The Book of Unsay
March 2017
Brisbane, Australia - The Book of Unsay is an experimental prose poetry book by Salim Ghazi Saeedi. Philosophical and idealistic in sermon-like tone with hermetic influences, the book is filled with denial outcries of word and reason - the consensus values. An approach that could be natural for an artist grown up in Iran, in a mishmash of paradoxical values and culture; the Silk Road where traditional customs and ancient history collide with individualist modern era. Meanwhile this is a poetry coming from an artist whose repertoire weighs more in instrumental music realm – essentially word-alien. As Salim puts it, “my mind is not designed word-oriented. I intuit, improvise and erotize concepts better than understanding them.”
Salim Ghazi Saeedi was born in 1981 in Tehran, Iran. In post Iran-Iraq war times, artistic atmosphere was limited and made him isolated from artistic currents. So everything he came up with from music composition to poetry are results of his self-exploration. Salim began writing poetry at age 28 and published Poetry Collection (in Persian) (2013), the same book translated in English entitled The Book of Unsay (2017) and The Holy Book of Anthropolatry (in Persian) (2017).
The Book of Unsay was written originally in Persian while he was living in Tehran. It comes in different sections reflecting different time periods of his life. He says: “I wrote some poems in Stuffings and Wanebook sections when I was ill. Those are actually addressed to myself and their goal, self-treatment. If you found me in the moments of writing them, you could have been assured of two things: I felt very bad and I became well very soon“, Salim says.
Salim’s study
material included modern Persian novelists but the only
major poetry he studied was Friedrich Nietzsche’s.
“Nietzsche could’ve been my only influence as I literally
did not study any other poetry. Except I recently felt a
strong affinity with William Butler Yeats. Maybe I can
mention him as a future influence!” The book being
originally in Persian, the writer confronted an issue of
gender-neutrality in translating and rewriting the book
into English. Salim says: “Persian is a gender-neutral
language. So in translation I decided to hire Michael
Slovak’s gender-natural pronoun convention as I felt it
suited my poetry tone the best.”
Salim explains his writing process this way: ”To me, poetry writing comes from moments of revelation and specific states of mind. At some moments, that I could be walking or even driving, I feel a bright and shapeless raw material in the aura around my head. That means ready-to-be-born ideas are there but until I don't start writing or talking I don't know what they are. Maybe those are the times that intuition doors are opened as in music improvisation. This may explain the reason each dozen of my poems are dated the same.”
Salim Ghazi Saeedi currently lives in Brisbane, Australia www.salim.world
The Book of Unsay is available for ordering in paper format at: http://www.lulu.com/shop/salim-ghazi-saeedi/the-book-of-unsay/paperback/product-23108749.html and in ebook format at: http://www.lulu.com/shop/salim-ghazi-saeedi/the-book-of-unsay/ebook/product-23127684.html
A few poems excerpts from The Book of Unsay follow:
***
flights
run away!
do not think that only vaults need escape.
run away from heavens no matter how big and appealing they
are.
refuse captivity!
the king of the bad
in my state,
the good slaughter the bad.
and in my childhood dreams I’ve always been the king;
the king of the bad.
magnum arcanum
imagine,
beyond reality,
thousand times more impossible than
reality...
so that the little portion that will be
realized naturally by chance,
would be bigger than your wish.
one
every desire is at orgasm only once.
________________________
Salim Ghazi Saeedi, is a progressive rock composer and experimental writer. He published 6 instrumental albums between 2006 and 2017 and critics classified them in Avant Prog and Rock in Opposition genres. A poetry collection and The Holy Book of Anthropolatry are among his book publications. www.salim.world
Vist this page for Persian version of The Book of Unsay.