Jon Reeve

by Christopher Faroe

In the city of Istanbul there is a suspension bridge, which stretches between two continents. But for many hundreds of years, before this development of the modern age, this ancient city–the center of so many empires–was defined by the watercraft, the docks, the shipping, that this aqueous rift allowed and necessitated. So it is fitting that Turkish-American poet K. Kamal Ayyildiz begins his collection, The Cistern (Çitlembik Publications, 2004), in a boat, paddles swishing. And even the wooden paddles give way to a diesel prop by the end of the first page.

Ayyildiz was raised in Virginia by a Turkish father and an American mother. The Cistern is a meditation on names, fathers, mothers, birth, maturation, cultural connections and cultural divides. Using the archetype of a city built on two continents, divided by a body of water—and that body itself, the instrument of separation laden with fairytale significance, “once there was and once there was not,” and yet somehow all of this merging, flowing, into the same underlying story. In Song of Bebek, the collection’s opening poem, this single story is exemplified in a reflection of the communal experience every Turkish man undergoes: “And in the park a band plays the chaos/ as sons board the military bus. / They look as I look across this body towards Asia, / their hearts lite the surface, / a man’s idea of himself / inside the buoyant craft, / sweating”.

Istanbul, for all its archetypal significance, is also a vibrant, sensory-overload of a city unique for its details, for the specific, for the tangible and present. And so it is fitting that Ayyildiz makes copious provision for each of the senses—drumbeats, gunshots, silver bodies of fish, olives, nuts, fruit, tea, the steam and lather of the Turkish bath, flour-dusty baker’s hands, the warm blood of childbirth. In this way his poetry is appropriately reminiscent of the post-formalist movements in Turkish literature. The Garip poets of the 1950s were famous for concentrating deliberately on the simple, on everyday activities as opposed to hollow literary abstractions and overused patterns. Ayyildiz echoes the same appreciation for the significance of the comonplace: “Eti looks up. / A basket drops on a string from the poweder sky. / A Jinn? No. / Teyze calls her to fetch bread and raki” (Song of Merdivenli Sokak).

And yet Ayyildiz is rooted in a rooted appreciation for tradition, for the country in which his name originates, the country of his father’s upbringing. He is able to combine the simple objects and elements of everyday life in Turkey, to the deeper story, transcending nation and name. In Firinci the simplicity of a bakers craft becomes a concentration on life and death; the nameless baker, or firinci, wonders over his kneading, as he bakes bread, the staple of Turkish cuisine: “His staple of dreams, unloaded golden, / are bird crumbs. // In the late addition of Hurriyet / the flour face ofa dead child.”

Ayyildiz aptly completes his collection with Song of Uskudar, a culmination of all that has been brought up in The Cistern. We are back on the coast, near the water. There is a mention of mulberry and pomegranate, two fruit motifs prominent in earlier poetic folk traditions of Turkey as well as modern Turkish poetry such as the Garip movement. And so Ayyildiz continues Istanbul’s ancient story: the mysterious connection between old and new, east and west, the specifics of our daily experiences, and the archetypes of all literature.

The back cover of his poetical volume 12 informs me that the author, John Gosslee, served as poet-in-residence forAttitude: The Dancer’s Magazine for three years. Perhaps if all readers were dancers, we might take more readily to this dozen of florid and fantastical Italian sonnets.

Let me tell you about the assembly. He relies upon the standard (and, I might add, nondescript) western zodiac system to organize, and apparently to motivate, his collection. On the cover, twelve personages, representing the various signs, scoot around a psychadelically colorful core, mounted on various cute wheeled machines. I suppose the illustration intends to set a tone of whimsy-with-a-purpose, with an analog in the volume’s concluding couplet: “We know everything is a passing fad/And make all listen to destiny clad” (“Two Fish//Pisces”).

But diving into the work, I have some questions about the structure. Every sign (Aries, Capricorn, etc.) gets a section which begins with his own 14-liner; that is followed by first a French translation (provided by one Elizabeth Watson — coincidence, or zodiac?); then a Spanish translation (José Guerrero, no relation); and finally ends with a page whose dates and lines are intended to provide a place where you, the reader/owner, can enter in your friends’ and relations’ birthdays.

