Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967):
40-year anniversary conference4-5 July 2008
University of ManchesterA conference that will explore Forugh Farrokhzad's literary and broader cultural impact both during her lifetime and in the forty years since her passing.
Organized by:
Iran Heritage Foundation and the University of Manchester.Convened four decades after the untimely death of 20th-century Iran's arguably most influential woman poet, this international conference will gather scholars from Europe, North America and Iran to explore Forugh Farrokhzad's literary and broader cultural impact both during her lifetime and in the forty years since her passing.
The conference will be held over two days at the University of Manchester, UK. Please address all enquiries via email to Dominic Parviz Brookshaw at dominic.p.brookshaw@manchester.ac.uk.
Website: http://www.iranheritage.org/farrokhzad/
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“Representing Ourselves—Writers of the Iranian Diaspora in Conversation”
May 3, 2008. UC Irvine, 9 am-5pm
Inaugural Event of the Iranian-American Writers of California (IAWC)
One-Day Workshop/Discussion
Hosted by: Dr. Nasrin Rahimieh and the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture at UC Irvine
Convened by: Dr. Persis Karim, Dr. Narsin Rahimieh, and Homa SarsharThe purpose of this day-long workshop/discussion is to create opportunities for writers of Iranian heritage to discuss a number of issues and concerns about writing, about what it means to write and publish poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that focuses on Iran, Iranian culture and the complex nexus between the U.S. and Iran, as well as our identity as Californians. The workshop is not intended to be a formal, academic series of presentations, but brings together a number of published and unpublished writers who have expressed an interest in creating greater community and avenues for collective discussion and reflection about our work and its reception. We also see this workshop as an opportunity to launch the Iranian-American Writers of California (IAWC) with the goal of making it into an organization that offers a platform for ongoing discussion, support and solidarity, as well as creating a collegial forum for debate and discussion about complex and difficult issues; finally, we hope that this organization will be the impetus to organize and imagine future programs throughout the state and hopefully, throughout the nation. We envision May 3rd as one of many conversations in which we discuss issues such as self-representation, politics and writing, responsibilities to our community and to each other, etc. We come together in a spirit of camaraderie, support, and awareness about the ways that the emerging literature of the Iranian diaspora can and does play a role in the ways in which we are seen, understood and also in creating and reinventing a culture that draws on both our Iranian and American heritage.
List of Invited Participants
Anita Amirrezvani
Jasmin Darznik
Parissa Ebrahimzadeh
Haleh Hatami
Zara Houshmand
Jahanshah Javid
Esther Kamkar
Porochista Khakpour
Sharon May
Majid Naficy
Gina Barkhordar Nahai
Sepideh Saremi
Sholeh Wolpé----------------------------------------------
Read a review of Sin--Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad on The Daily Star -- Lebanon
Read online or see below:
Reading Forugh Farrokhzad
Forty years after her death, Iran's most rebellious poet is back in English-language translation
By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Daily Star staff
Thursday, December 06, 2007Review
BEIRUT: She was a rebel and a rock star. She lived fast and died young. She was a revolutionary way before the rumblings of a historic rupture could be heard in Iran. She wrote more frankly about sex and more forcefully about desire than any Iranian literary figure before or since. And she paid a heavy price for it. She lost custody of her son. She was thrown into a mental hospital and given electroshock therapy. In print and for public consumption critics called her a whore with great relish. Forty years ago, she was killed in a car crash at the age of 32, flung from her jeep, her head smashed into a concrete gutter. The accident brought the brief but bold career of Forugh Farrokhzad, established poet, emerging filmmaker, to a shocking end. It also stained her legacy with a veneer of tragedy. To mark the anniversary of her death, the University of Arkansas Press has published "Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad," a slim, potent volume of poems that were originally released over a concentrated period of time, between 1955 and 1967, yet nevertheless illustrate expansive growth in terms of style, tone and subject matter. Farrokhzad's legacy casts a huge shadow over both popular and critical Iranian culture. Filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami named his film "The Wind Will Carry Us" after one of her poems, which includes the famous lines "May you be green, head to toe - / put your hands like a fevered memory in mine" (the poem is included in "Sin" but its title is translated, more bleakly, as "The Wind Will Blow Us Away"). Azar Nafisi, author of the bestselling memoir "Reading Lolita in Tehran," fled Iran at the age of 13 clutching three books of poetry, including Farrokhzad's. The scholar Farzaneh Milani, who is preparing an extensive biography based on more than 100 interviews conducted over 30 years, recently wrote about standing in line for hours to pack into a Tehran theater, which was putting on a play drawn on Farrokhzad's life and work and where the average age of the feisty, majority female audience was well under 30. But aside from two academic studies - Milani's "Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers," and Michael C. Hillman's "A Lonely Woman: Forugh Farrokhzad and Her Poetry" - there are precious few English-language translations of her poems that are still in print. According to Sholeh Wolpe, who cast "Sin" into English and is the first bona fide poet to translate Farrokhzad, even the black-market editions published in the original Farsi are heavily censored in Iran. (After 1979, writes Wolpe in her introduction, the Islamic Republic banned her books, ordered her