Muhafýzgücü:1, Hayalgücü:0
(Rearguards:1, Power of Imagination: 0 )
-World Literature Today autumn 1990
"Admittedly, analogies between genres can be misleading, even
perilous, but it is safe to liken the avant-garde poetry of Tarýk
Günersel to the music of John Cage. The two artists demonstrate
a similar audicaty of form and substance, comparable flights of the
imagination, and the same revolutionary way of seeing objects and
hearing sounds. At any rate, no one else in Turkey recreates life
and language with Günersel's cataclysmic innovations. A true
original who not only has gone far beyond most of the daring explorations
of modern Turkish verse but has also probed the outer reaches postmodernism,
concrete poetry, computer esthetics, postdeconstructionism, and grammatology,
Günersel (b.1953) unfurls a world that exists only in his imagination.
His poems bear no resemblance -or relationship- to those written by
anyone else in the Turkish language.
…Günersel is Turkey's premier assassin of romanticism. If
he occasionally offers dramas of the self, they are either done in
jest or are clinical in nature. He is the first Turkish poet who is
not a troubadour and the first who has gained an understanding of
the scientific possibilities of verse. Not that he avoids the temptations
of ancient mythology or lust or love. He is as receptive -more than
that, as voracious- as a computer. He is programmed to make a new
synthesis of all the data he receives and to restructure it all into
poems of a unique esthetic technology.
A dramatist whose plays scare producers with their boldness, a librettist who has given new vigor to the genre, a short-story writer whose voice sounds unlike any other in Turkey, Günersel creates stunning juxtapositions of abstractions and concrete elements in his poetry. If would be too facile to herald him as an enfant terrible; his is a far more serious-minded vision -and mission- to transform the Turkish poetic experience. The present collection stands (or, rather, takes a quantum leap) as a new dimension of imagination. His novelties predictably encounter resistance from the literary establishment. As the title indicates, for the present the conservatives are ahead of the innovators."