For whom are these translations, exactly? My ignorance of Spanish leaves me speechless about the quality of those ones; and from what I can tell, my enthusiastic high school French makes me perhaps the ideal candidate for an audience of the others. On the other hand, the utterly unadvertised “birthday book” functionality of the volume was its highlight for me. The unassuming functionality is quite endearing, and in fact I might even have been delighted with its poetry content had it principally been marketed as a zodically-organized birthday book.

So finally, onto the content of the poetry itself. As Gosslee explores cosmological mysteries, forgive me if I wonder what or who is this author’s deity, exactly? For his often stilted adherence (Larry Fagin agrees with me, as confessed in his review given under “Advance Praise”) to the strict poetical form (rhyme, rhythm, structure) evokes a ritualistic and in fact spiritual function of language, rather than a lyrical one. Indeed the rhymes seem almost to be a pneumonic device, a functional ringing which might aid or accompany worship and/or physical labor (again, I think of his potential intimacy with dance and dancers). The content smells a bit like incense and sounds a bit like yogic meditational texts; they often communicate what seem to be profound visual epiphanies of the author, as if he had a dream that felt like The Answer, and then tried to write it down. As a result, perhaps, the metaphysical freedom of his images are sometimes unforgivably nonsensical: in “Lady Justice//Libra,” what does it mean exactly for a deity to “transcend…a sieve”? I also must report titles that sound like first-draft Harry Potter chapters (eg. “The Centaur’s Duality”) and oft-confounding punctuation (the enforced stanza break between the octet and the sextet can feel like a random interruption).

However, I would concur with Fagin, again, that “the often startling imagery” can sometimes “carry the poems through.” My favorite sonnet is certainly “The Goat’s Yoke//Capricorn,” which contains:

…   as you look faster
For remedies to psychic disaster,
I watched you change thoughts in diachronic boom!
Enchanted with telepathic heirloom …

I had the impression that towards the end of these dozen, Gosslee’s poems began to address a particular individual, one might say a lover; here, however, I dearly hope he is addressing himself! for I couldn’t have conjured a more apt phrase than “enchanted with telepathic heirloom” for his own project. As for myself, I think I’d rather read horoscopes.

Teleportraiture
teleportraiture.com
Exhibition May 18-31, 2012
Opening Reception Friday, May 18^th, 7-9pm
Space Womb Gallery
22-48 Jackson Ave.
Long Island City, NY 11101

Teleportraiture is a series of small, intimate oil portraits, painted from live poses, by remote video chat, via Skype, Google Hangout, or iChat. Janet Bruesselbach launched Teleportraiture in 2011 as a Kickstarter campaign. The subject of each portrait is a backer of the campaign, or a loved one volunteered by the backer.

Janet is pleased to announce that the 45 resulting paintings, completed between October 2011 and February 2012, will be displayed in a 2-week gallery exhibition in New York City, in downtown Long Island City, to be more precise. Attendance at the opening reception on Friday, May 18^th, will also be possible remotely through a simultaneous online video chat.

The pricing and experimentalism of the series made the fine art portrait experience open to people who had never before considered commissioning one. The subjects include the artist’s friends and relatives as well as people met only through the campaign, and only online. Some posed from the other side of the world, others from the same room, all framed by their computer screens. The ages of subjects ranged from under a year old to septuagenarian. Many subjects had never used video chat before. The project reflects a moment when a flexible technology is still finding its social niche.

Janet has been working as a portrait artist since she was 15, and was further trained at RISD and the New York Academy of Art. Her painting is traditional but fresh and lively, and feeds on the energy of interaction with a live subject. Paintings reflect on both the artist’s personality and her subjects’. Yet as artifacts of sittings, they are not quite realistic, and often contain traces of awkwardness in every level of communication.

Some of the portraits remain available for purchase, as are a limited number of catalogs. The artist will be working in the gallery and will be available for live video chat Monday (21, 29), Tuesday (22, 30), and Thursday (24), from 12-6pm EST. The gallery is also open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, 12-6pm. To commission a portrait during this or another time, to schedule a viewing, and for any other inquiries, contact: janet@bruesselbach.com (310) 617-3366

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