When did you first publish poetry?

In 1965, when I was 13, “Jong”, a prestigeous literary journal, published two of my poems in Isfahan, Iran.

Who were your influences?

First and foremost, Walt Whitman. When I was 11, two bi-lingual collections of poetry by Walt Whitman and Robert Frost were published in Iran. I did not like Frost’s book because the Persian translator had composed it in meter and ruined the English poetry. But Whitman’s Leaves of Grass  was translated uin free verse and had kept the free spirit of the original. One of my first poems was written after Whitman’s “A Song of Myself.” Among modernist Iranian poets, I loved Nima Yushij’s nature poetry, Ahmad Shamlu’s protest and love poems, Forough Farokhzad’s feminine sensitivity and Sohrab Sepehri’s nature-mystic poetry. Among Persian classics, I read Ferdowsi’s epics, Rumi’s mystical poetry, Sa’di’s humanistic verse and prose, Hafez’ lyrics, and Nezami’s narrative romances. Many of these works are available today in English.

Why were you called the Rimbaud of Persian poetry?

Like Arthur Rimbaud. I started very early. My poems were published in prestigious literary magazine like “Arash” next to poems of Forough Farokhzad. Like Rimbaud, who became involved in the 1871 Paris commune uprising, I was active in the 1979 Revolution against the monarchy in Iran. After its consolidation, the new theocratic regime killed many secular revolutionaries, including my wife Ezzat and my brother Sa’id.  I fled Iran and finally settled in Los Angeles in 1984.