“EVERY POET sees the world through a unique lens; hears the world through their own exceptional ear.”
– Jessica Wilkinson and Ali Alizadeh, The Realpoetik Manifesto 2012
Poetry has been composed as oral storytelling, as lyrics or songs and as an aid to memory from as far back as the Epic of Gilgamesh, from the 3rd millennium BC in Sumer. As Robert Frost puts it, ‘A poem begins with a lump in the throat, a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where the emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words.’
Ali Alizadeh was a PhD student at Deakin (completing an epic poem on Joan of Arc), and he is steeped in the narrative and Sufi poetic traditions of his childhood homeland, Persia. Check out his website http://alializadeh.wordpress.com/ to review the diversity of his writings. And you can listen to an interview on Radio National’s Poetica in 2013: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/poetica/ali-alizardeh/5026248
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