The question has always been, Poetry, so what? Like anything, I guess. But there is a weight to poetry, for better or worse, that never seems to go away. I have asked myself this question, my friends who are poets, hoping to find some kind of answer. Sometimes the question poses itself: Can poetry save the world? My response has always been that the only thing that can save the world is this: Be a good, decent, loving and kind parent. But then, later this year, someone gave me a poem and it made me feel like the world was a better place, for a moment, and in that giving of the poem, the world had been saved, in that moment. It occurred to me that if everyone started giving everyone else poems, once, twice, five times a day, we could, as a culture, as a world, along with being good parents, help to, assist in, making the world a more beautiful place.
So, two things, here are two poets and poems that, as literature, deal with subjects, written by poets, who, by in large, have been and were considered outsiders. Nazim Hikmet, a Turkish man who was exiled to Russia, imprisoned, beaten, for his political beliefs. These beliefs, of course, were centered in the ill treatment of certain human beings by other human beings. He was standing up for a certain kind of human decency and his own countrymen put him in the slammer then kicked him out. Juan Felipe Herrera, a Chicano, grew up in the Barrio of L.A. and responded to his "imprisonment" by turning to language, teaching, performing and sharing the deep, warm love that is all about making the world a better place.
Here we go.
Nâzım Hikmet Ran (January 15, 1902 – June 2, 1963),[1][2] commonly known as Nâzım Hikmet (Turkish pronunciation: [naːˈzɯm hicˈmɛt]), was a Turkish poet, playwright, novelist and memoirist. He was acclaimed for the "lyrical flow of his statements".[3] Described as a "romantic communist"[4] and "romantic revolutionary",[3] he was repeatedly arrested for his political beliefs and spent much of his adult life in prison or in exile. His poetry has been translated into more than fifty languages.
Hikmet's imprisonment in the 1940s became a cause célèbre among intellectuals worldwide; a 1949 committee that included Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, and Jean Paul Sartre campaigned for Hikmet's release.[10]
On April 8, 1950, Hikmet commenced hunger strike in protest against the parliament's not including an amnesty law in its agenda before its closing for the upcoming general election. He was then transferred from the prison in Bursa first to the infirmary of Sultanahmet Jail in Istanbul and later to Paşakapısı Prison.[11] Got seriously ill, Hikmet ceased his strike on April 23, the National Sovereignty and Children's Day for a while. His doctors requested to treat him in a hospital for three months that was not allowed by the officials. Since his imprisonment status did not change, he resumed hunger strike on the morning of May 2.[10]
His strike created much reaction in the country. Signature campaigns were launched and a magazin named after him was published. His mother Celile began hunger strike on May 9, followed by renowned Turkish poets Orhan Veli, Melih Cevdet and Oktay Rıfat the next day. Upon the new political situation after the 1950 Turkish general election held on May 14, the strike was ended five days later on May 19, the Commemoration of Atatürk, Youth and Sports Day. He was finally released through a general amnesty law enacted by the new government.[10]
On November 22, 1950, the World Council of Peace announced that Nazım Hikmet was among the recipients of the International Peace Prize along with Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, Wanda Jakubowska and Pablo Neruda.[10]
Later on, Hikmet escaped from Turkey to Romania on a ship via Black Sea and from there moved to the USSR.
When the upspring of the EOKA struggle took place in Cyprus, Hikmet believed that the population of Cyprus could live together peacefully and called on the Turkish minority to support the Greek Cypriots to achieve the demand of ending the British rule.[12] "[citation needed]),
Persecuted for decades by the Republic of Turkey during the Cold War for his communist views, Hikmet died of a heart attack in Moscow on June 3, 1963 at 6.30 am while picking up a morning newspaper at the door at his summer house in Peredelkino away from his beloved homeland.[13] He is buried in Moscow's famous Novodevichy Cemetery, where his imposing tombstone is even today a place for pilgrimage by Turks and communists from around the world. His final will was to be buried under a plane-tree (platanus) in any village cemetery in Anatolia, which was never realized.
Despite his persecution by the Turkish state, Nâzım Hikmet was always revered by the Turkish nation. His poems depicting the people of the countryside, villages, towns and cities of his homeland (Memleketimden İnsan Manzaraları, i.e. Human Landscape from my Country) as well as the Turkish War of Independence (Kurtuluş Savaşı Destanı, i.e. The Epic of the War of Independence) and the Turkish revolutionaries (Kuvâyi Milliye, i.e. Force of the Nation) are considered among the greatest patriotic literary works in Turkey.
Nazim has Polish and Turkish citizenship. The latter was revoked in 1959, and restored in 2009.[14][15] His family has been asked if they want his remains repatriated from Russia.[16]
Nazim Hikmet - On Living
I
Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example--
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people--
even for people whose faces you've never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees--
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.
II
Let's say you're seriously ill, need surgery--
which is to say we might not get
from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see it's raining,
or still wait anxiously
for the latest newscast ...
Let's say we're at the front--
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
but we'll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind--
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.
III
This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet--
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space ...
You must grieve for this right now
--you have to feel this sorrow now--
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived" ...
Juan Felipe Herrera (born December 27, 1948 Fowler, California) is a poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist.
The only son of Lucha Quintana and Felipe Emilio Herrera, the three were campesinos living from crop to crop, and from tractor to trailer to tents on the roads of the San Joaquín Valley, Southern California and the Salinas Valley. Herrera's experiences as the child of migrant farmers have strongly shaped his work, such as the children's book Calling the Doves, which won the Ezra Jack Keats award in 1997. Community and art has always been part of what has driven Herrera, beginning in the mid-seventies, when he was director of the Centro Cultural de la Raza, an occupied water tank in Balboa Park converted into an arts space for the community.
Herrera’s publications include fourteen collections of poetry, prose, short stories, young adult novels and picture books for children in the last decade with twenty-one books in total. Herrera was award the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for Half the World in Light.
ASSIGNMENT
I would like you to write a poem about your own "imprisonment," about how/why/when you have felt like you were an outsider and dedicate the poem to someone (I will give you the name of the person I would like you to write the poem for) and then you are charged with giving that individual your poem.
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