{"id":16302,"date":"2018-10-29T13:52:06","date_gmt":"2018-10-29T17:52:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=16302"},"modified":"2018-10-29T13:52:06","modified_gmt":"2018-10-29T17:52:06","slug":"birhan-keskins-yol","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/birhan-keskins-yol\/","title":{"rendered":"Birhan Keskin’s Y’ol"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Just out from Spuyten Duyvil: Y’ol<\/em> by Birhan Keskin
\nTranslated from the Turkish by Murat Nemet-Nejat<\/h3>\n

Here’s what I have to say about Y’ol<\/em>: “When I read Birhan Keskin\u2019s poems I hear an oud playing a double makam: the one a fixed, the other a spontaneous\/improvisatory mode. In filigree, the fixed is rooted in the poetic archetypes of Layla & Majnun, the Persian poem of love, loss and spiritual redemption,\u2014except that here we no longer know who is majnun, i.e. crazy or possessed\u2014while the spontaneous\/improvisatory makes language boil over, literally makes it become concrete (as in \u201cconcrete poetry\u201d). Or is it that the written is silently sounded & the sounded silently written? There is a quest going on here, a quest for a visionary but a-religious spirituality, encapsulated in the title itself, Y\u2019ol, \u201cthe road to becoming.\u201d I cannot help but think of a lineage that reaches from Rabia of Basra, the first mystic Sufi woman poet to a contemporary such as Adonis. Only a poet-translator of Murat Nemet-Nejat\u2019s linguistic dexterity & depth of knowledge could have accomplished the tour-de-force of transposing this work into English.”<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

& here three more commentators:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cthe other calls the one who isn\u2019t there \/ that\u2019s how magic becomes magic\u201d\u2014there\u2019s no getting around it. To live is to desire, thus, ultimately to anguish. In\u00a0Y\u2019ol, the world is unstable, even untrustworthy. But this only makes love more important: \u201cthe sky i return, return return \/ return to is you\u201d. Love\u2014defined in these poems through an endless yearning\u2014could have been denied but instead is upheld, even as these poems of fortitude must scorch their pages. The title \u201cY\u2019ol\u201d means \u201cthe road of\/towards becoming.\u201d This Y\u2019ol presents the jagged music of metamorphosis and to read these poems is to discern songs made possible only with silence set on fire.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 Eileen Tabios<\/p>\n

Birhan Keskin\u2019s\u00a0Y\u2019ol\u00a0is a singular accomplishment, a book about desire and loss and craziness on a grand scale, the Turkish equivalent, perhaps, of something like Nicole Brossard\u2019s\u00a0Mauve Desert.\u00a0\u00a0Keskin\u2019s lovers break the bonds of sentence construction and even numerical order with the fury of the \u201cretaind and detained\u201d\u2014one long poem in numbered sections makes a muddle of the numbers themselves, as though the individual pieces had been scattered across the pages like dice from a dice cup.\u00a0 Its passion fairly takes away the breath of the reader, and Murat Nemet-Nejat\u2019s nimble translation captures nuance as well as it brings us the flesh and blood of two women playing for keeps across an erotic landscape unlike any other I\u2019ve seen in contemporary poetry.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 Kevin Killian<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a gone and committed fan of what\u2019s happening in Birhan Keskin\u2019s Y\u2019ol. It shakes me up in my writing, heart and mind. It\u2019s in my day. Its flow is nakedly experiential, yet its unquestionably operating out of the profound blindness of poetry, language reaches for a place.\u00a0These verses are dirty like the road of love. Immediately I read Y\u2019ol with all of me, felt\u00a0challenged and pulled like watching an amazing athlete or yoga practitioner going through their steps and yet it\u2019s the nature of\u00a0this\u00a0art form to move and tear and go forward into nothing. It\u2019s a virtuosic dance and a collapse, a reminder and a revelation. Every lover becomes her \u201cus.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0 Eileen Myles<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Birhan Keskin was born in K\u0131rklareli, a town on the European side of Turkey, in 1963. She graduated from the literature department of Istanbul University in sociology in 1986. She published her first poem in 1984. Between 1995 and 98, with her friends, she published the literary journal G\u00f6\u00e7ebe\u00a0(Nomad). She worked as an editor in numerous publications.<\/p>\n

