
08:51 then this fragmentary style in different pieces, different narratives.
08:56 And then, yeah, I like the way language is used in drama.
09:02 The time I was a student, I was quite young, I was really interested in Greek plays and
09:09 Roman plays.
09:10 And my favourite character was Medea because I just called her a kind of feminist character.
09:19 And then I played that and I enjoyed that.
09:23 And I tried to recreate that in my, recreate the voice of Medea in my poetry.
09:32 But I can say my poems could be performed on the stage as we performed one piece all
09:40 together with four or five people.
09:42 We tried to make a chorus out of some lines and we tried to repeat it.
09:48 The name of that performance poetry is The Fern and it's available on YouTube.
09:57 But I've got different forms of language.
10:02 I've got this kind of conversational, colloquial language which could be performed in a different
10:10 way.
10:11 Then I've got formal, archaic language just mingled with that, could be performed with
10:16 a kind of scenery and spectacles.
10:19 And so, yeah, I'm really happy that first I studied drama and it changed my mind.
10:26 It gave me lots of ideas to a kind of adaptation of drama in Persian poetry which was really
10:34 hard at the beginning.
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