Anyone who has ever undertaken or imagined the task of contextualizing and anthologizing a nation’s literature, and with it, deciding who and what to include and how to represent the schools and ideas and traditions and the contradictions within that built coterie, translating hundreds of pages of poems, setting geographical parameters for how to define said nation, can begin to understand the scope of Buğra Giritlioğlu and Daniel Scher’s task, its impressiveness and its breadth, as they worked on The Pulse of Contemporary Turkish. This poetry anthology, translated by Giritlioğlu and edited with Scher, presents a near-comprehensive view of contemporary Turkish poetry. The anthology features a forward by Laurent Mignon, essays by Ayşegül Tözeren and Utku Özmankas, and a translator’s preface by Giritlioğlu, all of which serve to contextualize the landscape of Turkish poetry for an international audience.
Placing 21st-century Turkish poetry into context requires a preliminary gloss of 20th-century Turkish poetics, which were largely defined by the Garip (“Strange”) and Ikinci Yeni (“Second New”) poetry movements. The Garip poets inherited a poetics that came out of the divan (sultan’s poetry) and folk traditions, taking what they found in European modernism and applying it to a post-Ottoman context. Divan poetry was largely characterized by love poems written by members of the sultan’s court, while folk poetry was the poetry of what would soon become the proletariat as the nation quickly industrialized, and the Garip poets adopted an imagist sensibility as the basis of their poetics. Ikinci Yeni, the primary poetic movement of the 1980s, was characterized by a move away from imagism and towards an attempt to “construct a new language,” in Özmankas’s words. Ayşegül Tözeren argues that the 1990s ushered in “an aesthetics of chaos and noise” that the work of 21st-century poets have responded to. Giritlioğlu and Scher have meticulously combed through magazines and books to represent the current state of poetry in Turkey.
Giritlioğlu chose to keep the entries undated, presenting poems in order of the poet’s first name rather than thematically or chronologically. Giritlioğlu defines “the contemporary” in terms of living poets, though Küçük İskender and Bülent Keçeli passed before the project was completed. The result is an anthology that one can trace, that lends itself to discovery and chance, where connections between and across schools of poetry (or the delineations of “lyric” vs. “experimental”) have room to breathe, change, and sift into one another.
In his essay “Turkish Poetry Since 2000,” Özmankas offers historical context for the experimental tradition Giritlioğlu aims to anthologize: “The various movements we have subsumed under ‘experimental poetry’ shared the same aim: toThe poems themselves sometimes push back against these critical frameworks, and the tensions between “the lyrical, the political, and the experimental” that Laurent Mignon lays out as a site of contention in the forward are eschewed by several poets. Mehmet Said Aydın’s “Pretty,” for instance, successfully collapses such distinctions: “i don’t have a neck that gets prettier the more you look at it / and there’s no need to derive tropes from the ‘mole’ on its left / i have two names, there’s no ali in there // i remember those who praised me. it’s happened.” Throughout the poem, “ali” refers in turn to an imagined version of the speaker and, perhaps, a lover. Later, in the same poem acknowledge and surpass the language introduced by Second New (Ikinci Yeni).” Giritlioğlu and Scher’s curation suggests that it is sound itself that allows this acknowledging and surpassing, as a poem by Asuman Susam suggests: “we had to first pass through sound then word / those garrulous loquacious gabby trite words.” Sound often causes other senses to get crossed, as in Cihat Duman (“we cannot smell the sound or color of blood”) or Zeynep Köylü (“the sound may veil my eyes”). Elsewhere, sound encounters space, geography, and distance: “a fleshless boneless sound” (Mehmet Erte), “you shout the sound doesn’t go anywhere” (Efe Murad), “sound, blood, nearby” (Aylin Antmen).
The poems themselves sometimes push back against these critical frameworks, and the tensions between “the lyrical, the political, and the experimental” that Laurent Mignon lays out as a site of contention in the forward are eschewed by several poets. Mehmet Said Aydın’s “Pretty,” for instance, successfully collapses such distinctions: “i don’t have a neck that gets prettier the more you look at it / and there’s no need to derive tropes from the ‘mole’ on its left / i have two names, there’s no ali in there // i remember those who praised me. it’s happened.” Throughout the poem, “ali” refers in turn to an imagined version of the speaker and, perhaps, a lover. Later, in the same poem:
my face is not radiant, my neck is not pretty, i’m not brave
they praised me three times, all when i was out on the street.
shouting.
hey, here we come breaking shackles!
clocking the bourgeoisie!
hey, here we come breaking shackles!
come on praise me now
starting with my beard’s noise.
