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Wednesday, May 12, 2004 The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church Tickets: $8 (adults), $7 (students and seniors with valid id) |
As an agglutinative language, Turkish has an infinite capability for nuances, while Sufism has an intuitive sensibility that merges love and death, pleasure and pain, eroticism and politics. In twentieth-century Turkish poetry, these two elements come together within the physical and spiritual landscape of Istanbul in a fusion called eda. Eda is both a movement of language and a representative of the progress of the Turkish soul in the twentieth century. In Turkish poetry, words create a space beyond themselves-a quality unique in the twentieth century. Eda is the play of ideas through the body of Turkish. It is not only the poetics of modern Turkish poetry, but an extension of the language itself - the flowering of its inherent potential. More than just a collection of translated poems and essays, Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (Talisman Books, New Jersey, 2004) is a translation of the language itself. Due to the fortuitous convergence of historical, linguistic, and geographic factors in the twentieth century-from the creation of the Turkish Republic in the 1920s to the transformation of Istanbul/Constantinople/Byzantium from a jewel-like city of under a million to a metropolis with over twelve million inhabitants by the 1990s-Turkey has created a body of poetry with its own poetics, world view, and idiosyncratic sensibility. What is more, these qualities are intimately related to the nature of Turkish as a language, both with regards to its strengths and its defining limits. Although the language of eda has flowered, and changed over time, it also maintained a continuum, a psychic essence, and a dialectic best characterized as arabesque. The poems in this anthology tell the political and spiritual story of this transformation. It is the silent melody of the mind, the cadence of its total allure, which this collection tries to convey. Each poem in the anthology is a prism refracting the light of this historical shift as a spiritual entity. Through Turkish language and poetry, history becomes transformed into light. Murat Nemet-Nejat Participants Jordan Davies Our special thanks to Ed Foster of Talisman Books, Anselm Berrigan of the Poetry Project and Mustafa Ziyalan. |
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