Seyhan Erözçelik, Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds, Talisman House, 2010.
"Seyhan Erözçelik [Turkey] 1962-2011.
Born on March 13, 1962 in Bartin, a town in the Black Sea region of Turkey, Seyhan Erözçelik studied psychology at Boğaziçi University and oriental languages at Istanbul University. In 1986 he co-founded the Șiir Ati (Poetry Horse) publishing house which published over forty titles in the 1980s. He is a member of the Turkish Pen Center and Writer's Syndicate of Turkey. He lived in Istanbul.
His first poem, "Düştanbul" (Dreamstanbul) was published in 1982, followed by a number of collections, including Yeis ile Tabanca (Despair and Pistol, 1986), Hayal Kumpanyasi (The Troop of Imagination, 1990), Gül ve Telve (1997) (translated in 2010 as Rosestrikes and Coffee Grounds), Șehirde Sansar Var! (There Is a Marten in Town! 1999), and Kitap, bitti! (The Book Is Over!, 2003). More recent books have included his collected poems, Kitaplar (2003), Yağmur Taşi (The Rainstone, 2004), and Vâridik, Yoğidik (Once We Were, We Weren't, 2006).
Many of Erözçelik's poems are written in the Bartin dialect, but others appear in different Turkic languages. The poet has also made a modernist use of classical Ottoman rhyme, aruz, particularly in his book Kara Yazili Meşkler (Tunes Written on the Snow, 2003). He has published a critical essay on the modern mysical poet Âsaf Hâlet Çelebi and the forgotten poet Halit Asim, as well as translating the poetry of Osip Mandelstam and C. P. Cavafy into Turkish.
Erözçelik was awarded the Yunus Nadi Prize in 1991, the Behçet Necatigil Poetry Prize in 2004 and the Dionysos Prize in 2005."
"Could it be that Seyhan is actually informing us that in this world, where life is presented to us as if it were the reality of the past, present, future and destiny ('fate' or 'sorrow'), there is in fact nothing more than the surreal? It must be - the surreality of fortune images and the allegory of the mediocrity of conventional fortune discourse, signifying life caught between mediocrity and imagination. With Seyhan, 'rose' is a savior: An icon that can be anything and overcome anything. An icon that provides redemption from being caught between mediocrity and imagination! Seyhan attributes a miraculous, mystical (maybe even divine?) power to the rose... The power of the rose, that shall transform us not towards doing everything, but towards being everything. In 'Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds' we see three paths: all of which are paths of the rose! In three spans of time: the rose shall come along those paths. And will bring us to itself..." - Hilmi Yavuz
"Seyhan Erozcelik s 'Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds' has three layers of narrative: first, the physical arrangements of rosestrikes and coffee grounds that the reader never sees; second, the fortune reader's own interpretation of these casual arrangements through words; and third, the text that the reader simply encounters. All of these convergent layers unite in one point: what is said in the poem will be the reader's own future or, more precisely, the objective future of the anonymous other." - Efe Murad
"In 'Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry,' Murat Nemet-Nejat established 'eda' as a marker of poetic process much as Lorca's duende or the Japanese concept of yugen had ignited similar interests in the century now behind us. The rootedness of mysticism in language, central to the poetics in question, finds a true exemplar in Seyhan Erozcelik's 'Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds,' a work of both intelligence & passion." - Jerome Rothenberg
"A poetic utterance implies the beliefs that made it possible. One such belief might be, certainly once was, that a god brings the poem to the poet. In a secular and scientific world we might expect such an antique notion to readily dissolve in critique, to be washed away by reason, but poetics in the twentieth century suggests that the more secularized and rational the culture of writing that surrounds the poetic act, the more urgent and extreme the search for some version of a supernatural origin.
In modernity the theorizing, that is, the thinking aloud about where a poem comes from, what its nature is, and what effect it can have, keeps shading into theology, especially when the topic is poetic inspiration . In his essay “A Godless Sufism: Ideas on the Twentieth Century Turkish Poetry,” for example, Nemet-Nejat postulates a deep interrelations between “a poetic inspiration that disguises itself as a poetics that explores the origin of poetic texts across linguistic barriers” and “a theology without the word god in it.” Following his lead, we might take note that in modern literary culture the most daring and exact of questioning of doctrines of inspiration has been exactly around the issue of translation. To sustain the transmission of some essence of words across time and cultures and languages Ezra Pound revived the old notions of the transmigrations of souls. More recently, Jack Spicer revived the conceit of spiritual dictation. The act of translating a poem from one language to another has been the point of creedal articulation, has been the place in secular literary culture where the ritual origins of poetry and the attendant world of numinous forces can no longer conceal themselves. No contemporary has explored this moment with quite the eloquence and critical acuity of Murat Nemet-Nejat.
