Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – President Biden on Thursday expressed the expectation that the vaccination of the US population will have proceeded to the extent by July 4 that we can look forward to small gatherings of friends and family then. The calculation is that when 70% of the population is inoculated, the virus will […]
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poetry
Poet Amanda Gorman’s take on love as legacy points to youth’s power to shape future generations
By Heather Lawford, Heather L. Ramey and Jessica Riddell | – National youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman’s recitation of “The Hill We Climb,” at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration in the United States captured the attention of a nation and people globally. Gorman highlighted the power of poets in our current sociopolitical context to speak unique […]
The Hill we Climb: Amanda Gorman’s Inauguration Poem
Amanda Gorman | – ( Buy her forthcoming poetry collection via Penguin Random House.) The Hill We Climb When day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry, a sea we must wade We’ve braved the belly of the beast We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always […]
New Year Bliss in Persian Poetry: the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – After the dark year of 2020, I thought it might be nice to talk about poetry and rebirth today. The quatrains or Rubaiyat attributed to the medieval astronomer Omar Khayyam (d. 1131), four-line Persian poems, are often about renewal, and some make special mention of New Year’s Day (Now-Ruz in […]
An Evening with Juan Cole on the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam at Nicola’s/ Facebook
Nicola’s Books, Ann Arbor: An Evening with Juan Cole Tuesday, Oct 27 2020 – 7:00 pm ET Our friend Juan Cole is joining us on Facebook LIVE to discuss his new book The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam A New Translation from the Persian. A Q+A will follow. ABOUT THE BOOK: A repository of subversive, joyous […]
More Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: ‘With soul afire, words flowing like a sea’
In 1882 Edward Henry Whinfield (d. 1922) brought out a bilingual Persian and English edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, based on eight medieval manuscripts. It is really his own selection, since he admits he played down the wine poetry (!), and several of his manuscripts are late and Indian. Whinfield did not know […]
In our Era of Plague and Depression, Ecstasy: Juan Cole on the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam for NIAC (Video):
Juan Cole is interviewed by Myriam Sabbaghi of the National Iranian American Council: “We are living in an era of plague, economic depression, and civil unrest. We worry about our loved ones every day as tensions between the US and Iran increase, and coronavirus magnifies the impacts of US sanctions. In this context, what are […]
A Drunken Nightingale: Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Honolulu’s Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art
Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design | Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art |- Here is a short video made while I was Scholar-in Residence at Shangri La in Honolulu in December of 2016. The grounds are the former mansion and guest house of the billionaire art collector Doris Duke, who filled […]
Don’t Hesitate to Raise a wine Glass High: Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
For the earliest collection of verse attributed to Omar Khayyam see my just-published The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation from the Persian (NB: the poem above isn’t in this collection– there are lots of such anthologies, and Whinfield favored the late Indian manuscripts.) Here is what novelist Michael Chabon said about my new […]
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