Stanford Humanities Center
Armen Davoudian is the author of the poetry collection The Palace of Forty Pillars (Tin House, U.S.; Corsair, UK) and the translator, from Persian, of Hopscotch by Fatemeh Shams (Ugly Duckling Presse, U.S.; Falscrhum, Germany). He grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.
SHC Project
Metanoia: How Poems Change Their Minds
Davoudian's project tackles the prevalent assumption that poets should discover new ideas rather than repeat old ones—that they should think in verse rather than versify pre-conceived thoughts. It does so by examining how several 20th-century poets deploy the rhetorical device of metanoia (from Greek for "changing one's mind"): instances where a writer, reacting to his or her own words, corrects what has just been said, rather than simply revising it out. Mining the etymology of correction (from rectus, straight), he argues that metanoia sponsors a particularly indirect manner, a manner associated with another antonym of “straight,” queer.
