"In Riskdom where I Lived" is the title to a collection (1) of 28 poems by Ali Abdolrezaei with a wide typo-topical range.
The term Post modernistic is used to describe Ali Abdolrezaei's tendencies in post-Revolutionary Iranian literature. His style consists of both a continuation of the experimentation- championed by writers of the modernist period (1950-1979), and a reaction against traditionalist ideas implicit in classical Persian literature.

Postmodern Persian literature is difficult to define its exact characteristics, scope, and importance. However, one could specify that the unifying features of Abdolrezaei's poetry rest upon the denial of "Meta-Narratives" (Jean-Francois Lyotard) and "archetypal patterns" (Carl Gustav Jung). For example, instead of the modernist quest for meaning in a chaotic world, his poetry eschews, often playfully, the possibility of clear cut meanings.
This distrust of conventional poetry extends even to the author; thus to undermine the author's "univocal" control (the control of only one voice). The distinction between high and low culture is also attacked by the use of colloquial language and multi-phonics/genres not previously deemed fit for Persian literature.

He breaks away from objective reality in that a narrative is told from an objective or omniscient point of view. In favour of subjectivism, in poetry he turns from external reality to examine inner states of consciousness. In addition, he explores fragmentation in narrative- and character-construction. The poem: "At the Priory" is often cited as an example of this style. This poem is fragmentary and employs pastiche to demonstrate the working of extreme subjectivity as an existential crisis. What we call reality is actually the construction of our minds. This is to say, our lives are not the subject of random fate, but reality is of our own making. It is shaped by manipulation of material events and emotions around us from a logocentric point of view.
While people are inundated with information technology, there is a shift into hyperreality (Jean Baudrillard) in which our understanding of the real is mediated by simulations of the real. The poem "Sausage" presents a virtual narrative with virtual imageries. Here, particular techniques are invoked to address this postmodern hyperreal information bombardment. The first thing that strikes a reader about this poem is the absence of certain familiar elements. Underneath though, there is a great deal clarity of diction and a rhythm that is organic. Intrinsic to the mood of the poem, is a vivid economy of language and a subtle technique of intensification by repetition. It is the entire poem, not the word that constitutes the unit of meaning. There is a dynamism and unified complexity configuring a fusion of subjectivity and objectivity. The reader's imagination makes the connection- juxtaposing the Photographic negatives to discover the unitary meaning.

Perhaps demonstrated most famously and effectively in poem "Mother me out!" is the belief that there's an assumed ordering system behind the chaos of the world. For the poet though, no ultimate ordering system exists, so a search for order is fruitless and absurd. The poem has many possible interpretations.

The sprawling canvas and fragmented narrative of the poem "Bandar Abbas" has generated controversy on the "purpose" of the narrative and the standards by which it should be judged. Abdolrezaei believes that the style of a poem must be appropriate to what it depicts and represents. The post-revolutionary Iranian socio-cultural landscape is a text that with the help of the poet can be read and understood. This poem provides us with a narrative vision which is in sharp contrast with the utopian dreams preceding the 1979 Iranian revolution. If post-Revolutionary Iran was a new Eden, or alternatively, a New Canaan, then it positively demanded poets who could articulate those metamorphoses/ manifestations envisaging such destiny:

…and since February walked a brand on my face
I am looking for a July bullet hid behind these walls
This wall this snail shell that revolves round Nothing
Where does it end?

