Don Yorty
Without Language With Language: Looking at Some Poems by Murat Nemet-Nejat
Over the last two weeks, as I’ve been reading and revisiting three books by Murat Nemet-Nejat, I’ve come to see them as a trilogy. The first, published by Talisman Press in 2011, The Spiritual Life of Replicants, is about seeing. The second, Animals of Dawn, published by Talisman in 2016, is about being. And the third, Io’s Song, published in 2019 by Chax Press, I would say is about becoming. But all three books interconnect with the solipsistic idea that the eye of the beholder exists. Poets use language to its best advantage, and there are poets whose work I enjoy who do that. Bernadette Mayer and Bill Kushner quickly come to mind. I would include Murat too, but what interests (and puzzles) me about him is that he, unlike Bernadette and Bill, did not grow up speaking English. There are those who would argue that Murat, who is fluent in Turkish and French with a little bit of Persian thrown in, can never be a good poet in English because it’s not his native language. But honestly I would argue that that isn’t true.
Human babies are born with the ability to speak every language that exists. But the baby, due to geography, begins to speak the language that it hears around it so the baby born in Dhaka speaks Bangla, and the baby born in Paris speaks French. We are born to speak every sound a human being can make though the sounds we will make are the sounds of the words that are composed around us. Poems, like any speech, are made of letters seen on the page, thoughts thought in the brain, and sounds heard in the ear. Poets combine this trinity in such sublime ways that people often commit it to memory. A thing of beauty is a joy forever, isn’t? But what about a man who is born without a language? How is he going to speak? And more importantly, if this alien turns out to be a poet, how will he write a poem? In his essay, “Questions of Accent,” Murat Nemet-Nejat writes about this:
“I speak no language like a native. Though I have lived in the States since 1959, my accent still sounds foreign. I was born in Turkey, but I am not Turkish. I am Jewish. In the fifties most Jews in Turkey were Sephardim and spoke Ladino Spanish. But I am not a Sephardi; I am a Persian Jew. My parents had moved to Istanbul on business, and I was born there in a Jewish neighborhood. But I learnt no Ladino, barely understood it. Jewish kids in the neighborhood thought I was Moslem, an outsider. At home, my parents spoke Persian with each other, which also I barely understood. Brothers among ourselves spoke Turkish. My mother spoke in an immigrant’s broken Turkish to me (my father barely spoke to me at all). Turkish became my mother tongue. I spoke Turkish in the street. I was, linguistically, most comfortable with other Turks, who mostly despised Jews. My speech became almost Turkish. Loving a language not completely my own was my first act as a Jew. And, despite my almost accentless speech, my first act of rebellion was to tell my Turkish friends I was not one of them. I was a Jew.”
As I was thinking about what Murat said, I happened to look at a poem in Animals of Dawn called “The Girl.” It was on a page I randomly opened. I’d read the book so I was seeing it again, and like every poem reread, I noticed things I hadn’t seen before; this is one of the rewards of a good poem; in a good way it never ends.
The Girl
The sleepy tree,
Among the vegetable life
of the garden,
A mailbox,
the sentry before the garden,
silent.
A caterpillar
lands on it,
green,
A disoriented,
half-hearted fugitive
from the green
garden,
Framed by a window
a girl of eight
bored by the whizzing
summer,
her eyelid twitches
as the Fly on the window
Squeezes,
cleans its head.
For a man with no language every word is a stranger in a strange land looking to define and make sense of itself. Here, the tree is in a garden of vegetables, not in a forest with its peers; the mailbox, vertical as a tree and partly made of wood stands apart keeping guard, the wrong occupation for a mailbox there to contain and protect errant daily words. The caterpillar should definitely not be on a mailbox visible to every bird. As I read the poem, I think I’m outside with the tree, mailbox and caterpillar, but actually I’m inside watching through a window where a fly rubs its thousand eyes for a moment before it flies. Like the wandering immigrant looking for a home, nothing in the poem is quite sure where it belongs. And in the sixth stanza in the sixteenth line finally there is the titled girl, and I realize I’ve been seeing what she is seeing, a part of her thoughts as she—bored and twitching—wants to be somewhere else. But she is wherever she goes. And I am her eyes.