Poet, critic, essayist, translator, and listserve provocateur, Nemet-Nejat has worked to bring a highly refined and philosophically sophisticated version of Sufism into the forefront of contemporary poetics. His notion of Eda, which he has developed and documented in his essays, his own poetry, and in his landmark anthology of Turkish poetry, Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry, published by Talisman.
House in 2004, has provided American poets not only with a powerful theory of inspiration akin to Lorca’s duende and tooled to our cultural moment, but has reconnected Western poetry with one of the great traditions of world poetry. In the light of eda the contemporary lyric recovers its ritual force. While Nemet-Nejat has grounded his doctrine in the properties of the Turkish language he suggests that Eda can pass from the body of one language to the body of another. The power of his translations are the proof-texts of his poetic doctrine.
Several of the poets in the anthology Eda have already begun to find an audience in America. With the recent publication of Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds Seyhan Erözçelik joins their ranks. This book presents two dazzling, deeply entwined sequences followed by Nemet-Nejat’s essay on the significance of Erözçelik and on the process of translation. It would be a disservice to Erözçelik’s poems to ally them too closely with their translator’s purchase on the poetic world of modernity if it were not so clear their wit, passion, and vibrancy assure them ultimately their own secure place in contemporary poetry. Nemet-Nejat’s terms are, however, an immense help in seeing what the American reader cannot, the deep roots these poems have in their literary historical moment, a part of poetry’s response to the transformations in the very fabric of Istanbul in the 1980s and 1990s, when the city’s population exploded, the urban landscape dramatically reorganized itself, and Turkish thought and culture entered on the fast track to the postmodern.
The first poem sequence in the collection, “Coffee Grinds,” is an extended act of tasseography, a particularly Turkish form of divination. The ritual requires that the coffee cup once drunk be turned over on its saucer. The grinds at the bottom of the cup dry on the saucer and then the shapes - perhaps we should say hallucinations – seen in the grinds are interpreted. Here, as so often in modern poetry, the discredited ritual practices of superseded eras receives an uncanny new life. Anglophone readers will no doubt feel we are in “Coffee Grinds” in a café somewhat down the street from Eliot’s Madame Sosostris. The graceful lines and cool ironies of the poem strike a perfect balance between the designation of pastime and entertainment allotted such practices in modern life, and the older world of suspicion and supplication and belief that can so readily be called back around such amusements. Each section of the poem –there are twenty-four ---- offers a separate rendition of fate. There seem to be a succession of fortune seekers, but it may also be the case that the poet is continually interrogating his relation to time and the world around him. In a footnote the poet finds in this modern amusement a residual shamanism that persists from the most obscure beginnings of Turkish culture. Moreover the method of this divination establishes early on that the associative flow of shapes suggested by the shape of the grinds and the skill of the reader of the grinds result in continuous transformation. Note in the following the deft interweaving of levels of reality and tones of voice:
A mass of coffee grinds’s flying to the sky. A profound sadness is getting up,
About to get up, and leave, leaving behind its space
Empty, that is, nothing to interpret
In its stead. Either for good or evil.
A portion of the universe is waiting to be filled, is what’s left.
Something has ended, you’re relieved, have gotten rid of a burden.
(What the load is, I can’t tell.)
Inside the cup, further back, a dolphin. The greatest of luck,
The most propitious object. Both a fish, and with lungs. Besides . . .
It’ll drag you with itself, to the sea . . .
One can see here also what makes the poem so marvelously effective is the different attitudes that the diviner strikes in relations to those whose fortunes he’s reading. The diviner of the grinds can be wry, matter of fact, immensely imaginative, sardonic, cruel, caring, desolate, or good humored. The divinatory act remains a dinner table entertainment, but one that can suddenly dip into a personal abyss, or a complex politics that even the non Turkish reader can readily surmise to be close by: symbols from the Turkish flag keep appearing in the grinds! A light touch this poet has, but one that pointedly reminds us of the precarious place of western oriented literati in Turkish culture. “Coffee Grinds” expertly keeps us balanced between both worlds and times. An ancient, pre-Islamic Turkey is effectively evoked with each turn of the cup. The crescent reminds us of the theological and cultural world of contemporary Turkey, while the grace and imaginative flights and the sense of personal loss deep beneath the surface of the poem remind us of how modern Turkish poets continue to transform the city of Istanbul into a precinct of passion and imaginative freedom worthy of its onetime inhabitant, Constantine Cavafy.
The second sequence here, “Rosestrikes,” is also an extended meditation on a single figure, in this case that richest and most challenging of figures, challenging because so deeply enmeshed in western lyric tradition, the rose. The neologism of the title “Rosestrikes,” which is continued in almost every poem in the sequence, offering us such provocative coinages as might well be a nod to Celan, to his no one’s rose, and it is hard not to sense the spirit of Celan lurking around these rose poems. With “Rosestrikes” the poet turns both inward and downward, displaying an intensity and forthrightness that ghosts the edges of “Coffee Grinds.” The voice that is in command, as it were, if not of the future itself then at least the turns the future takes as it speaks to us through images now suffers abjection:
Thiefrose
The town is
burning the fire
in the rose.