In poem "Junction", it seems to define the attitude of a generation exuding a much needed confidence in an age that, following the reign of the totalitarian regime in post Revolutionary Iran, could easily descend into disillusion and decadence. There exists, desperately, a quest for action demanding recognition that the status quo has to change. Abdolrezaei's work is, prophetically, heralding something new about to emerge into view. His imagery is consistent with contemporary life representing the spontaneous expression of the poet's thoughts and feelings. He sees poetry as a vital part in the process of creating transformation.
The lost identity of the poet is compensated for by the act of poetry writing. The poem "Great Men" expresses a belief that fires every Iranian poem into life:

It had gone to your head
that being a poet needs a tall stature
A tall shout
which the faster they ran, the harder they'd reach

 

The poem is the identity of the poet actualised in the process of writing it. By the same token, one can argue that poetry enacts identity for the reader as s/he gets engaged in the re-creative process of reading. Thus, poet and audience create, interactionally, a brief momentary sense of communion through a fragile web of words.
The embedded elements of surrealism and expressionist symbolism in the poem "Cloud" explore the damaging restrictions of social life following the Iran-Iraq war.
The narrative substance of "Held my hands and step by step died of sorrow" refers to the lost relationships in the poet's mind whose past deeds and aspirations are itemised as a way of fixing the odds of a confused identity, or self-definition, in exile. Here the poet himself appears to represent a strategy of existing in space rather than time.

The poem "Park" indicates that there exists no teleological sense of Progression and development as life circles back and forth.

In the poem called "Go as the go that I went", by taking up the “I” role, the poet demonstrates that actually there is no difference between his role and the “Other”. Never throughout his career, has Abdolrezaei presented a stable sense of the "I" in his poems.
This singular pronoun might be referred to anybody whose role is not desirable. But the poet puts himself in that position taking on the wicked roles and writes about the implications.
The poem, evidently, requires playfulness and the sprightly mobility of words and rhythms announces that life is an open-ended motion which at times creates unease:

Go towards the go that I went, don't go so you're left behind
for wherever I didn't leave, there I stayed
wherever I reached, there I was

As the poem draws to a conclusion in which very little is actually concluded, the narrator seems to be speaking only for the elusive character of his own identity.
To re-create a new identity in exile, the poem "Album" is a manifestation of reinventing his life in the process of remembering and rehearsing it. This poem establishes a link between the world of poetry and his original/ local world of farming life. “Album” is itself, centrally, indicative of a certain alienation resulting from his present life of exile and the need somehow to negotiate the distance between origins and present circumstances. The distance between the two is marked by physical distance as well as a kind of cultural disjunction.
In another poem "White Reading", we witness an intimate contact between the "I" and "you". All barriers (temporal, spatial and cultural) between poet and audience are abolished as the creation of the poem itself has become an act of communion. The open-endedness of this poem is not simply portrayed in the brave closing lines. On the contrary, it is scattered throughout the entire conception of the poem. Life like a poem is an on-going construction whereby we are parties to organise it interactively.

The self-conscious dialogue between the poet's varied personae sets the tone of the poem "Dictation". The poem interrupts itself twice with a third commanding voice while the poet looks back over his life. Although the poem is written in the first person, the reader learns little about the protagonist, who remains a representative figure. The "I" of the poem can speak for all men because no particular identity is ascribed. The mood of the poem brushes with tragic in the final stanza, in that a new poem "always rubs out other poems". Thus, the final line: "Poets! Stop writing hands up" is a verdict in the sense that defeat is inevitable and all people will die.

 

There is a challenging risk the proponents of the convention may pose: are you playing the role of this or that character? The poet has given in advance his verdict: I am this and that and the “Other”. I am enacting them all. To say this is to relinquish any demarcation between wickedness and righteousness. In art as in life, he doesn't mind being confused with slovenliness or a lack of consideration for others. This approach is in sharp contrast, for example, to British great poet W.H. Auden who said in 1965:

"…once I wrote:
History to the defeated
May say alas but cannot help nor pardon.
To say this is to equate goodness with success. It would
have been bad enough if I had ever held this wicked doctrine,
but that I should have stated it simply because it sounded
to me rhetorically effective is quite inexcusable."(2)

In these assembled rather short pieces, a glimpse of his poetic intentions and range of theme/ genre is available to English readers. Obviously for a better understanding, one has to look at his writings from a historical perspective i.e. their main chronological order.

