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Sally. Why the appetite for poetry in many modern cultures has dwindled into antiquity, poetry remains at the core of Iranian life and governments.

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The people of Iran encounter poetry every day in newspapers, classrooms, religious sermons,

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political protest advertising, billboards, television and radio, as well as in the home.

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Poetry is so embedded within Iran's ruling structures and political thought that it has

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become almost impossible to separate from the rhetoric of power over the past four decades.

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Both leaders of the Islamic Republic will allow for many an idea how many are poets in their own right.

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Much is yet to be written about the influence of poetry in the romanticisation of political thought in Iran, it has been explored in other culture.

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In Soviet Russia, Franco's Spain, Castro's Cuba or Italy.

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Under Mussolini, the role of the poet tyrant has been so critically investigated.

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Welcome to Middle East Centre Book Talk. The Oxford podcast on new books about the Middle East.

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These are some of the books written by members of our community or the books our community are talking about.

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My name is is Angela.

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Chef Scott and I teach the social anthropology of the Middle East, particularly Iran, with a particular interest in literary production.

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My guest is far too, Machans, assistant professor of modern Persian Literature at the University of Pennsylvania,

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Fotomat and her defo in Oriental studies at Oxford under the supervision of Hamar, Cocteau's Yang and Edmond Hurtig and 2016.

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She then taught Persian language and literature at the University of Oxford.

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So US and the Cato Institute of Art before joining the University of Pennsylvania.

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She is herself an award winning poet who has published three collections of poetry in Persian and English from

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May 20 21 until July 20 22 for TOMIE will be a Humboldt fellow and an EU Emmi affiliate residing in Berlin.

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Embarking on her second book, Project on Imprisonment, Exile and Precarious Modes of writing in Persian tradition, her much anticipated book,

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A Revolution in Rhyme Poetic Cooption under the Islamic Republic,

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was published in 2020 by Oxford University Press as part of the Oxford Oriental Monograph series.

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Its unique and highly original in addressing the output of the postrevolutionary Iranian poets,

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whom she calls official poets because they've been supported in various ways by the state but who

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until now have been dismissed as aesthetically unimportant and largely neglected outside of Iran.

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Fotomat. Welcome to Book Talk. And welcome back to the Middle East and community.

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Can you tell us about the role that the Oxford intellectual media played in the writing of this book?

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Piousness, I'm on it, it's a pleasure and I'm honoured to be here in conversation with you, but also to be back to the centre.

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But Antony's College, which was my first college when I first arrived in Oxford.

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So those were the good old days. You know, if I want to start answering your question about how export merely mildew,

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an intellectual community, shaped my scholarship and also who I am today as a scholar,

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I should really start with the Clarendon Farm and the fact that it gave me the opportunity to pursue APHC in the first place.

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But more methodically, if I want to highlight some of the most important takeaways from Oxford Time.

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For me it was basically to rethink the relationship between the old and new ones.

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Say that in order to make sense of the new,

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you always have to look at the past and we don't have to completely break from the past in order to create something new.

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I think that was something that was extremely important and inspiring to me.

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You know, came out of many conversations. My mentors woke up to zero and everyone thought Zik and also my friends, including yourself.

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Another thing that I think was very important was for me especially to come to

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realise the importance of significance of history and historical knowledge.

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I always had this is an old joke, and I always tell my friends that it's impossible to go to Oxford to study humanities and not become an historian.

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At some point you realise that you are a historian before you are a literary critic or your and you are not apologist sociologists.

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You really like any anything in humanities goes back to history and you have to go back to the past in order to shape your thoughts and your ideas.

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And you know, the interpretation of this past also, I would say it was something that,

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you know, that sort of the ways in which you look at this and try to make sense of it.

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And, of course, that privilege of working with wonderful scholars, meeting people that you simply don't get to meet in other contexts.

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Oxford is really unique in that sense. And the last thing I would say the beautiful libraries in which you could just hide

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for hours every day and get inspired by the beautiful architecture and the old books,

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you know, that always kept me thinking and rethinking and writing and rewriting.

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So I would say that the physicality of the place itself was also very inspiring and special.

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Well, it's absolutely wonderful to be able to welcome you back virtually.

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And it's an honour to have this conversation with you. So we've just passed the 40 second anniversary of the Islamic revolution in Iran.

