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Coleman
Barks |
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Born
and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and educated at the University of
North Carolina and the University of California at Berkeley, Barks taught
poetry and creative writing at the University of Georgia for thirty years.
He is the author of numerous Rumi translations and has been a student of
Sufism since 1977. His work with Rumi was the subject of an hour-long
segment in Bill Moyers's Language of Life series on PBS, and he is a
featured poet and translator in Bill Moyers's poetry special, "Fooling
with Words." |
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Coleman recording poetry in Connecticut for RANT, RAVE and RIFF |
Coleman
Barks’ versions of Rumi have proved
to be remarkably popular making
Rumi into one of America’s best selling poets. Many consider that this
unprecedented interest in the poetry of Rumi is primarily due to Barks’
anthology “The
Essential Rumi”. A selection of the Rumi translations appears in
the prestigious 7th edition of the edition of the Norton Anthology of World
Masterpieces.
Coleman
Barks is also 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”
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Coleman
Barks with sound engineer Carmine Moffa and Producer/Director D J
Kadagian |
"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."
“One of the greatest pieces of good luck that has
happened recently in American poetry is Coleman Barks' agreement to translate
poem after poem of Rumi….Coleman’s exquisite sensitivity to the flavor and turns
of ordinary American speech has produced marvelous lines, full of flavor and
Sufi humor, as well as the intimacy that is carried inside American speech at
its best.” —Robert
Bly
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