Biography of Qeysar Aminpour and An Introduction to His Poems

Qeysar Aminpour was born on April 23, 1959 in Gotvand, a village near Dezful. He completed his primary and secondary educations in Gotvand and Dezful respectively. Although in 1979, Aminpour was admitted to University of Tehran to study veterinary medicine but later on he withdrew from the university. He was one of the poets who contributed to the formation and continuation of the activities of the poetry unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Centre for Art (Hozeh-ye Honari) until 1990. During this period, he worked as the editor-in-chief of the magazine Soroush and published his first collection of poems in 1985. His first collection entitled “In the Alley of Sunshine” was a selection of quatrains. Then, the collection of Aminpour’s poems “Morning Breath” was released which included a number of his lyric poems and prose poems.

In 1985, Aminpour began studying history at the University of Tehran; But this major also did not satisfy him and so he left the university. However, in the same year, again he got admitted to another university to study Persian language and literature. Finally, he completed his doctoral dissertation entitled “Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary Poetry” under the supervision of Mr. Shafiei Kadkani thereby receiving a PhD.

Qeysar Aminpour started teaching at al-Zahra University in 1989 and then in 1991, he continued his teaching career at the University of Tehran. In 1989, he won the Nima Youshij Award for Poetry, known as the “Amin Crystal Bird,” and in 2003, he was elected as a permanent member of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature.

Witnessing the bombing of his hometown, Dezful, during the Iran-Iraq war Qeysar Aminpour was a poet who experienced the war. “Aminpour’s views and ideas about war were rooted in his personal experience of the Iran-Iraq war since, along with other poets, he had gone to the front and engaged in the war. ‘A Poem for War’ is one of his most famous poems devoted to the Sacred Defence.”

“In the Alley of Sunshine,” “Morning Breath,” “Storm in Parentheses,” “Noon of the Tenth Day,” “Like a Fountain,” “Like a Creek,” “Flying Without Wings,” “Sudden Mirrors,” “According to the Swallow,” “Selected Poems,” “All Flowers are Sunflowers,” “Tradition and Innovation in Contemporary Poetry,” and “Poetry and Childhood” are among other works of this poet and lecturer.

Aminpour has composed the most popular tasnifs and songs. The collection “Nilofaraneh” based on which Alireza Eftekhari released an album, is one of the most influential poems of Qeysar Aminpour. Also, “The Grammar of Love” was Aminpour’s last poetry book, which was published in the summer of 2007 in Tehran.

In 1999, a severe car accident caused serious damages to Aminpour’s kidneys and heart thereby forcing him to undergo heart surgery and have a kidney transplant; Eventually, on 31 October 2007, he passed away.

It is worth mentioning that Qeysar Aminpour is one of the advocators, and somehow, founders of poetry devoted to the Islamic Revolution.

The Global Messages of Qeysar Aminpour

Some poems of Qeysar Aminpour that contain universal messages and themes are as follows:

- A Plan for Peace (1)

- A Plan for Peace (2)

- A Plan for Peace (3)

-Ideal (2)

-Ideal (3)

-The Window

- The Lips of Death

- The Palestine Long Poem

- According to the Swallow

There are implicit and explicit messages in these poems, the most important of which are mentioned below:

Peace and Friendship

Among the poems mentioned, Qeysar Aminpour called three of his poems “A Plan for Peace” and this indicates that he conveys the message of peace and reconciliation not only to the people of his country but also to the world. For example, in “A Plan for Peace (3)” he says:

The martyr who was lying on the soil
Was putting his fingertip in blood and writing
Two or three letters on the stone
In the hope for the real victory
Not in war
But, on war!
Also, in a poem called “A Song for Reconciliation” which is embedded in the collection of poems “According to the Swallow,” Aminpour conveys the message of peace and stopping the war to the world as follows:

The news coming from the other side is all green

The news of this side is all red and yellow
On the other side, there is only the colour of peace
Here we only see the colour of deceit and pain
Isn’t there a place for you
In this big sky and earth?
The whole earth is your place of movement
Is it still too small for you?

Not only the earth, but the sky is also yours
Yet, still, you need a sword to wage war?

Freedom

In the poems entitled “Ideal (2)” and “Ideal (3),” Aminpour says:

The bird
Sitting on the wall
Holding a cage with the beak

Behind the bar
On the floor of the prison
Piles of chains

Elsewhere, he talks about his desire for the liberation of Palestine:

At the end of the alley of night, under the window
A swan sits staring at the window
On this side of the window, there is the whimper of rain and the rage of wind
On the other side, there is the sob of the window
Insisting behind the window of talk is enough
Let’s change the window
So that to design a new window
Now there is the wall regretting the image of the window

In such poems, the poet’s desire for “freedom” is symbolically expressed.

 

The Call for Helping the Palestinian People and Their Liberation

In the poem “The Long Palestine Poem,” Aminpour symbolically likens Palestine and Israel to a pigeon and a vulture respectively. Addressing all the people, he says:

That pigeon was one of our friends

The colour of his wings was familiar to us
Now that bird is sad and lonely
And again he has been displaced
The pigeon who is my friend and yours
He is tired but still waiting for me and you
We are the birds of the plain of pain
we are familiar with each other’s sorrow
We are not afraid of bloody clutches
We are not afraid of bloody feathers
Together with our wings
We raise up to the sky

So that to ask the storm
And ask the martyrs about the right path
Together we would fly
And spread across the sky
A crown of light is on our heads
The sun is under our feathers
Until we take back that house
Take the nest back from the vulture
We would be like a rainstorm
And we will plant flowers all over the house.

Reference: Quarterly Journal of Strategic Public Policy Studies. Volume 4, number 10, Spring 2013, pages 87-102

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