An analysis of post-modern tendencies in Reza Baraheni’s “Daf

Reza Baraheni’s “Daf” – the first in his collection of poems, Addressing Butterflies</em> – represents a part of recent challenges in Persian modern poetry, and this research is to identify and analyze the post-modern elements of it. Due to the great variety of themes and definitions of post-modernism, the writers have tried to analyze and interpret Baraheni’s poem based on the poetics of one of the trends in American post-modern poetry, i.e. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poem, and theories of Charles Bernstein in order to have applied a more objective method. The study reveals that “Daf” is the textual performance of going beyond the history of Persian poetry to make it free from any limitations. The poet intends to reflect the meaning – or rather the sense of meaning – through producing the sound of daf, and although a number of its lines seem to be far from conveying any meaning, they are not as equal as being nonsense; rather they separate themselves from an exact and accepted meaning. On the other hand, “Daf” is not a narrative poem, for every single line of it opens a new horizon for the readers, making it difficult to guess what would be the next line and where it will end. Altogether, this paper admits and approves some post-modern elements in “Daf”, despite the fact that it can’t be emphatically considered as a post-modern piece of poetry, and classifying it under the category of post-modern poetry is in doubt and contrary to the intellectual exercises and leftist ideas of its composer.