In Animals of Dawn being out of non-being begins to form. Prince Hamlet is the medium in this book, and the characters around him, Shakespeare too. “To be or not to be” has to be asked. And to answer it, the poet without a language has to produce some. “To see the wall one must hang a coat on it,” Murat writes in Animals of Dawn. First, see the page, then write the words. In this meditative book, as in all his books, Murat often experiments with English, abstracts it into sounds, puts caesuras in the middle of a word, separating it into syllables, making shapes out of it, vertical sentences, scrambling words up so much on the page, you have to really look to make the unintelligible intelligible. Like a man without language, is he throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks? I, for one, don’t think he is. He is looking for the right word and borrowing from other writers too, which is OK, as T.S. Eliot might say, if you steal from the best. And in this regard—Let us use what we can!—Murat is a wonderful thief taking words from others and making them into his own. Anyone simply looking at the poems on the first few pages of Animals of Dawn will see what an adventure it is:
I want to make Hamlet, to dis appear.
The lightning that didn’t strike made me disappear completely. …
and her arms unknowingly caresses the water
wall
haiku haiku hai-
ku haiku haiku haiku haiku
haiku hi
Plop. Frog
Circles disappearing, in fini te
Until I touched her, my sister gave hope but her corpse was heavy out of water.
Don’t touch the translucence, they turn into wing crumbs
O God, I could live in an oyster and count myself belonging to infinite space.
But I have bad dreams. Denmark is a prison.
“your ambition makes it so.”
…
the chain of numbers: sex dedicated to Stéphane Mallarmé
1 a doe 6
2 a door 5
3 adore 4
4 ardor’s 3
5 radar 2
6 odor 1
…
7
le hazard, executed
at each throw
of the die disappears.
le hazard, imprisoned
in each throw
of the die
…
Dracula
“Horatio: I’ll cross it though it blast me. Stay, illusion!
Speak to me…”
Existence is a very rare event,
out of the infinities that don’t happen.
These lines’re about the left out.
And their liberation.
The non-existent, you have nothing to lose
but your walls!
As Animals of Dawn is about being, The Spiritual Life of Replicants is about seeing. The first words I read are these: “If you could see what I see with your eyes!” That is Murat borrowing again. It’s a line of dialogue spoken by a robot to its creator in Blade Runner. And it makes sense. When I read, I read with the eyes of the writer. Later on in the book, the movie appears again. Look:
When all is said and done, the Los Angeles of Blade Runner is a slum with deserted buildings and leaky roofs and constant rays of observing eyes as helicopter light penetrating through the holes and windows. And the image is created with the arrival of light.
The image arriving, as rays of light through cavernous cracks to your brain, is tyranny. Repetition has a logic only the heart understands and the tyrant exploits The light is too bright and this the light knows so, wanting to be helpful, draws the line, what we need to see, darkness out of light, being, thought given shape. In plays of light and dark we watch movies, look at photographs, and read books. Before we can do anything, we need to see and that is the point, I believe, of The Spiritual Life of Replicants. In the autobiographical Io’s Song metamorphosis is what it’s all about. Out of the light we draw the line to make a word, and words add up to become books. Murat and Io are both from the Mediterranean and share its ancient soil and roots. Io, loved by Zeus and changed into cow, flees to Egypt chased by the jealous gadflies of Hera. Murat, in his youth, chased by his desires to learn English, came to New York. He wanted to become a writer, but that metamorphosis didn’t happen over night. In fact, it took him a decade to finally write a poem in English, but in that fallow time, he worked and thought. And I love how he thinks. It inspires me. In “Questions of Accent” Murat writes:
“I find the first two letters of ‘America’ infinitely stirring. It means ‘pussy’ in Turkish and ‘I am’ in English. It resonates with a tension between motherhood/sex (‘Am’ is also ‘mA’ in reverse) and identity. As I write down these thoughts, I notice suddenly that “Am” distorts the natural syllable break of the word. It accents “A-merica.” Not only do I speak English, but also, mentally, in my mind’s eye, hear it with an accent. The true power, even nature, of American English for me is accented, buried in this accent: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard….’
