The Scorned Avant Garde: Reconsidering Tundar Kiya and the Emergence of Iranian Postmodern Poetry

Perhaps no Iranian poet has been as universally unloved as Shams al-Din (Partow) Tundar Kiya (1909-1987). Many scholars and poets have rightly criticized Tundar Kiya for his rash boasting and bullying claims as well as for his lack of mastery of the Persian language. In his recent book Bā Čerāq va Āyinah (“With Light and Mirror”), Dr. Shafie Kadkani writes that his essay on Tundar Kiya’s “šāhīn” was written to critique the “hundreds of delusional pretensions” of avant-garde poets and their literary schools and manifestos. In my presentation, I intend to show that the dismissal of Tundar Kiya’s work -- and the works of postmodern poets -- is due in part to misreading and unwarranted expectation. We have to consider different criteria when evaluating writers like Tundar Kiya, just as one uses different critical measures for evaluating the Dadaists than for judging an early modernist artist like Édouard Manet. Using such works as Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde, I will distinguish avant-garde poets like Tundar Kiya -- who attacked the literary institutions and broke with the traditional distinction between high and low art -- from modernist poets like Nima, who aimed to radically reform and modernize Persian poetry. If, like Jean-François Lyotard, we view postmodernism as an outgrowth of the avant-garde, we might come to regard Tundar Kiya as a forebear of Iranian postmodern poetry. Tundar Kiya’s Nahib-e Jonbeš-e Adabi – Šāhīn (“Dread of the Literary Movement: Shahin”) -- with its formal and structural innovation in a hybrid, expansive text -- can be seen as a key early postmodern work. To show his link with current postmodern poetry, I will briefly introduce three of the most innovative neo-avant-garde poets: Mohammad Ramezani-Farkhani (b. 1970), the subject of issue 6 of the journal Hekāyat šeʿr, which focuses on the young poets of the revolution; Mohammad Azarm (b. 1971), critic and a leading postmodern poet; and poet pen-named Anima Ehteyat (b. 1980), the winner of Karnameh Poetry Prize and the runner-up for Qeysar Aminpour Prize for free-verse poetry. The more sophisticated works by these poets from different socio-political circles illustrate how the early immature experimentations of poets like Tundar Kiya have flourished and advanced in recent Persian poetry.