Turkey: Its Geography, Its Literature, Its Recently-Anthologized Poets

(most of this post courtesy of Wikipedia)

Geography

The 8 countries that border Turkey are, clockwise: Greece, Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The bodies of water, also clockwise, starting to the south, are: the Mediterranean, the Aegean, and the Black Seas. The big West Asian peninsula that comprises most of Turkey is the Anatolian Peninsula. The small southeastern European peninsula with Istanbul at its tip is part of ancient Thrace. Because of its location at the border of two continents, Turkey touches on a wide variety of cultures, including Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Russia. More broadly, it has had a history of blending Eastern and Western cultrues. Turkey is a democratic, secular, unitary, constitutional republic whose political system was established in 1923 under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, following the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I. Politically, Turkey is becoming increasingly Westernized, being a member of NATO and lots of other Western-sounding acronymically-designated organizations, and since 2005 it's been in negotiations for full membership in the EU.

Some scholars have proposed Anatolia as the hypothetical center from which Indo-European languages originated, as it's one of the oldest continually-inhabited regions in the world, having been settled ever since the Neolithic.

There was serious political instability in the 1960s and '80s, with military coup d'etats in 1960, 1971, and 1980, and a postmodern coup d'etat in 1997 in which the Turkish military convinced Necmettin Erbakan to step down nonviolently.

Literature

The literature was until the 19th century divided into two traditions, folk and written, which had little influence on each other. Folk poetry was closely related to folk songs, so the histories of folk music and literature are closely linked. Written literature tended to be very influenced by Persian and Arabic literature. In both traditions, poetry was the dominant form. We can't blame them. Because the written poetry took on the meters of Persian poetry, it ended up taking on a lot of Persian words, too, since Turkish words didn't work as well in the adopted meters, and this led to the Ottoman Turkish language, which was distinct from standard Turkish. The poetry in this language came to be called divan poetry, "divan" being the word for a poet's collected works.

Islam came to be very influential in Turkish folk literature, unsurprisingly, especially the mystically-oriented Sufi and Shi'a varieties.

Divan poetry was highly ritualized and symbolic. The apparently most significant symbolic dichotomy is:

the nightingale : the rose

representing, respectively, both

the fervent lover : the inconstant beloved and

the individual Sufi practitioner (often characterized in Sufi as a lover) : God.

Another dichotomy is the world : the rose garden, for the physical world : paradise.

Skipping way ahead, Nazim Hikmet (1901-1963) became the foremost modern Turkish poet, moving beyond traditional syllabics and forms to free verse. Here's a website about him, with examples of his poems.

Then, in reaction to the poetry of Hikmet and the Garip Movement, the "Second New" poetry sprang up in the 1950s, using techniques of abstraction and fragmentation that Wikipedia says are associated with the postmodern but seem to me equally derived from the Modernism of Surrealism and Dada, which Wikipedia says was a major influence on the "Second New."

Recently-Anthologized Poets

Lale Muldur: "Mimesis is out." She's a teleological Marxist influenced by Brecht and Benjamin, but she says sound is very important too, because (she says) she writes from "total spontaneity." She's one of the most widely read Turkish poets today. Here's an interview.

Enis Batur: Poet, essayist, novelist, editor. Another leading figure in contemporary Turkish literature. Here are a couple of his poems.

Here's Kucuk Iskender's flashy website, which even in Turkish is sort of interesting.

Ooh, and here's a different translation of Didem Madak's poem in our anthology, "Sir, I Want to Write Poems with Flowers," along with two others.

Two and a Half Questions

1. What do we make of the use of the rose and flowers in general in these poems? I would posit that it's pretty much impossible to write a poem in English where a rose is anything but a symbol of symbols themselves (right?). So what's the degree of irony in the Turkish poems we're reading that use roses/flowers, especially considering the traditional importance of those as broader symbols.

1a. Do we have symbols that function in the same way, where they were used traditionally in such complex and central ways that we still use them, doing new things with their old baggage?

2. What do you think about the use of fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax (to quote Juliana Spahr's description of avant-garde practices) in the Turkish poems? Might there be reasons, beyond our catch-all explanation of regional-editorship, that the Turkish poems have more of that going on?