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But as you make clear in the introduction of your book,

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your book is the first to address this vast body of poetry that's been produced under various forms of state sponsorship in the Islamic Republic,

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as well as the first to focus on the close relationship between poetry and power through these mechanisms.

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And why do you think it's taken so long for someone to try to fill this gap?

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Yeah, that's a that's a very important, wonderful question. I actually elaborates on this in the introduction of the book as well.

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That's one of the reasons for this gap, I think has been the lack of contact with the postrevolutionary Iran by as others

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whose work actually has shaped and sort of defined fields outside of Iran,

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you know, excessive purges and forceful involuntary integrations that happen right after defeat, especially the first decade after the revolution,

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caused many of these scholars to leave home and some tough noons contact with Iran and simply not being able to be physically present.

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And this had a really important impact on the production of this other sheep outside Iran.

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This is not to say that nobody has worked on postrevolutionary literature.

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And I make it very clear in the book that we have, in fact, in malleable body of research on postrevolutionary prose and even poetry.

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But, you know, they mostly have been focussing on or focussed on those authors and poets will have a

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very critical approach against the state or have been simply neutral and independent.

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And in other words, the emphasis has been always on the resistance and the defiance rather than conformity and ideology.

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And I try to break this binary uncomplicated in the book by showing that even

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those who adhere to a certain ideology being the ideology of the state question.

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That's on point. It's not as sort of black and white, that being imagine.

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So this new generation of scholars who grew up in Iran are educated under the Islamic Republic, including myself.

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We have a different experience and view of how the system really works.

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You know, we mean I personally was exposed to pull its roots in a very young age, both at home and at school.

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And there was always this divide between the school textbooks and what I found in my

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mother's underground library that had offset publications of the revolutionary period.

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And then, you know, the underground library that had different kinds of books.

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So being exposed to all of these different dimensions of Persian poetry, I suppose, was extremely important.

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Since very young age and soon I find myself in the poetry circles of Mashhad, which is one of the most thriving cities as far as poetry is concerned.

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And then later on, when I entered her own university,

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I became more aware of this extensive project that happened in the past and they're happening at that time.

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And also the state sponsored book industry, really, that constantly tried to weave a different literary history,

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different cantonization and canonisation of poetry. And then I left Iran and I started working on this project.

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One of the things that came to my attention was that this particular phenomenon,

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this book making industry and sort of cantonization and we cantonization of

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poetry has been completely dismissed and nobody has really picked up on it.

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There were articles and book chapters here and there, but none of them really tried to contextualise this particular phenomenon,

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especially in conversation with the past literary tradition.

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That was also part of my interests here. Just to pick up on that.

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I mean, what what do you think accounts for the not so much the neglect because you mentioned that,

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but the fact that the aesthetic aspect of this official poetry seems to have been downright distasteful to so many critics outside Iran.

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Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's a very important question to address.

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I tried to address this in the book as well, that, you know, there is this tendency amongst the critics, especially those outside Iran.

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And also, you know, independent critics inside Iran, that there is this tendency for aesthetics that I would call high literature,

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that simply ignoring the fact that poetry and literature has also other functions in the society.

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I studied sociology at several university,

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and I think that sociological batched background really helped me to rethink the relationship between poetry and society.

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And for me, the fact that poetry could be also an art of persuasion,

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dissemination of ideology, brainwashing, training, a new revolutionary generation.

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All of these was also very important. And, you know, once you once you put those in priority, the aesthetic dimension finds a different meaning.

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Why is it distasteful to many critics? I think as a result of that, anything that is ideologically charged and also considered as too political,

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political and ideological for the taste of the scholars has been dismissed.

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Think this will get sloganeering aspect of poetry, but, you know, poetry's share is short it or the poetry is a slogan or vice versa.

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And as soon as it's becoming a tool for mass mobilisation, which literally became that during the war with Iraq,

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then it's you know, it's not worth our time and our attention.

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For me, in fact, this very aspect of revolutionary or what I call the Islamic Republic in origin was very interesting,

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how rhythm and rhyme actually were used in the political sphere.

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Another reason, I think, for their dismissal is their ties, their very close ties with the state.

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I think he played a very important role in their othering. You know, there is a political divide, whether we like it or not.

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Between the scholars outside Iran, those who work in the humanities and for the most part.

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And, you know, the Islamic Republic.