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Her poetry books are: Delilirikler\u00a0(Madlyrics), \u0130skenderiye Library Publications, 1991; Bakars\u0131n \u00dczg\u00fcn D\u00f6nerim (You Will Find That I Will Return Sad), Era Publishers, 1994; Cinayet K\u0131\u015f\u0131 (The Winter of Murders) + \u0130ki Mektup (Two Letters),\u00a0G\u00f6\u00e7ebe Poetry Books, 1996; Yirmi Lak Tablet (Twenty Milligram Pills) + Yolcunun Siyah Bavulu (The Traveler\u2019s Black Suitcase), YKY, 1999; Yery\u00fcz\u00fc Halleri\u00a0(The World\u2019s Conditions), YKY, 2002; Kim Ba\u011f\u0131\u015flayacak Beni (her first five books, Who Will Spare Me), Metis Publishers, 2005; Ba (Ba), Metis Publishers, 2005; Y\u2019ol (Y\u2019ol ), Metis Publishers, 2006); So\u011fuk Kaz\u0131 (The Cold Excavation), Metis Publishers, 2010); Fakir Kene (The Poor Tick), Metis Publishers, 2016).<\/p>\n

Birhan Keskin\u2019s Ba won the Alt\u0131n Portakal (Golden Orange) poetry prize in Turkey in 2006. Her So\u011fuk Kazi won the Metin Alt\u0131ok poetry prize in 2016.<\/p>\n

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Murat Nemet-Nejat\u2019<\/span>s recent work includes the poems\u00a0Animals of Dawn\u00a0(Talisman, 2016), The Spiritual Life of Replicants\u00a0(Talisman, 2011),\u00a0the collaboration with the poet Standard Schaefer \u201cAlphabet Dialogues\/Penis Monologues\u201d; the translations Seyhan Er\u00f6z\u00e7elik\u2019s\u00a0Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds\u00a0(Talisman, 2010), the republication by Green Integer Press of Ece Ayhan\u2019s\u00a0A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies\u00a0(2015); and the essays \u00abDear Charles, Letters from a Turk:\u00a0Mayan Letters, Herman Melville and\u00a0Eda\u201d (Letters for Olson, edited by Benjamin Hollander,\u00a0Spuyten Duyvil, 2016), \u201cHoliness and Jewish Rebellion: \u2018Questions of Accent\u2019 Twenty Years Afterward\u201d (Languages of Modern Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives, edited by Joshua L. Miller and Anita Norich\u00a0(University of Michigan Press, 2016) and \u00abIstanbul Noir\u00bb (Istanbul: Metamorphoses In an Imperial City, edited by M. Akif Kirecci and Edward Foster\u00a0(Talisman, 2011). He is the editor of\u00a0Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (Talisman, 2004). Murat Nemet-Nejat is presently working on the poems Camels and Weasels and Io\u2019s Song, and a collection of translations from the Turkish poet Sami Baydar. Camels & Weasels is part of a seven-part serial poem The Structure of Escape which also includes the poems The Spiritual Life of Replicants and Animals of Dawn<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Just out from Spuyten Duyvil: Y’ol by Birhan Keskin Translated from the Turkish by Murat Nemet-Nejat Here’s what I have to say about Y’ol: “When I read Birhan Keskin\u2019s poems I hear...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91,103],"tags":[2009,2010],"class_list":["post-16302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry","category-translation","tag-birhan-keskin","tag-murat-nemet-nejat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16302"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16305,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16302\/revisions\/16305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}