Yeşim Ağaoğlu turns out to be an
artist who has created her own complex world. Reading her poems you are feeling
the creative power of her visual fantasy. She does’nt only write poems but is
also a visual artist and works with photography, installations and
performances. That means her poetical world too is always visual. Her imagery
is pictorial, often (melo) dramatic. She gets inspired by paintings and films,
is condensing in names and phenomenas of the global mainstream culture
metaphorical meanings. Her lyrical self gets involved in courageous role plays.
Whores, mermaids, tranvestites, murderers, punks, street musicians, circus
artists, extraterrestrials are populating her poems. Small well-knit melancholy
or amusing surrealist showpieces are amazing the reader because of their
imaginary playfulness, while their deeper meaning is not quite clear at the
first moment and has to be deciphered by closer reading. Borders between the
real and surrealist, the magic and fantastic dimensions are always fluid.
Things are anthropomorphisized, animals and birds represent their fable-like
nature. Transformation, confusion, deformation, disguising are omnipresent.
Metamorphosis and mutation rescue from stiffness and fear. The poetical self
has a sensual physical presence, it is bleeding, melting, licking and spitting.
Her inner self is like a dark cave where different creatures, animals and
personified emotions as loneliness and fear are living and haunting her, even
the poetress herself is falling down and locked up in this dark cave. The
natural dichotomies of summer and winter, day and night, life and death are
rythmical recurrent experiences close linked to love. In the poetry of Yeşim
Ağaoğlu the central theme is love, love as a passion of high frequency which
may produce short-circuit. It is a kind of obsession and wants to keep hold of
the beloved one in the stable relationship of a mythical couple. This is a
specifical tradition in oriental literature as Goethe already realized. Leyla
and Mecnun, Yusuf and Züleyha and suchlike are common figures in
Ottoman-Turkish classical as well as in Turkish folk literature. But Yeşim
Ağaoğlu finds the role models of excellent couples in the modern global world:
Heidi and Peter, Dali and Gala, Frida (Kahlo) and Diego, Paul and Beatrice, the
spiderman and his wife. But since the loving self is the inferior femal part
she is suffering from jealousy and mistrust and always scents betrayal and
deceit. She feels threatened by the end of the love and fears to be left alone.
Sometimes “the others” are involved being slanderous and destructive. The femal
self-confidence thirsty for freedom is unstable, because freedom means “left
alone without the beloved one”, that means absolute loneliness. This
contradiction may be as well a productive situation in which can be developed
the proud identity as a poetress by creative poetic power. So she is able to
dedicate her poems to her beloved as precious presents. On the basis of the
recollection of common adventures and memories is originated a subtle
subjective metaphorical language which is difficult to decipher. On the other
hand the offending by desertedness gives rise to an explosive “feministic”
outburst of rage against the traitor-beloved who highheartedly and without
commitment is enjoying his freedom. These dynamic emotions are producing in her
mind fantastic threatening scenarios which by their violent and inhuman
consequences remind of the brutal reality of the world. The readers guess here
might be political allusions. In such moments the excentric poetical self can
be - not without ironical alienation effect – exhilarated unto orgasmic climax
of self destruction and the desire to
kill.
A moderate reaction to desertedness
however is the impulse to travel to the cities of longing to meet again with
the beloved one. But this action deserves the courage to enjoy the freedom by
desertedness, the willingness to experience the alienation of the femal
individual as well as to pay attention to strange people and the power to
sublimate all these things in poetry.
The fascination of modern cities as
London and New York with their crowded underground stations and lonely
hotelrooms are unthinkable without the nostalgic bonds to native Istanbul full
of historical traditions. Therefore the topogragraphical dimensions of the poetical
texts are far-reaching. She succeds in giving fine impressions of city life by
local colour and sound for instance jazz musicians in the streets and the call
to prayer from the minarets.
In Yeşim Ağaoğlu’s poetical language
we find sometimes uncommon untranslatable terms, which she calls “Yeşimce”
something like “Yeshimsh”. Her poems are complex. Political polemics or
feministic positions are never ideological, they are integrated as natural
elements in the complexity of her poetical world. She masters the soft and the
rough sound. Her vulnerability is shown by the picture of the dust on the
butterfly’s wing and her brutality by the intimate flirtation with the knife.
Such contradictions are combined in the picture of the “thunderrose”. Inspite
of the dramatical stories and the realistic and surrealistic pictoral power her
poems are sometimes difficult to interprete. Instructive is always the first
and before all the last line of a poem as the fundamental element of the
poetical structure. But there remain always secrets.
