Coleman Barks: Rumi, Grace, and Human Friendship
Sounds True: Insights at the Edge
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The Freedom of a Rumi Poem
You didn't even hear Rumi's name till you were in your late thirties. It was at a Robert Blye conference where he thought it would be a great afternoon writing exercise to take a Rumi poem in a scholarly translation and reframe phrase into free verse. And so we did that for an afternoon, and he gave me the book. He said, these poems need to be released from the cages, meaning the cages of the scholarly language,. And I've been trying to do that now for 34 years. But it was after I got back to Athens, Georgia and got to working alone with the poems that I really felt the freedom.
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