Concrete Poetry in Turkish Literature

Turkey, ID CLEaR2015-210

Over centuries many poets have thought the poem rendered what words couldn’t with visual images. The poems composed with this perception aims to shatter the difference between looking and seeing. If the distinction between looking and seeing is removed so will be the difference between visual and literary language. Thus the task that visual or literary language isn’t able to accomplish will be performed on both sides. The poem’s need for the visual image is of course not only to remove these differences. This need may be a tradition coming from the times when writing and image were not distinctive from one another or from the human mind’s need for images as it conceives. In today’s world in the “process of imaging everything” as Jean Baudrillard emphasizes, the poem’s merging with visual imagery is seen in a variety of experiments. Poetry’s ability to naturally cross the boundaries evolved with the language of poster boards in the age of nonverbal communication. This essay aims to find reasons in the relationship between poetry and image as it uncovers the journey of visual imagery use in Turkish poetry.

Keywords: poetry, picture, image, figurative poem, concrete poem, visual poem, Turkish poetry.