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So whoever works for the government with the government, especially if that religion people are just simply considered as bad poets fighting for.

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What they just think is not true and, you know, I tried in the book, too,

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and to complicate this approach, that many of them, in fact, knew the point tradition pretty well.

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We might not like the way they might and might not agree with their ideology.

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But that doesn't mean that they are completely illiterate or unaware of all this tradition.

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In fact, they are deeply aware of it. And that's why they are capable of coopting so well.

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Which is something that I think the contribution of this book to the field is really to show that how this auction has taken place.

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Another thing I think there is this e-mail again,

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which has to do with what I already said is demoralising approach to not just the revolution of the Islamic Republic, but also Islam to some extent.

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I tried to, you know, in the book show that Islam really means different things to all of these poets.

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I start the book with an ode by a poet who was then later on after the revolution, Exhort persecuted an exile by the Islamic Republic.

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This poet is one of the first pioneering voices of these very trend that later on was promoted to official them after the revolution.

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Now Matthau's up. And I think complicating this winery, it was which was really something that I was hoping to do.

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The book we challenged if pigeonholing your approach of conning these people, Islamised people.

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Well, you know, if you look at what has been already produced, these poets have been constantly called Islamists poets.

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I think there is a difference between Islamist and Islamic Republic. And I think that's what I was trying to do in the book.

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And the fact that many of these poets, their allies,

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beat the censors and beat the Islamic Republic itself and played a role in the system and their poetry.

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And for this reason, doesn't deserve attention. I think I think this is something that had to be addressed and challenged.

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And I tried to do that in the book. Yeah, I think I mean,

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that was one of the things I really appreciated about your book and that I found so

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striking that you demonstrated so carefully that contrary to what we might assume,

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there was such incredible diversity, both in aesthetic and in ideological terms amongst this state sponsored poets,

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the Islamic Republic and our official poets that you describe.

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And so in this way, you refute earlier episodic approaches to Persian literary history, which tended to group poets according to their time period.

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And you argue very pointedly that poetry neither started nor stopped in 1979.

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So what lessons do you think that literary critics and historians should take away from your book regarding the most useful ways to classify poets?

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And one thing I forgot to mention in response to your previous question,

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which I think is also relevant to what you just asked, is that one thing I really learnt in during my time in office,

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I this was thanks to my supervisor at my sick,

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was that he really pushed me to go for a reading texts and sources about Bolshevik Russia, and that will cheer that revolution.

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And although this work is not in any way comparative study, I think there is you know,

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I have used different examples of mostly the example of Russia which show that Iran

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is really not the first and is not willing to be the last country that poetry was in.

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This country was tied to the revolution and courts for type revolution and also the complicated process

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of becoming parts of the revolutionary sort of movement and then later on becoming disillusioned by it.

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This is something that happened in the case of Bolshevik Russia, and I tried to address this in the book.

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I'm hoping that this opens the field really for further enquiries and research by other scholars also that to look for

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the parallels and try to put Iran on the map rather than just looking at Iran as the as this isolated place that,

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you know, just falls into the area of studies.

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And there is nothing really in common between this and other examples of as far as poetry and evolution on ideologies.

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Another thing that I was hoping to, you know, going back to a question about the epizootics approach is that I try to to show that basically

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the relationship with the poetic tradition is something that we should also look at,

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that each poet hanzi his or her own way of connecting with the past.

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You know, in today's Iran, even the government has its own take on this politic tradition.

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And we have after the revolution,

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we have this new wave of InTech protesters and critics who are aligned by the state and they are giving their own interpretation of office.

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For example, what is you a book on Hasselhoff is his interpretation of profit is one of them.

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And I chose the term cooption for this particular reason to show that there are

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ways there are always ways of connecting between the past and the present.

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Even then, there isn't revolutionary ideology on governments in place, even if they try to cut this relationship with the past.

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They're unable to do that because they're constantly themselves. They're constantly going back to this path.

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I'm trying to have a selective approach to this past. And also in terms of the episodic approach, as I mentioned in response to one of your questions,

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the fact that no matter what ideology these poets adhere to, they are always in conversation with other competing trends, including the last piece.

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What with your job from the 1970s? I showed this in detail in one of the chapters of the book.