original publisher not to print any more copies and when he refused, jailed him. His factory, meanwhile, burned to the ground.) As such, the publication of "Sin" - coupled with the DVD release in 2005 of Farrokhzad's only film "Khaneh Siah Ast (The House is Black)" - is giving uninitiated English speakers an essential introduction to her work. And considered alongside the forthcoming feature film by Iranian-American artist Shirin Neshat, based on Shahrnush Parsipur's novella "Women Without Men," that audience - or at least those removed and swayed by more reductive depictions of femininity as a force snuffed by black cloth - is about to have its view of Iranian women considerably enlarged and complicated. Neshat is a controversial figure and the various readings of her work, often filtered through the lens of identity politics and inextricable from readings of Iran as foreign or unknown, are perhaps illuminating vis-a-vis Farrokhzad. From her stark photographs of veiled women pictured with guns and covered with scrawled lines of Persian poetry, including Farrokhzad's, to her lush video installations, Neshat's work has been warmly embraced in Western art circles. It has, at the same time, stoked some unease in Middle Eastern art scenes. Some feel she makes work only for the West, reiterates media cliches and reduces tricky themes (gender, sex, politics, violence) to over-aestheticized, digestible bits of otherness. But that view conveniently sidesteps - and arguably mis-recognizes - the sheer gorgeousness and compositional sophistication of Neshat's art. Her cinematic adaptation of Parsipur's story about five mad women will probably be as heatedly debated around here as it is already hotly anticipated. And given the formal flourishes and grand passions that surge all over the pages of "Sin," one also wonders how the critical reception of Farrokhzad's work would turn if she were better known outside Iran, or had lived to expatriate, as Neshat did in the late 1970s.
Farrokhzad was born in 1935, the fourth in a family of seven children, to an overprotective, brutal mother and an indifferent military father. She was a most mischievous child and read voraciously. At 16, she was married off to a cousin, once removed. He was 31. Less than a year later her son was born. Though they lived outside the capital, Farrokhzad began traveling to Tehran and publishing poems in magazines there. She was referred to as a "poetess," her work was printed alongside silhouettes of nude women and rumors true and false of extramarital affairs made the rounds. She got divorced and lost all but rare visiting rights with her son. In 1955, she published her first collection, "Captive," with lines like: "My fevered, raving poem / shamed by its desires, / hurls itself once again into fire, / the flames' relentless craving." She wrote combustible verses about sexual pleasure and in doing so trashed just about every known taboo about what a woman could voice, to say nothing of write, publish and publicly circulate. The same year, she was committed to a psychiatric hospital. A fellow poet began to visit her there and they became lovers. In 1956, she published "The Wall," a collection that included her most incendiary poem "Sin." (Opening lines: "I have sinned a rapturous sin / in a warm enflamed embrace, / sinned in a pair of vindictive arms, / arms violent and ablaze.") Two years later, she published her third collection, entitled "Rebellion," which conveyed struggle and fatigue over lust and delirium. She also began a passionate, public affair with Ebrahim Golestan - filmmaker, proprietor of Golestan Studios and a married man. She traveled to Europe, studied film production and in 1962 completed "The House is Black," a stark documentary portrayal of a leper colony that is haunting, intensely moving yet utterly devoid of poignancy. The film won top honors at the Oberhausen film festival (coming perfectly full circle, it was reprised at Oberhausen in 2005 as part of curator Akram Zaatari's "Radical Closure" program). It also earned Farrokhzad a measure of respect from Iranian intellectuals, who read the work as an allegory for a society in advanced stages of decay, unable to cure itself rationally and throwing its lot to faith (these being the days of oil for arms, the shah's secret police and the rising profile of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini). Then, in 1964, came "Reborn," a collection of 36 poems on which Farrokhzad's literary legacy is largely based. Twenty-three of those poems are reprinted in "Sin," and they are more weathered than the ones that come before. They speak of sorrows, disappointments, regrets and resignations. Yet some, such as "O Bejeweled Realm..." filter Farrokhzad's poems of wild passions into relentlessly caustic verse, throwing punches in all directions at social hypocrisy and political negligence. The most powerful poems in this new volume, however, come last, from the posthumous collection "Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season," which was printed after Farrokhzad's death in 1967. Like the poem "Sin," these later verses are structured with an intricate geometry, in which certain words repeat but twist in resonance as the order, context or stress shifts (Wolpe deserves much credit for the fluidity and freshness of her translations). If, in her 20s, Farrokhzad was writing about desire as the thing that buds and ripens, then by her early 30s she was casting a rueful glance over its ruins. The crispness of her words and the enigma of her images - a subject "who winds her watch with childhood's logic of additions and subtractions," the kindness of a lover's lies, the dumb verses of defeated prophets, "how the branches of your fingers like five letters of truth left a mark on her cheek" - make "Let Us Believe in the Dawn of the Cold Season" a work to be read and returned to often. These late poems, like certain works by Charles Wright or Seamus Heaney, are meticulously built to be precise and elusive at once. They reach outside of the poet's own experience, beyond her headspace, her gender, her country of origin. Both pensive and urgent, they strive for the universal. If they fortify her work against readings based strictly on autobiography or identity politics, then all the better.
"Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad," translated by Sholeh Wolpe, is published by the University of Arkansas Press
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Mutanabbi Street Memorial
Reading
Mark Taper Auditorium, Los Angeles Central Library
Monday November 19, 7 pm
(more info to be posted soon)About the Bombing of Mutanabbi Street
Baghdad, Iraq:On March 5th 2007, a car bomb was exploded on Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad. Mutanabbi Street is in a mixed Shia-Sunni area. More than 30 people were killed and more than 100 were wounded. This locale is the historic center of Baghdad bookselling, a winding street filled with bookstores and outdoor book stalls. Named after the famed 10th-century classical Arab poet, Al-Mutanabbi, this is an old and established street for bookselling and has been for hundreds of years. Mutanabbi Street also holds cafes, stationery shops, and even tea and tobacco shops. It has been the heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community.
This tragedy is part of a wider and continuing tragedy, but one that we want to isolate and address---not only for the loss of lives but also for the implications underlying the destruction of a street where books were sold. Bookselling on Mutanabbi Street is no different from bookselling here. We traffic in memory, ideas, and dreams. In that sense, we feel that Mutanabbi Street starts at the front door of all of our bookshops. We strongly feel a need to respond. For that reason, we are putting together a memorial poetry reading for Mutanabbi Street, with any money raised to go to Doctors Without Borders. We have also started to form a coalition of booksellers, writers, artists, printers and readers." -- Beau Beausoleil
The first reading took place in the San Francisco Main Library Auditorium, August 26th, at 1 P.M. The next reading will be held at the Los Angeles Public Library on November 19, 2007, at 7 PM, as part of the ALOUD series. Among those reading will be Chris Abani, Sholeh Wolpe, Terry Wovlerton and Suzanne Lummis.
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A play in three acts , "Shame" is about life-altering sacrifices made to spare our families the back-bending burden of losing face in society.
When is enough, enough?
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The Art, Life and Legacy of Iran’s Rebel Poet
Princeton University October 5, 2007
Princeton University is pleased to announce Forough Goes West, a day-long interdisciplinary conference on the art, life and poetry of Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad. Featuring presentations by scholars Farzaneh Milani and Michael Hillmann, playwright Ezzat Goushegir, poet and translator Sholeh Wolpe, as well as a selection of short films by Shirin Neshat.
For more information please visit: Foroughgoeswest.com
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Liam Rector (1949-2007)
Distinguished poet and educator, and a man I knew and admired, shot himself on Wednesday morning (Aug.15, 2007) at his home in Greenwish Village. He was 57 years old. He will be sorely missed.
Years ago, my best friend, Joseph Wiseman, an educated, charming, beautiful man, shot himself in the head. We had met at Johns Hopkins University and he had gone on to become the director of a major AIDS project in Central Africa. It took me many years to come to terms with his death and to finally write about it. Liam's death has taken me back to that crushing grief.
My deepest sympathies to Liam's wife, Tree Swenson, a beautiful and accomplished woman who is the executive director of The Academy of American Poets. Here is the poem I wrote for Joe, but it's really for all of us, here, now, we who cannot understand but must.
Suicide
The sunlight brazenly lounges on your headstone.
Three puffs of clouds sit lazy in the sky.I confess: I’m not angry with you – not you,
just with the head that rested itself intimately
against metal so brutal and cold.I saw a tree crying today, shedding her sap like rain.
Our distance so soon graduated to universes and beliefs.--Sholeh Wolpe
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Come to Night Vision -- MOCA After Dark
MUSIC: House DJs Jason Eldredge of KCRW and Scott Silva spin. Jason Eldredge is the host of KCRW’s Accidental Rhythm program and Scott Silva is the former host of KCRW’s Connections program.
