Reading Forugh Farrokhzad’s Poems Poetically

Michael Craig Hillmann, Independent Scholar

Abstract:

“Reading Forugh Farrokhzād’s Poems Poetically,” consisting of PowerPoint slides and commentary for Zoom presentation, offers a cursory appreciation of specific features in a handful of poems. Obviously, scores of interesting and insightful articles on Farrokhzad’s poems are out there, but not many of them involve close readings of individual poems qua poetry in vacuo as sui generis texts with the purpose of showing how content, form, and aural features contribute in tandem to reader enjoyment. This paper, which tries to do that in the context of a specific sort of American formalism, treats such features as alliteration/consonance, anaphora, apostrophe, assonance, ellipsis, form and structure, imagery, incremental repetition, juxtaposition, metaphor and simile, paradox, parallel structure, personification, rhythm, stanza patterns, symbol, and tone.