In celebration of UNESCO’s World Poetry Day, the Bilkent literary community hosted a two-day poetry festival on March 21 and 22. During the festival, poets and scholars from a number of departments gathered in the Library Art Gallery to share and celebrate “poetry matters.”
On the first day, Prof. Mehmet Kalpaklı (HIST/EDEB) introduced the event, paying tribute to the memories of Prof. Talât Halman and poet and visionary Âşık Veysel (the anniversary of whose death is the same date as that of World Poetry Day). Making reference to the many ways in which the presenters would be exploring poetry as found in unexpected places, Prof. Kalpaklı lauded the diversity of this year’s festival.
From the epitaphs of Ancient Greece, through the tanzaku of Japan, early to late Ottoman poetry, Renaissance English poetic commentary, German Romantic poetry, and poetry in Persian, Arabic and Urdu, to Mexican-American hip-hop and original work by the young Turkish poet (and Bilkent graduate) Müesser Yeniay, the event indeed spanned a great variety of languages, cultures, time periods and poetries. Many presentations featured “off the page” performances that highlighted the musical elements of various poetic traditions, while others engaged the audience in lively discussion and creation.
This year’s presenters included Aslı Yerlikaya (EDEB), William Coker (CCI), Ahmet Simin Beyatlı (HIST), Murat Tiryaki (HIST), Heather H. Yeung (ELIT), Müesser Yeniay (EDEB), Sjoerd Levelt (CCI), Gheis Ebadi (HIST), Jennifer A. Reimer (AMER), Rimliya T. Telkenaroğlu (HIST) and Zeynep Seviner (EDEB). The event was organized by Dr. Yeung and Dr. Reimer, and constituted a special part of the curriculum for this year’s ELIT Twentieth- (and Twenty-First-) Century Poetry and AMER American Poetry courses.
As Prof. Kalpaklı noted in his opening remarks, quoting from “The Dead Poets Society,” “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”