Ali Babachahi

Ali Babachahi (, born 10 November 1942 in Bushehr, Iran) is an Iranian poet, writer, researcher, and literary critic.

Babachahi is one of Iran's most prominent postmodern writers and poets, and has published over 50 literary works in various forms.

Iranian poet and critic, Ali Babachahi, was born in 1942 in Bushehr, the southernmost port city in Iran.

A graduate of Persian Literature from Shiraz university, he has been a Sensational poet in the last three decades.

His first book in Unreliability was published in 1968.

From 1989 onward, he has been engaged in the compilation of a dictionary of Persian language at the University Publication Center and also edited Adineh monthly magazine's poetic column.

This veteran poet established his controversial book My Drizzle in 1996, that established him as a pioneer in postmodern Iranian poetry.

His essays and commentaries on "The Other Mode of Iranian Poetry" and postmodern literary views show his restless, dynamic mind.

His works and interviews have always caused discussion among critics and poets.

For ten years Babachahi was the poetry editor for Adineh, and ran a poetry workshop in Tehran.

He has already published 40 books; half are books of poems, and the other half concern poetry research, review and criticism.

He also wrote a narrative verse for youngsters.

Several of his poems have been rendered in Arabic, English, Spanish, Swedish, French and Kurdish.

Remarkably, Ali Babachahi develops book by book and his poetic stages are unpredictable, bearing a resemblance in this regard to John Ashbery, the American poet.

(Extracted from interviews)

…"One must be absolutely modern" _ this dictum of Arthur Rimbaud bears a fresh significance in every age.

Our poetry of the last decade has a kind of qualitative configuration, which I have termed "post-Nimaie poetry."

Anyway I seek a sort of different writing, and have termed all categories of different writings – "Poetry in another Mode".

In my last book, Picasso in the Waters of Persian Gulf satire, paradox and grotesque are used- e.g.: The poet says happy those born as angels, who then go and learn a bit of humanness – drive a truck and empty eyes bulged out of out town!

…I don't if I am a postmodern poet.

Anyway I don't believe in simplifying issues.

The range of postmodernism may be stretched back as far as Homer.

So a work must have postmodern demands.

You can't fashion your work after Calvino's One Winter Night A Traveler and then become a postmodern author!

My views on the situation of criticism today in Iran are elaborated in my article: “A Critique of Literary Criticism” published in Leaping Off The Line, but we certainly need more professional critics.

I don’t believe in great leaders or authority in poetry.

The age of heroism is long gone.

Influential figures like Shamlou, however, may challenge poets in other genres.

Vanguard poetry need not reject lyricism and offer just a collage of twisted nihilism.

My recent lyrical poems deviate from established conventions of our classical poetics and even “plays” with modern dominant lyricism, a play whose actors are pun, irony, paradox and grotesque, not to reject elements like lobe and tolerance but to generate a not perspective on lyricism.

New poetry de-standardizes previously valid concepts and deconstructs savior meta-narratives of heroism.

… the self referent aspect of language states that language does not only express meaning but it also makes meaning—words make forms, and poetic forms justify some sort of signification.

The more the poetic forms rely on musical potential, the more distinct literary reference becomes.

… According to Lyotar: By language games, Wittgenstein means various applications of language.

Thus poets struggle against a particular meaning dominating the society.

… I am both for and against meaning: I’m against meanings that are embedded in structures of expressions depending on a kind of power – ideological power of assimilation and familiarization of meaning.

Defying these types of meaning my poetry attains other kinds of meaning.

Standing on a pluralist and non-elitist point, I reject hierarchic viewpoint, linear narrative, and dogmas caused by binary oppositions.

Hence I write texts, a sort of writing that cherishes “differences”.

A function of postmodern poetry goes along this saying of Lyotar that we must make our knowledge deeper than what goes on in language.