At first his work is too obscure and dense. But its richness of imagery, its uniqueness of language and sudden surprising shifts of diction are remarkably convincing as the dust of obscurity settles. In his poetry, there is a tendency to use personal/ social references which an unfamiliar reader cannot place. This spectacular ability to discuss vast areas of human experience through his own brand of psycho –politics, if not daunting his rivals, nevertheless has been, quietly, inspirational to his opponents. Some critics have attacked certain lengthy poems as being maximalist, disorganized, sterile and filled with language play for its own sake.
Abdolrezaei 's life and work does not fit into tidy pigeonholes. There will be obvious overlaps and shortfalls when trying to compartmentalise his work or his own characteristics. We never step twice into the same Abdolrezaei, as his poetry doesn't show a man bound into a decreasing circle of repetition. His creative power is at its peaks and not yet showing signs of descent. During the last 15 years, his poetic profile has been most jaggedly visible and ubiquitous across Persian poetic territories in Iran Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Abdolrezaei as the founding father of the new Poetic tradition is creating new visionary, new expressive language and new potentialities in poetry. His line of poetry counteracts traditional Romanticism supplying workings of form and language on which the reader can rely to bear their own interpretation. That is to say, create meaning through making connections, establishing priorities and building structurations.

Abdolrezaei can't, except with considerable reluctance or qualification, confine himself and his creativity within the strait-jacket of Persian orthodox perspective i.e. create poetry less individualistic and idiosyncratic. In spite of the risk of appearing eccentric or anarchic, he seems to speak to us from out of the depths of his solitude through schemata largely unmediated by social or literary convention. So to invent, to unravel a form via which he can express his own vision of life, may be interpreted as a means to self-definition and as a demonstration to seek identity. Nevertheless, his language and his sense of identity are interwoven and have been changing respectively.

Since poetry is, primarily, a drama of the self, it wouldn't be Tautological to say that the notion of the self itself has its source in language that never inheres in the real. That is because writing i.e. the act of turning experience into language possibilities, deals, in the first instance, with epistemology and matters of cultural perception and communication.
The distinctiveness of new poetry began to emerge nearly a decade later after the Revolution. Along with the progressive tendencies in Secularism and Human Rights, Iranian literary nationalism began to take shape. This New poetry order grew up out of a body of ideas which, primarily, rest upon individualism and imagined reality.

 

Finally, I wish to reiterate that this anthology has come about as a result of efforts made by Abol Froushan as the translator of the poems from Persian into English. I should cite that Abol Froushan himself is a poet whose work has been published widely. For Abol words as objects per se, representing sound and forms, are of far more significance than they generally are for Abdolrezaei. Having said that, though, it must be said that just like Abdolrezaei, Abol is concerned with rendered experience rather than statement. He believes in organic form, rhythm and cadence that are necessary product of a particular moment and voice.

It seems Abol's poetry adheres to a great extent to Objectivism wherein the concern with music, sound and sensuous is at its strongest. The "objectivist" attempts to make poetry as intransitive as music or painting can get. In line with this approach, ideas are presented sensuously and intelligently and no predatory intention is pre-meditated. In his work, meaning is subordinated to sound, in that the individual word becomes an object and that the order and movement of sound in a poem might create a flux of emotions more significant than the underlying literary meaning.
For Abol there is a one-to-one relationship between the inner world and the outside world out of the window. His abstract expressionist poetry dramatises that relationship to the re-creation of experience. What he is after is just juxtaposition of one word against another so that a temporary suspension of habitual thought can occur in the process of writing. A poem ossifies within any disjuncture that mind-flow stops, and a temporary void is created. In these circumstances, the discontinuous activities of the poem are in line so much with how it says, as opposed with what it says.
 

August 2008

1- This book was published by Exiled Writers INK.

2- Collected Poems: edited by Edward Mendelson: 1994: Author's forewords

3- Finally, thanks to Dr Helen Pearce for help in editing this text.