bounty not border

Poetry’s allegiance is to the resources of language and not to the boundaries of genre.

field awareness

He was deft with line breaks, like a wide receiver who knows how to test the edge of the field but always keeps two feet in bounds.

amoebic ambit

With an amoebic ambit, my love of art is capacious, not being one who draws or respects lines as boundaries.

both philatelist and pirate

He wrote his poems against the gravity of language. Images, therefore, speak in his poetry solely on his behalf.

[…]

He was almost a philatelist with words. (He saw, long before we did, the fact that the boundaries of language are the boundaries of the world.)

[…]

A man of the Golden Age. “Poeta pirata est,” he would say?

From “Oktay Rifat”

—Ilhan Berk, Selected Poems by Ilhan Berk (Talisman House, 2004), edited and translation by Önder Otçu.