Poet Town

25/09/2012

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwcP3NOCeiE

The Hollow Men was written in 1925 Eliot said the name was a mixture of "The Broken Men" of Rudyard Kipling with "The Hollow Land" of William Morris. There a...

25/09/2012

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rj_LYsvGF0E

Members of the construction team which built Poets House's new home joined actor Bill Murray in May 2009 for the first poetry reading at 10 River Terrace. Pr...

23/07/2012

http://vimeo.com/40534162

www.facebook.com/izinsizgosteri

27/11/2011

16/11/2011

MENDİLİMDE KAN SESLERİ

Her yere yetişilir
Hiçbir şeye geç kalınmaz ama
Çocuğum beni bağışla
Ahmet Abi sen de bağışla

Boynu bükük duruyorsam eğer
İçimden öyle geldiği için değil
Ama hiç değil
Ah güzel Ahmet abim benim
İnsan yaşadığı yere benzer
O yerin suyuna, o yerin toprağına benzer
Suyunda yüzen balığa
Toprağını iten çiçeğe
Dağlarının, tepelerinin dumanlı eğimine
Konyanın beyaz
Antebin kırmızı düzlüğüne benzer
Göğüne benzer ki gözyaşları mavidir
Denize benzer ki dalgalıdır bakışları
Evlerine, sokaklarına, köşebaşlarına
Öylesine benzer ki
Ve avlularına
(Bir kuyu halkasıyla sıkıştırılmıştır kalbi)
Ve sözlerine
(Yani bir cep aynası alım-satımına belki)
Ve bir gün birinin adres sormasına benzer
Sorarken sorarken üzünçlü bir görüntüsüne
Camcının cam kesmesine, dülgerin rende tutmasına
Öyle bir cıgara yakımına, birinin gazoz açmasına
Minibüslerine, gecekondularına
Hasretine, yalanına benzer
Anısı işsizliktir
Acısı bilincidir
Bıçağı gözyaşlarıdır kurumakta olan
Gülemiyorsun ya, gülmek
Bir halk gülüyorsa gülmektir
Ne kadar benziyoruz Türkiye'ye Ahmet Abi.
Bir güzel kadeh tutuşun vardı eskiden
Dirseğin iskemleye dayalı
-- Bir vakitler gökyüzüne dayalı, derdim ben --
Cıgara paketinde yazılar resimler
Resimler: cezaevleri
Resimler: özlem
Resimler: eskidenberi
Ve bir kaşın yukarı kalkık
Sevmen acele
Dostluğun çabuk
Bakıyorum da simdi
O kadeh bir küfür gibi duruyor elinde.
Ve zaman dediğimiz nedir ki Ahmet Abi
Biz eskiden seninle
İstasyonları dolaşırdık bir bir
O zamanlar Malatya kokardı istasyonlar
Nazilli kokardı
Ve yağmurdan ıslandıkça Edirne postası
Kıl gibi ince İstanbul yağmurunun altında
Esmer bir kadın sevmiş gibi olurdun sen
Kadının ütülü patiskalardan bir teni
Upuzun boynu
Kirpikleri
Ve sana Ahmet Abi
uzaktan uzaktan domates peynir keserdi sanki
Sofranı kurardı
Elini bir suya koyar gibi kalbinden akana koyardı
Cezaevlerine düşsen cıgaranı getirirdi
Çocuklar doğururdu
Ve o çocukların dünyayı düzeltecek ellerini işlerdi bir dantel gibi
O çocuklar büyüyecek
O çocuklar büyüyecek
O çocuklar...
Bilmezlikten gelme Ahmet Abi
Umudu dürt
Umutsuzluğu yatıştır
Diyeceğim şu ki
Yok olan bir şeylere benzerdi o zaman trenler
Oysa o kadar kullanışlı ki şimdi
Hayalsiz yaşıyoruz nerdeyse
Çocuklar, kadınlar, erkekler
Trenler tıklım tıklım
Trenler cepheye giden trenler gibi
İşçiler
Almanya yolcusu işçiler
Kadınlar
Kimi yolcu, kimi gurbet bekçisi
Ellerinde bavullar, fileler
Kolonyalar, su şişeleri, paketler
Onlar ki, hepsi
Bir tutsak ağaç gibi yanlış yerlere büyüyenler
Ah güzel Ahmet Abim benim
Gördün mü bak
Dağılmış pazar yerlerine benziyor şimdi istasyonlar
Ve dağılmış pazar yerlerine memleket
Gelmiyor içimden hüzünlenmek bile
Gelse de
Öyle sürekli değil
Bir caz müziği gibi gelip geçiyor hüzün
O kadar çabuk
O kadar kısa
İşte o kadar.

Ahmet Abi, güzelim, bir mendil niye kanar
Diş değil, tırnak değil, bir mendil niye kanar
Mendilimde kan sesleri.

11/10/2011

Andy Garcia reads Pablo Neruda.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Poet-Town/188991921170188

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example: "The night is shattered,
and the blue stars shiver in the distance."

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
That I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like this one, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, and sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not not have loved her great, still eyes?

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered, and she is not with me.

This is all.
In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same the same trees.
We, we who were, are the no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that is certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her ear.

Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that is certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms,
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer,
and these the last verses that I write for her.

