ampere’s and
This week’s visuals: Hansel & Gretel, painted by Zelda Fitzgerald (1947) [via LitKicks] & Landfill Editions & Berlin’s gallery of “degenerate art” banned by Hitler [via @brainpicker] & Soviet anti-alcohol posters [via @tomvanderbilt] & Charles Burns vs Tintin & Catalonian book covers [Image: Vintage French book covers / via]
Left Bank gangs
Anthony Cuthbertson looks at the expat literary scene in Paris: What Allen Ginsberg called, ‘The bewildering beauty of Paris’ has attracted writers and artists for centuries. It has been the setting of great novels and the home of great writers, and in the last hundred years has briefly been the stage for two waves of […]
Maintenant #39: Efe Duyan
I am against mystified poetry -sometimes it is considered as something holy, exempt from all criticism and being totally different substance than other types of writing. According to my very personal view, poetry is to be defined as one of the possible ways of expressing yourself. It should be on the streets so to speak; sometimes complex of course but not complicated. Therefore I am not against chaining myself to the desk, I believe in working in poetry… As I said, I also “allow poetry to appear before me”. Although all I’ve said in reference to so-called mechanistic definition, I strongly believe that it is the most personal branch of writing. Even while I am telling a historical story or describing the city, it is still the first—singular’s inner view. I may seem paradoxical, but I never write something when I did not live or experience something to write. I think I’ll leave this contradictory two sided view open at this moment. After this point the poetry itself should speak, not the theory…
In the 39th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Turkish poet Efe Duyan.
Six Poems
He isn’t the kind that dies, he says,
Did I suggest the opposite
As I stood looking at his face?
But there’s no hiding around here, my dear Sir.
Doesn’t he know that in these streets
Death is present in the eyes of everyone?
He takes out a ledger or two with old writing —
‘His last will and testament’
I bend towards it, as if this will make things clearer.
We’ll hide, won’t we, my dear Sir?
We’ll hide as much as we can hide in this forsaken place…
By Efe Duyan.