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When I talk about how this mystic, poetic militant approach was co-opted, in fact,

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partly by going back to the mystical tradition of mystical poetry and partly by going back

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to the guerrilla poetry of the 70s and by putting these two different jargons together,

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these poets came up with their own way out,

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sort of sanctification of the war making do the whole the defence or the very notion of literary commitment with Adibi,

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which was something that you look at the works of the leftist secular poets of the prerevolutionary period,

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you see that they are the pioneering voices, in fact, in formulating this concept.

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And then we have Mohammad the Zohar Keamy, who comes a year before the revolution and also after the revolution.

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This book called Literature and Commitment in Islam.

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So suddenly everything is co-opted and, you know, Islam is itself is co-opted and we have a new phenomenon.

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But this new phenomenon didn't come out of nowhere, had its roots in the past.

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So I tried to show these connexions with the hope of not stopping by the revolution or as a point of as the only points of reference.

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Thank you. So early in the book, you set out to create an objective canon of revolutionary and post revolutionary poets, official poets.

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Can you tell us what objective criteria you use to make the selection the most important official poets of this period?

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Yes, I would say that was really the most challenging part of the book to come up with,

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you know, a number of poets and then to say that these very pioneering voices for that,

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I had to go back to what has been produced by the Islamic Republic itself and what has been said and argued and as well as,

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you know, the school textbooks and use my own lived experience in Iran, you know,

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the collective memory of many interviews that actually I had formal and informal conversations with the postrevolutionary generations.

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What did they remember? What was part of the collective memory?

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So all of this really brought me to those names in the first place.

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And I really use one word,

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if I want to say that really helped me to identify these poets was the work of Mohammad Kosen because of me, who you know well,

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he's on us on immigrant poets in Iran has become actually one of the most important voices of, you know, state sponsor narrative of literature.

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But at the same time, in fact, because I think his immigrant background helped him to be more objective about these

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poets rather than just promoting them or praising them just because this is them.

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Wanted to hear these names.

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In terms of the objective criteria, it was really important to me, the role these poets played so I could come up with two different generations.

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The generation that wrote before the revolution, and they were already part of the literary value before the revolution happened.

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Well, it's such a starter. Staffers of the set began on the anti-war sites and money and so forth.

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And then the second generation whose poetic output and career really starts, why the revolution?

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And they've become known as poets after the revolution. And, you know, they went through different processes as poets.

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The way that Tahara staffers are there or must I began on the approached poetry or their relationship with the leftist poets.

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What extremely intriguing to me. And then the way that they really shifted ideologically when the revolution happened.

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And then they slowly became part of the official draught.

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How did that take place and what was their role? They started taking up positions in the new government.

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There very close ties and sometimes organising role in some of the most important institutional cultural institutions of the government,

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such as ones a formality, you know, the vendor day meeting where and what was happening in those meetings.

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And then the way that their work was canonised in the school textbooks was also very important to me.

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The way that their work was published. How did they published it?

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Who published their work? And then also over time, what kind of relationship they had with the seat of power in particular.

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As you know, Harmony has been with the current leader of the Islamic Republic, has been holding this annual poetry ceremonies.

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Many of these poets, in fact, became the poet laureates medical shadows of these nights.

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Perhaps the worry upon, too, is that people sitting with one chair distance from harmony.

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All these years, he was one of the major poets watch news notes,

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many revolutionary songs that even the opposition today remember those songs and they sing them.

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So you alluded earlier in one of the responses to an earlier question, but also just now to your own personal experiences living in Iran,

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whether it was studying literature, moving to sociology and also reading from your mother's library and so on.

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But you yourself were also a practising poet to practise the craft under these same institutions and in these same conditions.

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So how did that influence your perspective in writing this book?

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I think being a it really helped me to sometimes read these poetry beyond ideology, even when it was ideological.

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So, for example, I have two chapters in the book on the war. One of them is about the other face of war.

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It's called in English. I tried to show that some of these poets where it's been writing, you know,

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in service of ideology, but you see that sometimes they break away from the fore, for example.

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And once that this break happens, the content also shifts and you see a different kind of reality of war coming out of these poems.

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Being a poet sometimes, you know, helped to understand this shift between the content and the form because it happens to my stuff all the time.

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So I think being a poet really helped me, too. Well, beyond the ideological disagreements and divides.

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Thank you. I wanted to ask you about female poets as well.

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So it's very striking that in your in the official canon and also in the canon that you construct yourself of the official poets.

