Poetry
CONTEMPORARY VOICES IN POETRY
Poetry Reading by Fırat Demir
Contemporary Voices in Poetry Series of the BTF led by Efe Murat Balıkçıoğlu is hosting poet Fırat Demir. Demir will read from his upcoming collection and selected works. English versions will be read by Joanna Burdzel from Harvard University.
Special thanks to Adnan A. Onart for his guidance and support.
Sunday, December 4, 2022
4:00 pm
Goethe-Institut Boston
170 Beacon Street
Fırat DEMİR
Fırat Demir published his first poetry collection, Yeni Cüret Çağı, in 2012, followed by Öte Geçeler in 2015 to much critical acclaim. A selection from Demir’s poetry translated into English by Ahmet Ergenc, the Turkish translator of William S. Burroughs’s The Wild Boys, Chuck Palahniuk’s Stranger Than Fiction, and others. Demir edited the Turkish translations of Edmund White’s selected stories Ada Öyküleri (2017) and the biography, Rimbaud: Bir Asinin Çifte Yaşamı (2017). His translation of White’s Marcel Proust biography, Marcel Proust: A Life (2019), is the first biographical study of Proust in Turkish. Demir is also commissioned by Istanbul Biennial to edit and write an anthology for its 13th season, a companion book named Hala Barbar mıyız? (2013). Demir’s poetry and prose appeared in other mediums, such as video art and installation, in collaborations with contemporary artists, and exhibited at several biennials and group exhibitions. Demir has been living in New York since 2014, where he completed his BA in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.
(Fırat Demir’s photo by Dominique Nabokov)
Efe Murad BALIKÇIOĞLU
Born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey, Efe Murad studied philosophy at Princeton University and received a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from Harvard University’s Department of History. He is the author of six books of poetry and the translator of six more, including the first complete translation of Ezra Pound’s Cantos into Turkish; volumes by the American poets Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and C. K. Williams; and, together with Sidney Wade, Silent Stones (Talisman House, 2017), a collection of poems by the Turkish modernist Melih Cevdet Anday, which was awarded the “Meral Divitçi Prize for Turkish Poetry in Translation.” A scholar of Ottoman history and Islamic philosophy, he is currently teaching at Wellesley College’s Department of Religion. His ongoing practice melds paleography, found footage, soundscapes, and religious experience in poetry. An Organ of Quality, a cycle of poems, will be published by Bored Wolves in 2022.
(Efe Murat Balıkçıoğlu’s photo by Adnan A. Onart, 2018).
JOANNA BURDZEL
Joanna Burdzel is a Ph.D. student of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, where she is currently working on the first English translation of contemporary Polish novelist Manuela Gretkowska.
She is also editing her first cycle of bilingual poetry, “Exorcisms,” which captures a dissonant identity, purging through and against romantic narrative.
Underlying all of her activities is an interest in the spiritual and the esoteric, as they permeate contemporary poetic consciousness.