O thou art
a thief!
A house fire
and a rose fire
are so different.
But my heart’s
burning
inside the house.
These poems are brief, gnomic, psychologically extreme, in some ways the antithesis of the capacious style of “Coffee Grinds” and yet both poems are steadfast in their exploration of the interpenetration of zones of being. “Rosestrikes” is as well a poem of divination, of a continuous trancelike gaze upon an ancient figure, steeped in religious and erotic associations, until it reveals some startling, unseen likeness. “I don’t believe in roses / because I am a rose,“ the poet tells us, but his multifoliate nature will only disclose itself in the pursuit of resemblances that cannot be perceived without a kind of ecstatic suffering.
Nailrose
everything
is slanted
towards you!
Taken together, the two sequences gathered in this volume might be seen as exemplifying Nemet’Nejat’s effort, as critic and translator, to reunite the experience of lyric poetry with visionary states of being. One can only hope that further volumes, of Seyhan Erözçelik ‘s work, and of others such as Ahmet Güntan, Lale Müldür, küçük Iskender, and Sami Baydar, will soon find their way into English. Until we can all speak Turkish, and thereby experience Eda without mediation, translation will have to do. We are lucky to have this one. Coffee Grinds and Rosestrikes is a moving, masterful, and quietly prophetic volume, combining, as Nemet-Nejat argues, the depiction of an historical condition and the spiritual response to it. Were the poet less a poet, Seyhan Erözçelik might have titled his work more truly and forthrightly: not “Coffee Grinds,” but “Fate.”Not “Rosestrikes,” “The Soul." - Joseph Donahue
from Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds
TWO
Here, I’ve turned up your cup. (Because the grinds are a bit dried, your fortune has set.)
(In order for fortune to set, must we make coffee grinds wait? Whatever, let’s look at the cup, see inside.)
A mountain. Flying to the sky. (As in all fortunes, is this mountain an inner distress? Shouldn’t words, as moving targets, in fortunes also have various meanings? And couldn’t unknown words enrich the interpretation, therefore a fortune?
The mountain is flying to the sky, continuing to fly, leaving its main mass of land behind. But also know that that block of mother land also will not remain where it was –are themselves blocks which will continue to fly. As big pieces, as small pieces they will fly to the sky, there forming a mountain.
Mountain, in the sky. Even though their densities are different, only clouds may sustain their existence as mass. If so, what’s this mountain which has rediscovered itself doing here?
You can tell me that. But it seems you’re emptying your insides. And this, in the tongue of our coffee grinds, means an easing up. (Easing up block by block. If it happened all at once, it’d be like an electro-shock. Because of that, this way is a good thing. Maybe also the pace has to do with your personality.)
With this passing of the mountain to the sky, as if you are also being reborn. Midway, between sky and earth. And as if with your rebirth a crescent is oozing out from your skirt and mowing the skirt of the mountain.
Along with a cat in silhouette and a pregnant pigeon (or is it malignant) flying to the sky.
Between sky and earth, or, seen another way, like the depths of the sea. Heavy, silent, or functioning among the noises of the depth of the sea, the migrating mountain, parcels of mountain, rocks, stones, the silhouette of the cat, the pregnant pigeon, you wearing a long gown, tiny fish, a crescent moon like the knife… you’re in that sea.
Or seen from another angle…
The crescent is also on the saucer of the cup, in addition, exactly opposite the crescent inside the cup. Exactly like the reflection of a mirror, the right side on the left. The left, on the right, etc. (Or, to say more, the West in the east, the North south…)
According to looking in the mirror, hearts are on the right.
Does this alter anything, anything?
Opposite the crescent (the one in the saucer, that is crescent in the mirror) there is a star. (Like a flag
The crescent becoming a full moon, that star also will keep growing. , exactly!)
(Why the mountain is migrating to the sky is now crystal clear.)
Finito!
SIX
An immense letter M. In the shape of a Moon. Or, a moon in the shape of the letter M is lighting this cup. A person with one horn (not an equine) is weaving for you. What kind is it? Like the human heart, it is knitting sadness, sitting down, meticulously. Click click. Click click.
Did I say sadness? No despair, dis-repairing like Penelope.
You’re right behind the person with one horn. And there is someone behind you. Is it male or female, I do not know, etching writings on your back. There is a halo around your head. (Can writing be etched, well, this one is doing it?) Again, a noise, clicking away. (Like the mechanism inside cats. Or a spool…}
Further back a woman. From her head down, she is pouring down the moonlight. (This’s the light coming from the moon above.) You’re going up, opening up to the world. (The one without sharp minarets!) Rising, the moon is getting bigger, its light shining, a third eye is opening in her forehead, the corona is spinning.