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There's only one female poet, Taras Sapphire's out there, who you mentioned earlier as well.

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And yet amongst the younger generations, in my experience of Iran, in the early 2000s, at least, there were almost as many female poets as men.

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And in some circles there were more. So how might we understand this shift?

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Yes. First of all, I have to mention that this the cannon that I shape for the sake of, you know,

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the space I am to limit the walk for the first two generations of this poetic cannon.

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The ones who are already established, the ones whose work already being circulated and canonised in the textbooks

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on their name is is already established as the poet in this official jargon.

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Now, in this circle, that is, as you mention, and very rightly so, it's a very highly masculine turnon.

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Right. And there is only this one woman who stands out and really stands out in her poetics, especially in a certain way.

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Tell her it's our fault, as I did.

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Now, I mentioned in the book, in fact, in the first chapter of the book, that there were other poets, women, poets at this period.

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So if you did quash our need, for example, toward the mineral key, these are the poets who are writing.

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They're active at the time, but none of them made their way to, for example, the school textbook.

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Their name was not as emphasised upon and highlighted as softhearted.

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And I think the reason for that stemmed from the fact that it has to do with the cartoons

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of this persona of history in the Korea revolutionary period and also her politics.

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You're absolutely right.

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There are, in fact, many women, poets who do not belong to this particular circle, and they're pretty well read and widely known.

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And, you know, the subject of this book was those poets whose work has been endured and patronised by the government.

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That said, also, I have to add that in the past few years, especially these poets unites with harmony.

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We see that there is increasing number of women bullets who are sitting in the back,

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you know, and reading about in praise of motherhood, in praise of life.

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I love that. You know, he's also very much connected to this idea of being a devout woman.

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And I think their presence and some of them are wonderful poets, feel not as canonised important, this virus that forms a dark horse.

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But I think we might have in the future some of these female poets standing out,

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depending on whether or not this invented tradition of poetry knights continue,

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then I think that's very much bound to the life of the Islamic Republic itself.

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You know, whether or not it lasts in power.

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I think one reason that Tara staffers are dead became so important after the revolution was the fact that the system was trying to fight desperately,

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so trying to find an exemplary replacement for influential women poets such as Google Fadal,

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whose work then was censored and banned after the revolution, although her work is circulated.

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But some of her poems, especially during the first decade after the revolution,

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I think was an important period for the Paris agenda and censorship and our results.

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Poetry was one of them then.

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I think she was a perfect replacement for Rockefeller also because she wrote in modern forms that politics was interesting and avant garde.

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In fact, in the book I argued that she is the most avant garde poet.

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She might be only one woman, but her voice really stands out and she has really interesting poetic phrases and that evolves over time.

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And her very close relationship with her arm, you know, she was the translator off or on.

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And I think that was extremely important in shaping her persona, not only as a woman poet,

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but as someone who is extremely well-dressed and deeply engaged with the Islamic tradition.

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What very interesting need doesn't write in rhyme, know, doesn't practise classical forms,

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which is something that is also very unique about her promotion and other poets such as Rocket n Roll, I need.

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And if you want to think about the aesthetics of poetry, according to the current leader of the Islamic Republic,

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he actually very open the audience mentions this, that his preference and he likes classical poetry more than modern poems.

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You said it very clearly. Yeah. So I think that desperate need to replace a little out of sorts.

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Influential and popular poetry pushed the system.

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Who you choose to pick? A woman who could speak to that sort of poetic persona that Froogle Fattal's Lockhardt.

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Thank you. So, I mean, for me, your book is full of insights that I think tell us things about the Iranian revolution

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and the revolutionary state and society that other historians have missed until now.

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But for you, which do you think is the most important? Which are you most proud of making a contribution with?

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Thank you for saying that. I think the most important thing for me was to show how poetic legitimacy and political legitimacy for hand in hand.

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And I think that's really something unique about Iran and also to show how poetry is still very much relevant to society and to the power.

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And I really want to at you know, this is in a way a foundational book in the sense that, as you mentioned,

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because of that much gap that existed in the field, I really was challenged by how to write this one book.

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That veteran is not going to answer all questions and probably creates more questions

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how to write a book that opens up the field to further enquiry and research.

