Professor R. Jahan Ramazani
Professor R. Jahan Ramazani (Col ’81), chair of the English department, edited the third edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry and co-edited the 20th-century volume of the eighth edition of The Norton Anthology of English Literature. He just published A Transnational Poetics.
What first inspired you to study literature?
I grew up hearing family members recite Persian poetry. After I graduated as an English major from U.Va. in 1981, a Rhodes scholarship took me to Oxford, where I fell in love with the Irish poet W.B. Yeats’ Collected Poems. I learned many of his poems by heart and would walk around reciting them to myself or anyone who’d listen. Their powerful rhythms lodge them deep in memory. Think of the opening line of his poem “Leda and the Swan,” which captures the force of Zeus’ sudden attack on Leda: “A sudden blow: the great wings beating still ...”
As an editor for Norton, you had to make choices about what should be included in the canon. How do you make those choices?
The choices can be excruciating, especially since including someone new means excluding someone else: The number of pages is finite. You want to bring these neglected voices into the canon? Very well, then, which ones are you going to cut out? Anthologies must exclude vastly more than they can include.
In The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, it was a pleasure to include Allen Ginsberg’s once-scandalous Beat poem “Howl;” Seamus Heaney’s elegiac sequence for his mother, “Clearances;” and Jorie Graham’s poem about JFK’s assassination, “Fission.”
The choices are partly a matter of scholarship, since you have to have a comprehensive and independent knowledge of the field if you’re going to single out some of the best works. They’re also partly a matter of administrative compromise, since you have to balance the competing claims made for different schools and aesthetics. And they’re partly a matter of gut-level instinct: The poem has to click for you. In evaluating an individual work, I ask myself whether it’s doing something inventive with the language; whether it’s imaginatively lively and metaphorically rich; and whether it’s transforming the artistic conventions it uses—or just blandly repeating them.
What neglected work would you recommend?
Everyone knows Bob Marley and the great music—reggae, calypso, ska—that’s come out of Jamaica and the Caribbean. But fewer people know the robust and funny poetry of Louise Bennett. A trickster poet, she helped to legitimize the use of Jamaican English and was beloved for her comic performances by Jamaicans and other West Indians.
What are you reading now?
I’m reading Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel of post-independence disillusionment, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. And a South African novel, the Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. In harrowing scenes of abuse and torture, it demonstrates the ethical dangers of one people’s dominance over another, any time, anywhere. I’m also reading stories from India, Vietnam, China and Japan in preparation for teaching the literature of countries we’re visiting on U.Va.’s Semester at Sea’s journey around the world. It’s fascinating to see how these contemporary writers strive to be true to their own traditions and histories while at the same time responding to the worldwide conditions of modernity.
Comments
I am from Iran. I lovvvvvvvve you and am deeply proud of you prof. hope ona day I can see you in person.
I recently bought Norton Anthology of English Literature and noticing the name “Ramazani” was like being hit by a thunderbolt. I quickly surfed the net and made sure you are an Iranian. Hope you a life replete with books and smiles.
hi
i need to contact an english literature professor .can i have your email address please?
regards
jahani
Dear Dr Ramazani,
I am working on Derek Walcott (my main focus is on Omeros). I have come up with a question. Could I possibly have your email address to discuss my question with you?
Regards,
Haleh Zar
Dear Dr Ramazani,
It was such a surprise for me when i gathered that you are an Iranian especially when you mentioned that hearing to Persion poetry recitation was your first encounter to poetry. I just wanted to say that i am really proud of you.
Best wishes,
mostafa
Dear Dr. Ramazani,
I am almost finished with The Hybrid Muse. A wonder and a joy. I am about to give a short talk at the AWP (2012) on “Crossing the Class Divide” and as part of my talk, I suggest pedagogy that includes Post Colonial studies, since it expands the idea of who one is, who one is teaching (in the class I was visiting in Taos, NM, there was a Moroccan, Vietnamese and an east German among the Pueblo native, Northern New Mexico Hispanics, and various anglos. I suggest that even if not offered as part of the curriculum, I suggest for the education of the teacher of poetry, (or anything really) to read your book, and of course Said’s, to better know how to listen, and expand the frame of the questions one asks. I am going to get all your books. Thank you so much,
Veronica Golos
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