FOOD AND DRINK: Light fare at Patinette Café and outdoor cash bar
SCREENING: Music videos from Film Independent’s Los Angeles Film Festival
ARTMAKING: Workshop with artist Jamie Sweetman
SCREENING: Richard Tuttle: Never Not an Artist
Filmed at Tuttle’s home in New Mexico, his studio in Manhattan, and the galleries at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the film offers an intense, intimate portrait of the artist’s working process.
TOUR: Exhibition walkthrough with a MOCA educator. Space is limited to 20. Sign up at the information desk inside the galleries beginning at 6pm.
MUSIC: Featured performance by Busdriver
SCREENING: Music videos from Film Independent’s Los Angeles Film Festival
SPOKEN WORD: Sholeh Wolpe
Sholeh Wolpe is the author of Sin—Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad (University of Arkansas Press, 2007), The Scar Saloon (Red Hen Press, 2004), Rooftops of Tehran (Red Hen Press, Jan. 2008) and a poetry CD featuring poems read by the author to traditional Persian music (Refuge Studios). Her poems, translations, essays and reviews have appeared in scores of literary journals, periodicals and anthologies worldwide and have been translated into several languages. Sholeh was born in Iran but spent most of her teen years in the Caribbean and Europe, ending up in the U.S. where she pursued Master degrees in Radio-TV-Film (Northwestern University) and Public Health (Johns Hopkins University). She lives in Los Angeles.
SPOKEN WORD: Rubén Martínez
Martínez has often collaborated with musicians. He was featured as a spoken word artist on MTV Latino with Mexican rock heroes Maldita Vecindad y los Hijos del Quinto Patio, and performed with Los Illegals and Johnette Napolitano (Concrete Blonde) in sold-out shows at the House of Blues and the Ford Amphitheatre in Hollywood. He has composed and performed works included on albums such as Concrete Blonde y Los Illegals (Ark-21 Records, 1997) and The Roches’ Zero Church (Redhouse Records, 2002). He is currently at work on a solo album.His books include Flesh Life: Sex in Mexico City (powerHouse, 2006) with photographer Joseph Rodríguez, and The New Americans (The New Press, 2005), the companion volume to the acclaimed PBS television series of the same name. East Side Stories: Gang Life in East L.A., a book of photographs by Joseph Rodríguez with text by Martínez, was published by powerHouse Books in 1998. The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City, and Beyond (Vintage Departures), a collection of his essays and poetry, was published in 1993.
TOUR: Exhibition walkthrough with a MOCA educator. Space is limited to 20. Sign up at the information desk inside the galleries beginning at 6pm.
SCREENING: Found Sounds Bahia and Colors of a Creative Culture
David Zucker’s documentaries explore how artists in Bahia, Brazil give discarded materials new life as musical instruments and works of art, bringing music and paint to the people.
TOUR: Exhibition walkthrough with a MOCA educator. Space is limited to 20. Sign up at the information desk inside the galleries beginning at 6pm.
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---------------------------------------------------------------------June 30 (Sat), 4-10 pm—
International Conference and Concert, "Transcending Nationalisms,"
The Fowler Museum, UCLA
The evening includes a dramatic presentation written and performed by Sholeh Wolpe, along with film and theater actors Necar Zadegan and Herzl Tobey.
While Western perceptions of the Middle East are often colored by news of terrorism, armed conflict and Islamic extremism, the region that stretches from North Africa to West Asia is too vast and rich to be abridged by simplistic representation.
On June 30, diverse artists of Middle Eastern heritage explore the power of arts and culture to bridge the widening chasm exacerbated by political leaders and mass media. “Transcending Nationalisms: Can Art/Culture Bridge the Middle East & the West?” at UCLA’s Fowler Museum will include a public forum with writer/editors Reza Aslan, Nathalie Handal and Sholeh Wolpé, moderated by Jordan Elgrably. The talk and performance will be followed by a reception in the museum’s Davis Courtyard, featuring the exhibit “Architecture of the Veil” by Algerian artist Samta Benyahia. It will conclude with a live performance by Six Degrees Records recording group Niyaz, featuring Azam Ali, Ramin Loga Torkian and Carmen Rizzo.
During Transcending Nationalisms Sholeh Wolpé, along with actors Necar Zadegan and Herzl Tobey, will present a dramatic reading and performance to demonstrate the power of literature, and importance of supporting and reading translations from the Middle East to promote understanding. Nathalie Handal and Reza Aslan will join then the program for a lively discussion of whether it is possible to bring people of East and West together through literature and if so, what role can we all play in hastening and promoting this mutual conversation through the arts.
Reserve tix by phone, 310.657.5511 or 657.5522. For more info and to book tix online, go to http://www.levantinecenter.org/pages/june30_2007.html
