Ali Alzadeh
Ali Alizadeh is an award-winning Iranian-born Australian
poet. He migrated to Australia after living through
the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, and is
a writer of poetry, criticism and plays. The major
themes of his works are history, dissent and the dilemmas
of religion and spirituality. He holds a PhD in writing
from Deakin University Melbourne, and this is his second
book. He is currently living and teaching writing in
China.
On Contemporary Poetry in Iran
The aesthetics and politics of contemporary Iranian
poetry were transformed by the collapse of the Shah’s
regime. Prior to that point almost all poets — modernists
and traditionalists, secularists and Islamists, socialists
and nationalists — had joined the revolution
against the unpopular US-backed monarchy. With the
creation of the Islamic Republic in 1979, however,
this unity disintegrated almost immediately, with one
result being the diversity of discourses and the urgency
and vibrancy found in much of today’s Iranian
poetry.
The initial bifurcation occurred between the supporters
of the Ayatollah (such as the traditionalist Shahriar)
and the progressive left (such as the modernist Ahmad
Shamlu). This chasm emerged in the works of feminist
poets as well; Tahereh Saffarzadeh, for example, reinvented
herself as an anti-Western Muslim, while Partow Nooriala
migrated to the United States after her feminist publishing
house was shut down by the regime. More recently, in
a graphic demonstration of the regime’s attitude
towards anti-Islamist poets, the Nobel Prize for Literature
favourite, Simin Behbahani, was assaulted by the Revolutionary
Guards during an International Women’s Day rally
in Tehran.
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Artwork © Stephen Kinsella
This is not to suggest that there are only two kinds
of poetry being produced in Iran and in the ever-widening
Iranian diasporas, one that is pro-Islamic Republic,
one that is opposed to it. There actually exists no
unity or uniformity among the verse being produced
in what is sometimes naively seen as a homogenously ‘Islamic’ or ‘radical’ society.
Furthermore, with the introduction and rapid proliferation
of the Internet, the country’s younger poets
have forged new approaches beyond the established ideological
or artistic blocs of the past. The grand narratives
of Iranian culture — Persian nationalism, Islam,
Sufism, patriarchy, anti-Imperialism, etc — may
persist; but contemporary Iranian poetry is characterised
by disagreements, dissent, and resistance.
See Simin
Behbahani 
See Alireza Behnam
See Tahereh Saffarzadeh
© 2007
Salt Publishing Limited 