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One thing that, for example,

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I'm a book that I have shown in the book is that we are dealing with a romantic form of romantic political thought in Iran,

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in which poetry is so deeply embedded in the political jargon that is almost impossible to separate it from it.

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Another thing that I hope I have done in the book that I sort of feel would be useful to the readers is that interdisciplinary approach.

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This is a work that is not just literary criticism, is not just sociology of literature or social history of literature.

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I really try to use different theories from different backgrounds, political science, for example, to show that, you know, think about poetry.

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We can thinking between different disciplines. We don't have to just constantly go for a type of high literature and just stick to that other.

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There are also other ways of looking at the revolution and the Iranian society.

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Then just as much as I love the high literature myself.

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Yeah,

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I hope that that the book offers that sort of sociological insight into understanding the role of poetry in the society and in shaping the revolution.

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Absolutely, that was one of the main takeaways for me and one of the things I appreciated

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most about it was this showing how poetry is so pervasive in the society,

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but also how this really rich millennium long heritage of Persian poetry can be reinvented sic almost completely and yet remain so

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much the same in so many ways to reflect a completely new political reality and help birth it in a way to help bring it about,

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bring it into being. So it's absolutely fascinating. It's a wonderful book.

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I did want to ask you very briefly out of this official canon, which of these poets is your favourite personally and.

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Well, that's one question.

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Maybe a slightly separate question is which one do you think will stand the test of time and remain in the Persian poet at Canon?

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You know, one hundred years from today, perhaps those two names will be different, but perhaps they'll be the same.

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Yeah. I think if I want to choose one. What will be tolerance?

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I was on the. Not just because she's the only woman pull it,

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but because I think her politics is extremely fascinating and interesting and unique in many ways compared to other poets of this tradition.

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She has a very interesting life and very interesting crown.

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And, you know, her shift towards the Islamic revolutionary ideology is a mystery to many of her close friends.

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She did an MFA in literature at the University of Iowa, travelled outside Iran, read literate work literature pretty widely.

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She was a bilingual poet. She published in both Persian and English.

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She, in fact, has a collection which I briefly address in the book, introduce in the first chapter of the book called Red Umbrella.

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I have a couple of favourites, but I would say this is my most favourite collection of hers.

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13 poems only. And they're published in English University of Still IVI 1969.

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Extremely fascinating poetry.

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Her relationship with the war on, I have to say, is also as a scholar who was direct and engaged with the texts of the text as a form of poetry.

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Her relationship with the Koranic text is also very interesting to me.

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She also taught in universities. So she was a poet, scholar very early on after the revolution.

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In fact, her promotion to become a professor at the university during those extensive purges itself is an interesting dichotomy, I think.

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So, yeah. For those reasons, I for the sake of her poetry.

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I think poetry is very interesting in terms of the avant garde politics and language and imagery that she uses.

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She doesn't exactly fit this category up a bit as much as I really dislike this word Islamist.

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A female poet. She doesn't really fit that category.

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If you read the variety of her works before and after the revolution, and I think she would be the one who would definitely remain.

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Her name was on it. Milani has written about her, in fact, very beautifully.

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And another poet, which I don't think that's as much as sort of a Sarposa there.

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But I've been really popular amongst the mass.

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You know, you see it being quoted quite often on Twitter on different occasions.

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Some people don't even know whose poetry is this. But people, right?

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Wrong name on their signature at this point, for example, belongs to such and such.

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But it doesn't. But it shows that, you know, the ports you have.

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Has its own journey after the poet writes it, no matter who wrote it.

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If it speaks to people, it travels. Is Saddam important?

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He's interesting in the sense that he really was one of the really maybe the only

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point of this cannon that managed to write fresh and contemporary in a true sense,

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allowance. He really revived that tradition after the revolution.

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And, you know, he's he's shift on his disillusionment.

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I think makes him a very interesting case, although he never really gave up on his ideology altogether.

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He always remained loyal to his his beliefs.

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But I think the fact that he experienced the different forms, including Vidal, makes him an interesting poet.

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And, you know, poets such as seeming a bit of a Honi also praised his poetry.

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But if I want to choose one between the two, the band definitely will be taught herself.

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For Tim, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you.

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I've been speaking with author for two missions about her book, A Revolution in Rhyme Poetic Cooption Under the Islamic Republic.

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And this has been Middle East centre book talk. Thank you for listening and goodbye from Oxford.