Ziba Karbassi and the poetry of gasp

I am posting a short note I wrote back in February of last year mainly because I believe Karbassi is a powerful voice to consider and recognize.

During a reading in San Mateo (CA) on February 8, 2009, the London-based poet Ziba Karbassi—who has been touring California—mesmerized the audience with the depth of her understanding of poetry in general and what she refers to as the poetry of gasp in particular.

At the same time, the unsurpassed beauty of her words and the provocative and at times offensive language she is recognized for was enough to make the seemingly older and more conservative Iranian audience much nervous and the mood of the reading hall a bit tense. However, her deliverance of her own poetry sprinkled with bouts of anger at the Islamic regime of Iran on one hand and her flirtatious and sensual reading of her love poems on the other left the crowd in much admiration and respect for the young poet.

The 33-year-old poet categorizes the Persian poet Rumi as the poet of exhale while in her opinion, Rumi’s guru—Shams—is a poet of inhale as Hafiz and Khayyam are; with the same conviction, she labels herself as a poet of both conditions—inhale and exhale. A poet, she believes, is the hunter of the moments of suffocation in whose poetry all the living creatures and lifeless things are in constant love making. The poem is the result of a state of restlessness in the poet’s soul which is usually marked by heavy breathings and severe panting before and after the birth of a poem. It is in the poetry of gasp, Karbassi suggests, that we encounter eroticism in language.


Indeed
By: Ziba Karbassi
Translated from Persian by Shirindokht Nourmanesh

And you—the innocent, virtuous, and chaste ladies
with your bent necks
and your effeminate walk
with your precious thousand-year chokers of stillness,
you are indeed right,
I am a whore.
And certainly this sun too
is peeking out from underneath your skirts
here
on my paper.

© 2009