Suzan Sarı interviewed by Tim Gaze
Suzan Sarı interviewed by Tim Gaze
how did you come to poetry? how did you come to visual poetry?
I remember a little about how I came to poetry; at the age of sixteen, I had funny ideas like poetry was to find out and underline what anybody saw but didn’t talk about and so on. At the same time I always had unbelief to express things by telling or preferred not telling anything by using language as a reaction. Fortunately I have learnt to be hopeful. The ways of not-telling are various. By reading and writing we create lots of problems and I’m not sure about whether they have meanings in real life or not.
Two years ago, while I was going on to write those stupid poems and reading with a potential but something don’t worth to name as chaotic, I met with poetikhars (means ‘poetical culture’) and its founder, Serkan Işın. This wasn’t a real encounter but a spiritual enlightenment (!), & by reading the foreign visual poetry websites. I made some re-readings and have translated a good many essays.
my poetry:
In the beginning I was trying to write how a word can be meaningful without any other symbol or signifier by writing it down ‘alone’.
’Writing’ a pregnant woman (http://www.poetikhars.com/node/433) with the letters of this word. There can be found many ways of writing a word. And if the others’ argument that there is some spiritual things within poetry is true, then why that spiritual thing must be in Times New Roman and 12 typeface?
One of my earlier works carries the features that I especially love doing now, writing with letters not according to a pre-word (in ‘unfair looking’ (http://www.poetikhars.com/node/428) I used parentheses between two Ö letters (I have used Ö many times, it is a letter that has eyes) and in my last poem ‘paranthesia’ (http://www.poetikhars.com/node/1008) the parentheses themselves constitute the meaning, they aren’t there to underline anything. Able to achieve any meaning is preferable.
In another poem, ‘the mechanism of the dictionary’ (http://www.poetikhars.com/node/447), there was a big wheel consisting of little ones done by A; the referentiality in a dictionary. By using the signifiers in any way, writing about signification has lots of advantages when it is compared with writing it down in sentences. Much better in the matters of signification.
Now I don’t feel myself in that circle. By writing in my developing style (it is like learning to write the mother tongue), there come out non-lexical concrete words and this axisless manner doesn’t let my signifiers reverse to signifieds or vice verse.
Talking/writing about visual poetry is describing, representing a certain thing but visual poetry itself gives us the chance of presenting ‘any’ thing only by writing without any description. By the technology of writing we can make out ‘new’ things without knowing about it. And now I am describing this ‘certain’ process by using the conventional ways. I hope I can tell it nowJ. Writing only by considering the process, it makes the poem the non-representation of nothing but only the presentation of itself.
After a period of using non-word colorful things (but there were always letters) I am back only with letters but with many kind of fonts and the courage to distort them deeply. I don’t think my recent works allow the old comfortable readings and I am pleased with them. Limiting the given materials (collaborations or working on found materials) and forcing the poem through its inner side is another valuable experiment. Besides all, writing makes the poem grow through the outer world. In such a way (asemic) of writing there is no replacement of any certain thing, thought. In collages, collaborations etc. there is equality in meaningfulness between the old application of signifiers and the new. Nevertheless, there are still things to do with those techniques to make out and to see much more. What’s more there can be a huge text that I think will come out and there is no problem not to feel it alone.( I used parentheses between two Ö letters (I have used Ö many times, it is a letter that has eyes) and in my last poem ‘paranthesia’ () the parentheses themselves constitute the meaning, they aren’t there to underline anything. Able to achieve any meaning is preferable.In another poem, ‘the mechanism of the dictionary’
you have an idea for a super-duper, wide poem which presents a lot of ideas simultaneously?
Yes, but I see, I couldn’t say:)
By reading, it seems like I find out a pure thing that comes to life by me and life meets with these new rough words for the first time. In fact this technique is not so used in conventional Turkish poetry, to make new combinations of certain signifiers, the risk of having meaninglessness in the end, isn’t taken so much.
are you a group of friends in Istanbul, or several individuals co-operating?
There were a few poets in the beginning, still we are a few but not all the same poets. Serkan Işın (the founder and the editor), Derya Vural, Deniz Tuncel, Ayşegül Tözeren and I are the active ones for a long time. We haven’t seen each other neither before the start of poetikhars nor after and we don’t communicate too much, if there is urgency only on web. Maybe the others are friends and don’t accept me into their community, it is possible.
www.poetikhars.com is not only a visual poetry website but nearly the best platform to discuss the current matters of Turkish poetry for four years.
what kind of exhibitions or performances or other public demonstrations of visual poetry have been in Turkey?
We can’t even succeed to publish the 6th issue of Poetikhars for over one year. There is a wish to hold an exhibition but it is even more difficult than an issue of the magazine. But there have been some exhibitions on web with the titles of ‘everyday life and form’, ‘the noise engineering’, ‘scanner darkly’…
is anything from Islam, perhaps Islamic calligraphy, coming into your poetry culture?
Things are quite different and difficult for Turkish poetry, there is a huge Islamic Turkish tradition but 80 years ago the alphabet was changed. The consequences of this change haven’t been clear yet nor have they been exceeded. It has influenced Turkish literature deeply as well as all culture.
There are traditional crafts like miniatures, bookbinding, tile-making, carpet-weaving, ebru marbling in Islamic Turkish culture. Turkish-Islamic calligraphy, “Hat” (hat means line) has developed mainly under Arabic culture, but then in Anatolia come to have a perfect synthesis. It cannot be separated from its religious roots because of Islam’s prohibitory attitude towards painting. As an extreme example, in 14th century in Anatolia, there was a sectarian style named as Hurufilik (the term comes from ‘letter’). The founder, Fazlullah Astrabadi, re-read the Kuran according to Cabbala and Jewish mysticism. “Hurufilik” searched for the truth in a text, a sentence and a letter on human face.
& please tell me a little bit about the state of Turkish poetry, experimental poetry & visual poetry.
Still the archaic problems are discussed within Contemporary Turkish poetry and the matters to be discussed by visual poetry are stabilized because of that ancient manner.
There have been a few, individual attempts after the change of alphabet but they don’t have the modernist meaning of experimentalism. There have been some discussions on vispo within mail-groups, some writings about visuality but not directly on vispo and a large number of poets are looking silently at what is happening. It will take much more to make them understand that the main problem is the writing itself.
is there a nice Turkish translation for "asemic writing"?
There is nobody concerned with asemic writing beside poetikhars. There is only one published essay with the word ‘asemik’ in its title, and it can be taken as an example for the beginner of asemic. And that was translated by me
. I used ‘asemik’ and don’t think it is the time to find another word for it while we are struggling with questions like “where is the poem in this visual poem?”
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