The true power of language, its well of inspiration, for me, lie in its conscious or unconscious errors, cracks, imperfections. I am a poet, an American poet, because I have a defective ear. And, first lesson: this defect is the source of my possible talents and their limitations…”
The immigrant must learn the rules, which is something the native born speaker doesn’t have to do. Knowing two languages, and seeing their similarities and differences, outside looking in, the immigrant gains insight into the possibilities and advantages, the risks a writer can take that lead to success. Most native English speakers, who have never needed to think about the words they speak, haven’t a clue to half of what is the English learner’s ken.
Murat Nemet-Nejat is an American poet whose English truthfully records its sounds and nuances, shapes and sizes, an entrepreneur of sentences that tell the truth. How does he do it? What can I tell you? Every good poet works and wills it so. I enjoy reading him because there’s always something new. Just today I noticed in The Spiritual Life of Replicants, there’s a poem in the shape of wings reminiscent of George Herbert’s “Easter Wings.” That is Murat borrowing again. In Io’s Song, he returns to the poem, shape and thought the same, and yet he expands and changes it. See. Be. Become. Become. Be. See. I have to end and leave Murat somewhere so I think I will end and leave him here with his winged poems I think they both are beautiful.
I hear
w w
i i
n n
g g
s s
in in
the the
f f
o o
l l
i i
a a
g g
e e
behind the wall.
I hear
w w w
i i i
n n n
g g g
s s s
in in in
the the the
f f f
o o o
l l l
i i i
a a a
g g g
e e e
behind the wall
the eye sees the contradictions in words and sees through itself, in an act of freedom.
s m i t h e r e e n s!
Over the last two weeks, as I’ve been reading and revisiting three books by Murat Nemet-Nejat, I’ve come to see them as a trilogy. The first, published by Talisman Press in 2011, The Spiritual Life of Replicants, is about seeing. The second, Animals of Dawn, published by Talisman in 2016, is about being. And the third, Io’s Song, published in 2019 by Chax Press, I would say is about becoming. But all three books interconnect with the solipsistic idea that the eye of the beholder exists. Poets use language to its best advantage, and there are poets whose work I enjoy who do that. Bernadette Mayer and Bill Kushner quickly come to mind. I would include Murat too, but what interests (and puzzles) me about him is that he, unlike Bernadette and Bill, did not grow up speaking English. There are those who would argue that Murat, who is fluent in Turkish and French with a little bit of Persian thrown in, can never be a good poet in English because it’s not his native language. But honestly I would argue that that isn’t true.
Human babies are born with the ability to speak every language that exists. But the baby, due to geography, begins to speak the language that it hears around it so the baby born in Dhaka speaks Bangla, and the baby born in Paris speaks French. We are born to speak every sound a human being can make though the sounds we will make are the sounds of the words that are composed around us. Poems, like any speech, are made of letters seen on the page, thoughts thought in the brain, and sounds heard in the ear. Poets combine this trinity in such sublime ways that people often commit it to memory. A thing of beauty is a joy forever, isn’t? But what about a man who is born without a language? How is he going to speak? And more importantly, if this alien turns out to be a poet, how will he write a poem? In his essay, “Questions of Accent,” Murat Nemet-Nejat writes about this:
“I speak no language like a native. Though I have lived in the States since 1959, my accent still sounds foreign. I was born in Turkey, but I am not Turkish. I am Jewish. In the fifties most Jews in Turkey were Sephardim and spoke Ladino Spanish. But I am not a Sephardi; I am a Persian Jew. My parents had moved to Istanbul on business, and I was born there in a Jewish neighborhood. But I learnt no Ladino, barely understood it. Jewish kids in the neighborhood thought I was Moslem, an outsider. At home, my parents spoke Persian with each other, which also I barely understood. Brothers among ourselves spoke Turkish. My mother spoke in an immigrant’s broken Turkish to me (my father barely spoke to me at all). Turkish became my mother tongue. I spoke Turkish in the street. I was, linguistically, most comfortable with other Turks, who mostly despised Jews. My speech became almost Turkish. Loving a language not completely my own was my first act as a Jew. And, despite my almost accentless speech, my first act of rebellion was to tell my Turkish friends I was not one of them. I was a Jew.”