There’s a smaller moon meeting the moon above, the crescent. It’s looking around. Joining its own extremities with the ends of a circle. That is, the circumference is being completed.
A confused, and as much as confused, an exciting, terrific fortune.
You are in the hands of coffee grinds now. Coffee grinds in your hands.
EIGHT
A mass of coffee grinds's flying to the sky. A profound sadness is getting up,
about to get up, and leave, leaving behind its space
empty, that is, nothing to interpret
in its stead. Either for good or evil.
A portion of universe waiting to be filled, is what's left.
Something has ended, you're relieved, have gotten rid of a burden.
(What the load is, I can't tell.)
Inside the cup further back, a dolphin. The greatest of luck,
the most propitious object. Both a fish, and with lungs. Besides...
It'll drag you with itself, to the sea.
To the sea or the sky? If sky, is freedom, sea is mother's lap.
To the sea or sky? Various cats and roosters are also dragged with you. You're on the road on a royal progress, together, towards somewhere. Two roosters, one cat and the fish.
The dolphin leading the way, a lucky and fortunate road.
(An event, clearly, affecting the whole family, by the way, good luck.)
That's what is beyond the emptiness. Something happened,
you are freed. This is affecting a lot of people near you,
along with you.
Affecting well and good.
A good reading. Wonderful.
Well, that's it.
THIRTEEN
Lifting the cup, the saucer lifted with it then fell. This act made a sound. Before being read, fortune made a sound. Is that understood?
The mass of coffee grinds in the cup is in motion. Luck, in motion. Kismet in motion.
To where?
Towards the inside of the cup. (When I say cup, you think I mean world, yours included... don't you?)
Fortune has stalled.
I'm looking. The moving mass of grinds looks like the Nude of Maja, reclining in bed, hands in her hair. But there is this difference: here she is mermaid. In other words: the Mermaid Nude of Maja. In an ether as comfortable as mother's womb, she is reclining.23
(This mermaid isn't you. But revealing of your spiritual state, both a child and a mother. Born and giving birth. That's how it is.)
A slight danger, a fish's trying to nibble pieces from this mermaid.
This danger will be averted, you won't even notice.
Wind and sea are into each other, with places beyond the sea.
Where to?
Due to the shape of the cup I guess, a horizon in the shape of a crescent moon is also in this fortune.
Everything is so clean, so peaceful.
But in the saucer, someone is carrying a gun. What it means, I couldn't make out. (That's the part of fortune which was still in motion.)
Fortune has stopped.
(Coffee grinds don't move any more.
What about kismet?)
TWENTY
(You’ere unable to settle your fortune. This is called coffee grinds anxiety.)
The grinds have overflown the cup.
I’ll start outside.
In other words outside the cup, there is an animal trying to escape inside, or trying to enter your fortune. Small, ferocious, beautiful hair… with a long tail. And the path before it wide open.
That small, ferocious beast has sent its replica inside. A replica of coffee grinds oscillating inside, keeps strolling, swinging its arms, as if it owned the place, in its own country.
A person without a face, holding a flag. (The flag’s appeared in your cup again!)
Forest beasts, singing all together.
The swollen, bubbly places inside have stretched the coffee grinds like a membrane. If I say piff! It will burst.
(Piff!)
And the replica of the replica of the small beast also is in the cup.
Now inside the cup a universe apart, a separate world.
That world, expanding.
From the cup to the saucer a rivulet is running, a rivulet of grinds.
The beast of fortune, that very ferocious one, is drowning in this brook.
Reborn in the cup.
To put it in another way, it’s jumped a threshold.
To another world…
TWENTY-ONE
Fortune has dried again.
Let it. (The drying of fortunes show that fortunes go faster than our lives, it seems.) .
At the bottom of the cup there is a horizon line, water, sky, land… all joining there, a guy has cast his tackle to the fish, is waiting. From above a strip of delicate road is descending directly towards him. Towards his thoughts.
Further back, there’s a woman dancing, like the Spanish, holding waving a handkerchief. For whom is she waving it, why is she waving it, we can’t tell.
A woman with wings, bending, is gathering something from the ground, some herbs. And why is she gathering them, for whom, we can’t tell.
Another woman tossing her hair right and left is moving far away.
The crescent in the saucer has risen and entangled with her hair.
(Then I touched the coffee grinds in the cup.
They are not dried. That’s the truth!)
We human beings, sometimes, pretend we don’t know.
A Reading of Seyhan Erozçelik’s Rosestrikes & Coffee Grinds by Murat Nemet-Nejat
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