Firouzeh Fozouni
Poet, Stone Sculpture
Iran

Firouzeh Fozouni (Saghi)
Born in 1964, Langroud, Guilan Province

Associated (senior) member of Music Center
Member of Contemporary Poetry Association
Member of Guilan Society
Member of Artistic Division (Encyclopedia of Contemporary Celebrities of Iran)
Student of music at Scientific-Operational Comprehensive University of Iran (University of Music)

I started my first artistic task from childhood with ballet, which I continued for some years. I started music by playing guitar and continued with piano and eventually chose sitar as my favorite musical instrument. 

My artistic activities are briefly listed as follow:

1- completing the advanced course of singing classification with excellent masters: 
- Five years in the class of master Sadigh Taarif singing master Davami’s classification.
- Two years in the class of master Mohsen Karamati singing classification of masters Shajarian, Eqbal and Taherzadeh etc).

2- Completing setar instrumental classification (Mirza Abdollah) and attending its course with excellent masters. I started my task with Mrs. Roohangiz Towfigh and continued with other masters such as master Bassam, Masoud Shoari and master Ganjei.

3- Poetry, writing songs and ballads:
I have published a book of poetry called: “ Sky with color of soil, sea with color of blood”. I have a book called “ A square of life” that is being published and another two books ready to be published.

4- Sculpture: I make sculpture and relief with stones and held an exhibition in April 2004. I will have another exhibition in January 2005.

5- My poetry has been published in newspapers and magazines of Iran and other countries.


Books
The Azure, The Khaki, The Sea, The Purple Blood
Collection of Poems/Kavir Pub./2002/184 pages/Persian language/
These poems are mostly social poems; the book includes 9 quatrains, 21 other classics and 77 modern poems.

A Square of Life
Collection of Poems/Kavir Pub./ coming 2005/144 pages/Persian language/
These poems are mostly social poems, including classic and modern poetries.

A Critic by Kiumars Monshi Zadeh
Firouzeh Fozouni, (pen named Saghi) is a painter poetess and poetess painter, who paints in her poetry and versifies in her paintings. Leonardo da Vinci has once said that painting is silent poetry but Firouzeh’s paintings cries out poetry. A wild poetry that sometimes shakes its crine like a fierce lion and a river of coffee with milk and sometimes whispers like a blue-rubiginous stream. Colorful whispers in green, red, violet, yellow, blue and saffron colors. These colors, in her poetry, could be named as stony poetry and have not been inspired by anyone or any school. As though this has only happened once in the world of poetry-painting or painting-poetry, an incident that perhaps could have happened if it was going to happen but this has fortunately has happened in Iran by an Iranian that is not the same as anything else since it is an incident that only happens once.

These silent stones that cry out these colorful cries are saying things in silence that are not utter able, they spout from the depth of entity and cry out on a canvas that is not like any other canvas (not even and not smooth). As though our painter breaks her relation with universe to create a new world and a global work that is neither poetry nor painting or sculpture but it is poetry as well as painting and sculpture just like coffee with milk that is neither milk nor coffee but it is milk and coffee mixed with together in such way that it is impossible to separate a drop of coffee from milk or vice versa.

Amalgamation of these three arts together(as art critics put it) is something that has not often happened. Perhaps it was better if paintings were composed in larger dimensions since they could be beautiful and massive just like Sphinx statute that is mostly famed for its dimensions. If we convert acoustic waves to optic waves, we can compose colorful music just like that if we convert optical waves to acoustic waves, acoustic painting could be developed (of course this is a theory that could turn to a thesis and deaf people could see the sun flower painting of Vincent Van Gogh with their ears and blind people could hear the moonlight sonata of Beethoven with their eyes). It seams that our painter has done it without knowing the theory as her visual works whisper melodic poetry and sometimes cry out a noisy epic that mixes the hearing and visual senses together just like the smell of tincture of iodine from one of the poetries of Garcia Lorca.

Despite her white look at life, her inner look is so black that reminds us of thousands crows flying out from her eyes and why should we not say that these works that throw us into the depth of beauty and enjoyment have been inspired by suffering and sorrow that are carrying so much tumult on their shoulders.

Shakespeare has said, “ Idiots eat bread from their father’s furnace”. One who has no sorrow has no art. She is full of sorrow; her sorrow is sorrow of a sad nation who lives in silence and sadness. As though they live to be sad since the life of Iranians is symphony of sadness and it has never been futile that our painter poetess pours all the sadness and tumults of a nation into our eyes in her three-dimensional paintings. Our painter writes poetry, plays sitar, sings and has lost all her life in art, as though she does not know that poetry and life are two playful rabbits who run in opposite directions and if we want to catch one of them, we have not caught neither of them. She has grabbed art with her both hands to loose the life with two hands. She has not felt anything else but suffering from life but she seams so stubborn that if she was going to be born once again, she will live like this again and alas that someone is so frenzied.

French people say “ someone who loves is twenty years old as long as he loves” and our painter who is wholeheartedly overflowing with love, is entangled with an everlasting youthfulness that fledges her energies to be sometimes like a bubble just like Small Prince and sometimes like Dr. Jackil and Mr. Hide who is sometimes full of honesty and sometimes overflowing with wickedness (a double personality who demonstrates the softness of water from stone to us and sometimes pours fire into our eyes from softness of blue color since the color that blazes in her eyes in that moment is not like any other color).

"A Glance at the Poetry of Firouzeh Fozouni", by Asadollah Amrai
Wandering about in libraries and bookshops is sometimes an opportunity to find a book that perhaps cannot be seen in normal circumstances. Poets that often hazard their lives to compose poetry or publish a collection. A poet should live the moments of his country’s culture in order to reach riches in language. One of these collections is collection of poetries by Firouzeh Fozouni who uses Saghi as her pen name. Title of her new collection is “ Sky with color of soil, sea with color of blood” that has been published by Kavir (one of the reputable publishers of our country) in 3000 copies.

Fozouni has experimented white poetry, Lyrics and Quatrains in this collection and does not intend to challenge that she is positioned at a higher level than others.

There is no need to go through such extensive discussion and exercise all these formalities to become a human being. Would it make any difference if you accomplish perfection using new vocabulary or using vocabulary of thousand years ago? When we become a human being, we would smell all pleasant adores.

The movement of poetic language of Fozouni is soft and calm and sometimes resembles the echo of stream that comes into the surface from the fringe and turns to a harsh language as though another season has emerged.

Sometimes it has an ambiguous language when it intends to communicate with surrounding universe and sometimes it cannot be perceived, nipped and left behind.

[He ruthlessly even did not see the legible lines of: “brother, I beg you to slow down” in front of his eyes to the end.

Nevertheless, this collection is worthy of reading.



Caroun Photo Club (CPC)