As I was thinking about what Murat said, I happened to look at a poem in Animals of Dawn called “The Girl.” It was on a page I randomly opened. I’d read the book so I was seeing it again, and like every poem reread, I noticed things I hadn’t seen before; this is one of the rewards of a good poem; in a good way it never ends.
The Girl
The sleepy tree,
Among the vegetable life
of the garden,
A mailbox,
the sentry before the garden,
silent.
A caterpillar
lands on it,
green,
A disoriented,
half-hearted fugitive
from the green
garden,
Framed by a window
a girl of eight
bored by the whizzing
summer,
her eyelid twitches
as the Fly on the window
Squeezes,
cleans its head.
For a man with no language every word is a stranger in a strange land looking to define and make sense of itself. Here, the tree is in a garden of vegetables, not in a forest with its peers; the mailbox, vertical as a tree and partly made of wood stands apart keeping guard, the wrong occupation for a mailbox there to contain and protect errant daily words. The caterpillar should definitely not be on a mailbox visible to every bird. As I read the poem, I think I’m outside with the tree, mailbox and caterpillar, but actually I’m inside watching through a window where a fly rubs its thousand eyes for a moment before it flies. Like the wandering immigrant looking for a home, nothing in the poem is quite sure where it belongs. And in the sixth stanza in the sixteenth line finally there is the titled girl, and I realize I’ve been seeing what she is seeing, a part of her thoughts as she—bored and twitching—wants to be somewhere else. But she is wherever she goes. And I am her eyes.
In Animals of Dawn being out of non-being begins to form. Prince Hamlet is the medium in this book, and the characters around him, Shakespeare too. “To be or not to be” has to be asked. And to answer it, the poet without a language has to produce some. “To see the wall one must hang a coat on it,” Murat writes in Animals of Dawn. First, see the page, then write the words. In this meditative book, as in all his books, Murat often experiments with English, abstracts it into sounds, puts caesuras in the middle of a word, separating it into syllables, making shapes out of it, vertical sentences, scrambling words up so much on the page, you have to really look to make the unintelligible intelligible. Like a man without language, is he throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks? I, for one, don’t think he is. He is looking for the right word and borrowing from other writers too, which is OK, as T.S. Eliot might say, if you steal from the best. And in this regard—Let us use what we can!—Murat is a wonderful thief taking words from others and making them into his own. Anyone simply looking at the poems on the first few pages of Animals of Dawn will see what an adventure it is:
I want to make Hamlet, to dis appear.
The lightning that didn’t strike made me disappear completely. …
and her arms unknowingly caresses the water
wall
haiku haiku hai-
ku haiku haiku haiku haiku
haiku hi
Plop. Frog
Circles disappearing, in fini te
Until I touched her, my sister gave hope but her corpse was heavy out of water.
Don’t touch the translucence, they turn into wing crumbs
O God, I could live in an oyster and count myself belonging to infinite space.
But I have bad dreams. Denmark is a prison.
“your ambition makes it so.”
…
the chain of numbers: sex dedicated to Stéphane Mallarmé
1 a doe 6
2 a door 5
3 adore 4
4 ardor’s 3
5 radar 2
6 odor 1
…
7
le hazard, executed
at each throw
of the die disappears.
le hazard, imprisoned
in each throw
of the die
…
Dracula
“Horatio: I’ll cross it though it blast me. Stay, illusion!
