Persian Poetry in Los Angeles: Nostalgia vs. Cultural Adaptation

Majid Naficy, Poet & Co-editor of Daftarhaye Kanoon

Majid Naficy, the Arthur Rimbaud of Persian poetry, published his first poems in Jon-e Isfahan at age thirteen. Since then, he has put out more than 20 books of poems and essays in Persian. He fled Iran in 1983, a year and a half after the execution of his wife, Ezzat in Tehran. He lives in Los Angeles with his son, Azad, where the city of Venice has engraved a fragment of his poetry on a wall in Venice beach. Majid has published two collections of poetry, "Muddy Shoes" (Beyond Baroque Books 1999) and "Father and Son" (Red Hen Press, 2003) as well as his doctoral dissertation "Modernism and Ideology in Persian Literature: A Return to Nature in the Poetry of Ninma Yushij" (University Press of America, 1997) in English."