Properties of Poetic Form in Reza Baraheni’s Accosting the Butterflies

In Persian poetry, the issue of form has gone through so many alterations. In the last decades and after the emergence of Modern Persian poetry, these formal changes have been more significant and controversial. One of the latest noteworthy theories in Persian contemporary poetry has been proposed by Reza Baraheni in Accosting the Butterflies. In the latter and particularly in the theoretical section titled “Why I Am No Longer a Nimaie Poet?” the author claims that Modern Persian poetry has been beset with a crisis and attempts to find a solution for the mentioned conflict by discussing the flaws and impasses in Persian free verse and blank verse poems. In this book, poems and theories are inspired by postmodernism and other western literary theories such as formalism and deconstruction, and the ideas of the kind “languagality”, “polyphonic poetry”, adoption of sound and breath, and “narrative interruption” are introduced to Persian poetry for the first time. By reviewing Barahani’s poetic form in various periods of his career and studying the impacts of postmodernism on his ideas, the present paper aims to analyze Baraheni’s latest theories on poetic form, and represent a novel classification for properties of form in Accosting the Butterflies.