Speak to me…”
Existence is a very rare event,
out of the infinities that don’t happen.
These lines’re about the left out.
And their liberation.
The non-existent, you have nothing to lose
but your walls!
As Animals of Dawn is about being, The Spiritual Life of Replicants is about seeing. The first words I read are these: “If you could see what I see with your eyes!” That is Murat borrowing again. It’s a line of dialogue spoken by a robot to its creator in Blade Runner. And it makes sense. When I read, I read with the eyes of the writer. Later on in the book, the movie appears again. Look:
When all is said and done, the Los Angeles of Blade Runner is a slum with deserted buildings and leaky roofs and constant rays of observing eyes as helicopter light penetrating through the holes and windows. And the image is created with the arrival of light.
The image arriving, as rays of light through cavernous cracks to your brain, is tyranny. Repetition has a logic only the heart understands and the tyrant exploits The light is too bright and this the light knows so, wanting to be helpful, draws the line, what we need to see, darkness out of light, being, thought given shape. In plays of light and dark we watch movies, look at photographs, and read books. Before we can do anything, we need to see and that is the point, I believe, of The Spiritual Life of Replicants. In the autobiographical Io’s Song metamorphosis is what it’s all about. Out of the light we draw the line to make a word, and words add up to become books. Murat and Io are both from the Mediterranean and share its ancient soil and roots. Io, loved by Zeus and changed into cow, flees to Egypt chased by the jealous gadflies of Hera. Murat, in his youth, chased by his desires to learn English, came to New York. He wanted to become a writer, but that metamorphosis didn’t happen over night. In fact, it took him a decade to finally write a poem in English, but in that fallow time, he worked and thought. And I love how he thinks. It inspires me. In “Questions of Accent” Murat writes:
“I find the first two letters of ‘America’ infinitely stirring. It means ‘pussy’ in Turkish and ‘I am’ in English. It resonates with a tension between motherhood/sex (‘Am’ is also ‘mA’ in reverse) and identity. As I write down these thoughts, I notice suddenly that “Am” distorts the natural syllable break of the word. It accents “A-merica.” Not only do I speak English, but also, mentally, in my mind’s eye, hear it with an accent. The true power, even nature, of American English for me is accented, buried in this accent: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard….’
The true power of language, its well of inspiration, for me, lie in its conscious or unconscious errors, cracks, imperfections. I am a poet, an American poet, because I have a defective ear. And, first lesson: this defect is the source of my possible talents and their limitations…”
The immigrant must learn the rules, which is something the native born speaker doesn’t have to do. Knowing two languages, and seeing their similarities and differences, outside looking in, the immigrant gains insight into the possibilities and advantages, the risks a writer can take that lead to success. Most native English speakers, who have never needed to think about the words they speak, haven’t a clue to half of what is the English learner’s ken.
Murat Nemet-Nejat is an American poet whose English truthfully records its sounds and nuances, shapes and sizes, an entrepreneur of sentences that tell the truth. How does he do it? What can I tell you? Every good poet works and wills it so. I enjoy reading him because there’s always something new. Just today I noticed in The Spiritual Life of Replicants, there’s a poem in the shape of wings reminiscent of George Herbert’s “Easter Wings.” That is Murat borrowing again. In Io’s Song, he returns to the poem, shape and thought the same, and yet he expands and changes it. See. Be. Become. Become. Be. See. I have to end and leave Murat somewhere so I think I will end and leave him here with his winged poems I think they both are beautiful.
I hear
w w
i i
n n
g g
s s
in in
the the
f f
o o
l l
i i
a a
g g
e e
behind the wall.
I hear
w w w
i i i
n n n
g g g
s s s
in in in
the the the
f f f
o o o
l l l
i i i
a a a
g g g
e e e
behind the wall
the eye sees the contradictions in words and sees through itself, in an act of freedom.
s m i t h e r e e n s!