Sound appears again here, in a surprising way, where a beard has “noise.” The desire for beauty and the desire for liberation move in tandem, collapsing the distinction Mignon makes in his introduction: the lyric alongside the political. And praise comes from the street — the speaker’s beauty is acknowledged, comes to fruition, in the site of collective struggle. Aydın’s italicized stanza evokes the famous eighteenth century folk poet Dadaloğlu’s well-known lines, “The state made the decree about us. The decree is the Sultan’s, but the mountains are ours.” Such allusions and themes are present throughout the anthology as these poets turn again and again to love and belonging across historical and geographical contexts.
Although questions of what makes a poem “lyric” or “experimental,” a formal experiment or a political one, are also alive and well in contemporary poetry in the United States, poets in both the U.S. and Turkey have long bristled at such distinctions. And while the introductory essays place a large emphasis on the difference between experimental and lyric poetry, the poems included in this anthology reject such narrow definitions. Scholar Lauren Mignon quotes the Marxist poet Nazim Hikmet’s famous line, “We’ve had it with the rose, the nightingale, the soul, moonshine, and all that,” demanding a shift towards materialism in Turkish poetry, one that we see take shape throughout this anthology. This shift comes up clearly in Ahmet Güntan’s “Ring.”:
Although questions of what makes a poem “lyric” or “experimental,” a formal experiment or a political one, are also alive and well in contemporary poetry in the United States, many poets in both the U.S. and Turkey have long bristled at such distinctions. And while the introductory essays place a significant emphasis on the difference between experimental and lyric poetry, the poems included in this anthology reject such narrow definitions. Scholar Lauren Mignon quotes the Marxist poet Nazim Hikmet’s famous line, “We’ve had it with the rose, the nightingale, the soul, moonshine, and all that,” demanding a shift towards materialism in Turkish poetry, one that we see take shape throughout this anthology. This shift comes up clearly in Ahmet Güntan’s “Ring”:
That a cactus doesn’t signify anything else
Is a manner of speaking.
That a cactus in the desert is just a cactus in the desert
Is a manner of speaking.
Love differs from all this
And unbroken things that keep expanding with repetitions.
Love becomes the mechanism through which image dissipates, where gestural intimacy is replaced with an invocation of the material reality of care, love, and intimacy. The poets featured here are contemporaries of one another, their work often a result of shared sensibilities, politics, and aesthetics, a response to the work of 20th-century Turkish poets that came before them. Motifs and ideas — love, death, time, authoritarianism, a smile — repeat throughout The Pulse of Contemporary Turkish as if it were a collection of “unbroken things [that] keep expanding with repetitions.”
[left: Buğra Giritlioğlu] The fantasy of the “unbroken” extends to the question of the nation itself. Any anthology that takes up the question of a national literature should at the very least contend with the implications of nationalism and the state, and namely, what makes up a nation or national identity. In the context of Turkey, in particular, the question of what constitutes “Turkishness” has been long contested, as the end of the Ottoman Empire was met with a renewed nationalism that justified mass murder, consolidating power and dismantling the federalist rule that had existed in Anatolia pre-1923 under the mantle of a new, secular, Western “Turkish” identity. The Pulse of Contemporary Turkish merely gestures at this tension through allusions to “the political.” As with any anthology, some voices are missing—but most glaringly, the anthology does not feature a single Armenian poet. Mignon argues that Giritlioğlu “de-orientalizes Turkish poetry.” This might be true in terms of offering various forms of subjectivity, but the collection does not meaningfully contend with Turkey’s decimation of Armenian, Kurdish, Greek Orthodox and Jewish communities, neighborhoods, and livelihoods.
The Pulse of Contemporary Turkish presents a helpful point of departure for both new and long-time readers of Turkish verse. These poems have velocity and direction, as in Lâle Müldür: “a bird spins at abnormal speed / in the forest or / forest hollow called heart / and instructs us to flee.” They consider the danger latent in trusting the turn of the season, the flower, heeding Nazim Hikmet’s call, as in Zeynep Köylü:
winter’s summer affair is over
what remains is the raw doubt of lilac rituals
double-edged murderous night did not recount the wound
on my back
And throughout, Giritlioğlu and Scher’s curatorial direction guides the reader, offering many windows and paths into what might be a new poetics for many non-Turkish readers.
[Published by Syracuse University Press on April 15, 2025, 294 pages, $49.95 paperback]