10/10/2011

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Poet-Town/188991921170188

We are poor students who stay after school to study joy.
We are like those birds in the India mountains.
I am a widow whose child is her only joy.

The only thing I hold in my ant-like head
Is the builder's plan of the castle of sugar.
just to steal one grain of sugar is a joy!

Like a bird, we fly out of darkness into the hall,
Which is lit with singing, then fly out again.
Being shut out of the warm hall is also a joy.

I am a laggard, a loafer, and an idiot. But I love
To read about those who caught one glimpse
Of the Face, and died twenty years later in joy.

I don't mind your saying I will die soon.
Even in the sound of the word soon, I hear
The word you which begins every sentence of joy.

"You're a thief!" the judge said. "Let's see
Your hands!" I showed my callused hands in court.
My sentence was a thousand years of joy.

10/10/2011

A beautiful poem by Jim Morrison

09/09/2011

A Carcass by Charles Baudelaire

My love, do you recall the object which we saw,
That fair, sweet, summer morn!
At a turn in the path a foul carcass
On a gravel strewn bed,

Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman,
Burning and dripping with poisons,
Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way
Its belly, swollen with gases.

The sun shone down upon that putrescence,
As if to roast it to a turn,
And to give back a hundredfold to great Nature
The elements she had combined;

And the sky was watching that superb cadaver
Blossom like a flower.
So frightful was the stench that you believed
You’d faint away upon the grass.

The blow-flies were buzzing round that putrid belly,
From which came forth black battalions
Of maggots, which oozed out like a heavy liquid
All along those living tatters.

All this was descending and rising like a wave,
Or poured out with a crackling sound;
One would have said the body, swollen with a vague breath,
Lived by multiplication.

And this world gave forth singular music,
Like running water or the wind,
Or the grain that winnowers with a rhythmic motion
Shake in their winnowing baskets.

The forms disappeared and were no more than a dream,
A sketch that slowly falls
Upon the forgotten canvas, that the artist
Completes from memory alone.

Crouched behind the boulders, an anxious dog
Watched us with angry eye,
Waiting for the moment to take back from the carcass
The morsel he had left.

— And yet you will be like this corruption,
Like this horrible infection,
Star of my eyes, sunlight of my being,
You, my angel and my passion!

Yes! thus will you be, queen of the Graces,
After the last sacraments,
When you go beneath grass and luxuriant flowers,
To molder among the bones of the dead.

Then, O my beauty! say to the worms who will
Devour you with kisses,
That I have kept the form and the divine essence
Of my decomposed love!

— William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)

08/09/2011

THE TRINITY OF SEA-FARING BLUES REDUCED TO ONE

A day of falsehood and fraud, a day foul and fully lived
A day eyeless earless handless footless disjointed and dumpy
All my losses and glooms massed together and all my chaos
And the adventures I lived through for so many millenia
My glooms and my chaos of millenia massed together
Massed together by a slow process man for man death for death
So many suns, so many sea-snakes and so many systems
I am entitled to sea and moons and to skirmish and despair
For no reason suddenly I liken blue to someone
I recall and revoke the mouth of fish for no reason
That's how I cool off

I had planned on three places all three suitable for you and me
One among the sunflowers one thirty years old don't ask about the third
Don't ask me about the third someday I will tell you myself
If I can muster courage and tact I'll probably tell you
But first let's shed light on this heart-broken darkness
Let's build new cities just like the ones we have
Let's start anew with sesame and bread and overseas and love affairs

Let us go and return
Perhaps at some place in a seed or in a state perhaps
Perhaps that sound or that gulp or soft couches or the greenest green
I could haul rocks invincibly or shovel mud or pave a road
You never can tell maybe we shall find happiness let us go and return
I shall not shirk I shall haul rocks and shovel mud
What's more you have tumultuous rumbling hair anyway

TURGUT UYAR

Translated by Talat Sait Halman.
(Literature East & West, March 1973)

05/09/2011

A Season in Hell
by Arthur Rimbaud
translated by Bertrand Mathieu

A while back, if I remember right, my life was one long party where all hearts were open wide, where all wines kept flowing.

One night, I sat Beauty down on my lap.—And I found her galling.—And I roughed her up.

I armed myself against justice.

I ran away. O witches, O misery, O hatred, my treasure's been turned over to you!

I managed to make every trace of human hope vanish from my mind. I pounced on every joy like a ferocious animal eager to strangle it.

I called for executioners so that, while dying, I could bite the butts of their rifles. I called for plagues to choke me with sand, with blood. Bad luck was my god.
I stretched out in the muck. I dried myself in the air of crime. And I played tricks on insanity.

And Spring brought me the frightening laugh of the idiot.

So, just recently, when I found myself on the brink of the final squawk!
it dawned on me to look again for the key to that ancient party where I might find my appetite once more.

Charity is that key.—This inspiration proves I was dreaming!

"You'll always be a hyena etc. . . ," yells the devil, who'd crowned me with such pretty poppies.
"Deserve death with all your appetites, your selfishness, and all the capital sins!"

Ah! I've been through too much:-But, sweet Satan, I beg of you, a less blazing eye!
and while waiting for the new little cowardly gestures yet to come, since you like an absence of descriptive or didactic skills in a writer,
let me rip out these few ghastly pages from my notebook of the damned.