Foregrounding in Akhavan-Sale's Poetry

Mehdi Akhavan-Sales is no doubt one of the most eminent poets of the post-Nima era. His poetry, in the words of most scholars in the Iranian contemporary literature, is a poetical and artistic blend of the Persian traditional poetry and the neo-Nimaic poetry. Akhavan-Sales is the epitome of the generation of poets who are not only committed to the society and its developments but also whose poetry enjoys a unique literary enrichment. He is, indeed, a poet who both minds the literary form and attends closely to the content of his poem. Therefore, many have tried to discover and study the various aspects of Akhavan-Sales’ literature by reading his poetry over and over. Literary criticism, which is considered to be an important field of the modern literature, comprises multiple areas. One is foregrounding, which acts as one form of reading literary works. Foregrounding is the employment of language elements in a manner in which the mode of expression draws attention and is unconventional and non-automatic, rather than automatic. This definition gives a general description of the literary criticism style. In the word of the scholars, foregrounding is realised in two ways: deviation and extra-regularity. Akhavan-Sales’ poetry is replete with both deviation and extra-regularity. Deviation normally includes the levels of phonology, lexis, syntax, and semantics; extra-regularity usually deals with the novel words. In this type of foregrounding, we impose some norms on the conventional language. The reader of this article will get familiar with some of the reasons for Akhavan’s greatness and the secret of his poem’s impressiveness.