Coleman Barks Reads Rumi, WITH
BILL MOYERS Coleman Barks on NOW
WITH BILL MOYERS
Coleman Barks, with the Paul Winter consort, and three poems from Rumi.
More about Rumi
Together Bly and Barks visited the tomb ofHafez
(Hafiz), a revered poet of the 14th century,
in the southern Iranian city of Shiraz. Bly says of the visit: "We
got up in the morning and we went to the grave. And about eight o'clock
in the morning, you know, children started to come. Maybe third grade
children. And they stood around the little tomb and sang a poem of Hafez's.
Really charming. And then they went away, and now some fifth graders
came. And they stood around the tomb and sang a poem of Hafez. Of course,
every poem of Hafez is connected with a tune, so you teach the children
the tune, and then they have the poem. So I said to myself, "Isn't
that unbelievable? And why don't we do that? Why don't we go to the
grave of Walt Whitman and have children come there?"
Coleman Barks Bio
Coleman Barks was born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and went
to school at the University of North Carolina and the University of
California, Berkeley. He taught poetry and creative writing at the University
of Georgia for thirty years.
In 1976 fellow poet Robert Bly showed Coleman Barks some
scholarly translations of the great Sufi poet Rumi. Bly
suggested to Barks that he make a more modern poetic translation, as
Bly recalls saying to Barks “Release these (poems) from their scholarly
cages”
Thus with the encouragement of Bly, Bark sought to recast
these Rumi poems in a more modern version. Barks does not seek to replicate
the rhyme and rhythm of the original Persian. Instead he prefers to
render the essence of the poems into free verse. In making these modern
versions Barks is attempting to encapsulate the spiritual insight, humor
and spirit of Rumi’s original masterpieces.
Coleman Barks is a poet in his own right. He says of his
writings. “I like translating Rumi and writing my own poems. But
in one I have to disappear- with Rumi. In the other I have to get in
the way- get my personality and my delights and my shame into the poem”
"Rumi was without boundaries. He would say that love
is the religion and the universe is the book, that experience as we’re
living it is the sacred text that we study, so that puts us all in the
same God club."
