Erdag Goknar

Fady Joudah

Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival

Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival Staff

Murat Nemet-Nejat

Hatice Orun

Jeffrey Kahrs

Winners of the Fifth Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition Staff

The festival chapbook includes an essay on Mahmoud Darwish's poetry by Fady Joudah, original translations of Turkish poets, Nazim Hikmet, Gulten Akin and Birhan Keskin and poems by the winners of the Fifth Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition.

A Chapbook of Talks and Poetry

Fifth Annual Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival

Poetry. Middle Eastern Studies. IO'S SONG is poem, energy field, myth, and autobiographical essay. It is "signatures' colors." As the author states near the end of the work, Myth is not a narrative applied, but dis-covered. The narrative that emanates against our will revealing ITSELF, A VIOLENT LIGHT that descends and leaves. Every myth is an arrival and escape, departure which in truth is death. This is due to the nature of words, their will to metamorphoze themselves from meaning to meaning, AS BEEING, crossing boundaries across human will, human reason or human culture, seeing ourselves thru the mirror of language as a reflection, willess, bobbing on the alien surface (facade) of words, ceding to insanity to plumb its depths.

Io's Song

Nazim Hikmet

Edwina Attlee

Michael Beadle

The chapbook of the Third Annual Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival opens with a paper given by the festival's guest speaker, Murat Nemet-Nejat: "Eda, Intimations from Turkish Poetry." The rest of the chapbook is dedicated to poems submitted by the winners of the poetry competition. The festival and the poetry competition were organized by American Turkish Association of North Carolina. The festival, which took place on April 17, 2011 in Cary, NC was made possible by a major grant from the Turkish Cultural Foundation. The festival organizers were Buket Aydemir, Pelin Bali, Mehmet C. Ozturk and Birgul Tuzlali.

Third Annual Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival

Turkish Voices, written during 1989/90, is initially based on the Second New Turkish poet Cemal Süreya's first book of poetry, Üvercinka (Pigeon English), which he wrote during the 1950s, in his twenties. In this book, absolutely stunning erotic passages of uncanny psychological insight, where a nexus between pleasure and power is revealed through the lyric persona of a male seducer, are mixed with cute refrains or half-digested surrealist lines which blur the text, sentimentalizing that insight by turning the poems into general appeals for freedom, completely overlooking the victimization of the female persona, who never speaks. A work of deconstructive translation, this book offers a reworking of Uvercinka, containing fragments from different poems in the book, sometimes ending in mid-sentence, isolated, spliced together, and sometimes alterated. Fragments from other Turkish poets have been added, splitting the lyric persona, opening up its unity; finally, poems written by the author himself earlier joined the text. The result is a series of eighty-four fragments where any idea of ownership or originality or source - what poem, that is, comes from whom or where - disappears, is completely blurred. In other words, what starts with the ego and power-centered persona of the male seducer is dissolved, splintered, through a dialectic or critical confrontation with Süreya's resistant text, into multiple points of view, often of a sufferer, a victim. What one ends up with is a multiplicity of voices, an erotic poem which becomes its own critique of power. Murat Nemet-Nejat is a poet, translator from Turkish poetry, essayist and editor of Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (Talisman, 2004). Murat Nemet-Nejat's works include, among others, the poems The Bridge (Martin Brian & O'Keeffe, Ltd., 1977), "Fatima's Winter" (Transfer 1, Fall/Winter 1988-89), "Heartbreak Weekend at Atlantic City" (Transfer 6, 1991), "Vocabularies of Space" (Talisman 11, 1993), "Steps" (Mirage, 2006), The Spiritual Life of Replicants (Talisman, 2011), Animals of Dawn (Talisman, 2016), Io's Song (Chax, 2019); the essays "Vocabularies of Space" (Talisman, 1993), "The Peripheral Space of Photography" (Green Integer 76, 2003), "Translation and Style" (Talisman no. 6, 1991), "Questions of Accent" (The Exquisite Corpse 43, 1993), "A Godless Sufism: Ideas on 20th Century Turkish Poetry" (Talisman, 1995), "The Radical Feminism of Runa Bandyopadhyay's Syntax," the introduction to her book Nocturnal Whispers (2019), "Image as Ideas, Poetry as Film: Speculations and Poetic Acts (an Essay Film)" (Kaurab 59); and translations of the Turkish poets Orhan Veli, I, Orhan Veli (New York City: Hanging Loose Press, 1987), Ece Ayhan, A Blind C at Black and Orthodoxies (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1997; reprint: Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2016), Seyhan Erozçelik (Greenfield: Talisman, 2010), and Birhan Keskin, Y'ol (New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2019). Nemet-Nejat's work has been translated into Bengali, Turkish, Spanish, Romanian, and Vietnamese, among other languages. He is presently working on the poem "Camels and Weasels" and the translations of the Turkish poet Sami Baydar.

Turkish Voices

Poetry. Translation. Middle Eastern Studies. The only U.S. anthology to date to track the develpment of one of the great poetic traditions of our time. Nemet-Nejat offers an introduction to modern and contemporary Turkish poetry, until now largely unknown in the West. "We ignore such work at our own peril: we're in another world, and Murat Nemet-Nejat welcomes us to it" Ammiel Alcalay."

Murat Nemet-Nejat

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