Alireza Roshan was born in Tehran in 1977, where he worked as a journalist, heading the Books Desk at Iran’s most popular reformist daily newspaper. Around 2008, he began publishing his poetry daily online, on sites such as Google Reader, Google+, and Facebook. In so doing, he gained fame as “a poet without a book,” yet he’d deny claims to being a precursor of Instapoetry.
Translation from Persian by Erfan Mojib and Gary Gach
Time is written into the White Shaman mural … these murals are texts, analogous to the books once housed in the Library of Alexandria. — Carolyn Boyd, quoted by Eric A. Powell, in Archaeology (November/December 2017)
[N.B. Amish Trivedi has for some time been a close associate at Poems and Poetics, some of his earlier work having appeared in the postings of February 25, 2011, October 7, 2012, August 2, 2013, June 16, 2016, and July 5, 2018. He recently received a PhD from Illinois State University with a dissertation titled “A Wing in a Crumbling Mansion: Poetry in the Post-Academy.”]
[NB: Inagaki Taruho (1900–1977) was a real modernist dandy who started writing wild, experimental, whimsical stories in the 1920s that blur the boundaries of prose and poetry. Although Taruho did not write what one traditionally thinks about when one imagines “poetry,” his short-short stories are sometimes classified as poetry. His most famous collection is called 1001 Second Stories, which is a collection of funny, little contes that describe the surreal hijinks one might find in the earliest animation that was, not coincidentally, being produced right around the same time. (JA)]
Poems and poetics