New Poetry as Event: A Reflection on the Poetic Views of Morad Farhadpour

The present study, employing a descriptive-analytical method, examines Farhadpour’s perspective, influenced by Alain Badiou, which considers new poetry as an event in the contemporary history of Iran. This signifies the concrete, embodied translation of Rimbaud’s famous phrase in the context of contemporary Iranian literature: “absolutely modern being”; and Nima Yushij is the originator of such an event. A key characteristic of an event is its unpredictability. However, this does not imply that it arises from nothing. Rather, in a dialectical encounter with tradition, a rupture occurs in our ordinary understanding of the existing state (classical poetry), while simultaneously its existence and emergence are profoundly denied by that state. Accordingly, Nima and his followers (Shamlou, Forough, Rouyaee, etc.) are considered the subjects of this event, who have, in a way, pursued the logic of that rupture. This means that the subjects of the event have affirmatively continued the internal logic of the event’s initial negation, and have become subjects because of their loyalty to that logic, thereby creating new movements. Nevertheless, Farhadpour believes that after Nima and Shamlou, we have not witnessed any new occurrences in the realm of contemporary poetry, and most poetry collections have been reduced to the personal self and the search for inner existential truth. The echo of those initial ruptures and breaks in the event called new poetry is rarely heard. In the genealogy of the crisis of poetry, he attributes the root of such absence and crisis to both the distancing of the 1979 Revolution from its emancipatory politics and the unfamiliarity of our poets and critics with the historical experience of modern poetry, in addition to the decorative and theatrical aspect of literary criticism.