Further Notes on Turkish Poetry

In an earlier post (here) I mentioned Murat Nemet-Nejat’s 2004 volume Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (Talisman, 2004).

There is an interview with Nemet-Nejat in Jacket 37:

EDA, Turkish Poetry, and the Vicissitudes of Translation

Among other items of considerable interest, we find this:

"My relation to [Jack] Spicer is not that of influence — only rarely did I take something directly from him — but of belonging to the same poetic river, sharing a correspondence, a commonality of purpose. I regard Spicer as the creator of Gnostic poetry and poetics in American literature in the 20th century. I think his calls to Mars or for a language against the grain are attempts to evoke a suppressed, forbidden language. Until the 15th century, Byzantium was the center of Gnostic practice. My EDA of “godless Sufism” is an Eastern version of the same heretical sensibility. The progress of the Turkish poetry in the EDA anthology involves an explosion of suppressed voices, those of gays, of women, of social and ethnic outcasts."

Spicer, a close friend of Robert Duncan & Robin Blaser, has left a body of work recently published as My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer.

Also see Turkish Poetry in Translation.

Calligraphy: Mehmet Sefik Bey. Piece of a poem, arranged in the form of a flower.