Animals and the Environment in Turkish Culture by Kim Fortuny;

Author:Kim Fortuny;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

5

Ecopoetics, Dead Metaphors, and Bird Migration: The Bosporus Passage of the European White Stork

One often comes across the European White Stork (Ciconia ciconia) in the poetic geography of Istanbul. These long-distance migratory birds travel across the Dardanelles and along the Bosporus tracking the arrival of spring or anticipating the departure of autumn depending on the seasonal direction of the flight pattern. The reliable, yet remarkable, migration of these birds is a constant against which poets work through various themes of stasis and flux. Attila Ilhan, the modernist Turkish poet whom the late literary critic and writer Talat Halman admired for his “exploratory zeal” and “exhaustive metaphoric preoccupation” with the Turkish language, features the passage of the storks in his poem “One Three Five,” a poem that contrasts movement in the natural world with the paralysis of the human speaker at the center of the poem:

you who are that lonely cloud in the cold sky

holding the familiar loneliness by the hand

in the midst of a generous blue

say that you are forgotten

the seas roll forward with a great uproar

you are coming up against time

one three and five the storks are gone now

now a haven in darkness calls you

a haven where you are forgotten not forgotten where you are unknown

(Halman 1)1

In another poem by Ilhan, “Maria Missakian,” storks again mark the passage of the season, here the quickening of winter weather:

if I could hide in her shadow at night

the clouds growing in the sky

if I could listen to the rain and tell

lightning breaking

if they left us in the streets

if the storks left because of the cold

never looking back once

it’s night again attila ilhan

and you’re alone a stranger of the autumn.

(İlhan “one,” 17)

Again, the poetic persona stands apart from the seasonal flux, seemingly trapped in a dislocated human consciousness whose conditional status (the “if” of the anaphoric “I”) contrasts with the certainty of natural phenomena. As “a stranger of autumn” the speaker, unlike the migrating storks, does not know where or how to go.

Poetry has always relied on the natural world as compass, whether the geography be external or internal. While poetic engagement with nature has often been aestheticized and idealized, many twentieth-century poets have also relied on the natural world as immutable fact, a material given that often functions as the stabilizing referent in metaphoric constructions. In these two examples from Ilhan, the departure of the migratory birds signals a reality beyond the page, an avian truth that anchors the poems in biological constancy. The birds allow for the contrastive function of the human metaphors. The entanglement of poetry and the environments from which it emerges, or with which it engages, is nothing new. Postindustrial urban culture in the twentieth century, whether the United States or Turkey, has taken nature as a referent in new directions, however. As writers and readers have become increasingly aware of the depth and breadth of human manipulations of the environment, the place of nature in poetry has in many ways become further solidified in its role as a constant and in contrast to the vagaries of human activity.

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