Forget Thee: An Encounter with Ian Dreiblatt

The day begins with signs. Always... In my Turkish coffee cup, which I fill with water to soften the drying coffee grounds before washing it, an inscription (perhaps a poem) appears in Chinese when I look vertically and in Sanskrit when I look horizontally. Moreover, if we did not intuit the form on this earth, could we easily name things? 

Mayakovsky, who wanted the poem to explode like a slap in the human face, after the times when the poem was written with a regression in the language, or instead with a recession, could certainly understand how tender the human spirit is to be wary of things exploding after the atomic bomb. We are now tracking in the silence. Signs do not get us anywhere. However, the form is enough to hold it together. 

Poetry wandered in the desolate plains, pastoral melodies, and enchanted forests of ancient times. Poetry, fought on battlefields and arenas, wrapped in silk, tucked into gold pouches, hung on the walls of holy places, curled up on the parchments, sometimes it lived in a woman's body and sometimes in a man's body. At the tip of the reed pens, in ink cans, in handkerchief pockets, in machine gears, in typewriter strokes... Then it slept on the street. In the red and green of spray paints. On the outskirts of the city and in art galleries. In psychiatry clinics, in meditation camps, in television shows. Now poetry is everywhere and, therefore, nowhere. Maybe only in silence, we hear it again. 

An encounter, says John Berger, is – unlike a meeting – inherently sudden and unpredictable. An encounter with beauty is always to witness an exception. It is always despite everything there. That is why it attracts us. Is it possible to encounter beauty here despite everything, despite everything that kills the spirit of time? Where is this place? A modern metropolis or a necropolis? Or is it an attic where thousands of people from all over the world take shelter? Where to find the poem? It is futile to look for it in the city, I know. 

When a person gets up from a crowded table and sits at a table alone, at least, prefers that table to be a sun-drenched one. How cold our thoughts and how warm our feelings... Maybe that is why we welcome summer as a feeling and winter as a challenging idea. In Sarajevo, walking through a song, I come across a New Yorker poet. There are no pauses in his poetry, and of course, it is without measure. Still, he can get some cool mountain air in his poem. He mentions that poets in New York carried poetry in their pockets instead of money, and they were waiting for a chance to push each other down the stairs. However, I understand that his eyes are more on the saints than the poets. He fermenting his poetry in the sage of this age. Then he asking:

"well, what are saints for if not to break the distance between the things around us and the words we use."

Ian Dreiblatt lives in Brooklyn, New York. He writes poetry and does translations from Russian. He is attracted by etymologies, the significant differences between languages ​​and idioms, the tension between writing and speaking, the hazy pragmatics that make communication possible nonetheless. We meet through a Bosnian word that fascinates us both in separate cities and separate lives: "dunjaluce".

That is how the world talks to us, making us talk to each other...

In Turkish, it is not yet possible to read "Forget Thee," Dreiblatt's first full-length poetry book. However, I look forward to the day when Ian's poetry will open to us, and the poeticness of Turkish will open to him.

The book takes its name from the following lines from Psalm 137: "IF I FORGET THEE, Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill / May my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember thee." It is an oath sworn by an Israelite poet in Babylonian exile. Leeore Schnairsohn, who wrote a review on Dreiblatt's Forget Thee, emphasizes that our age appears to have outgrown such oaths and sureties. According to him, old Jerusalem (recovered, or occupied, since 1967) is now half Babylon. Its web of alleyways packed with shops selling antiques and icons alongside off-brand electronics and your-favorite-baseball-team-in-Hebrew-letters on a tank top: "Ancient enmities fester under the signs of a totalizing globalist culture, amid soft calls of "Hello, where are you from?" and the hustle of soldiers behind a sudden barrier. Among well-signed avenues of homecoming — Germans snapping the Via Dolorosa, Russians lining up to kneel at Golgotha, Americans circle-dancing before the Wailing Wall — a kind of ecumenical estrangement hangs in the air, spiritual exhaustion that makes you sit down in a plastic chair and order a Coke. The right book to pull out at that moment might be Ian Dreiblatt's first full-length collection of poetry, forget thee. Under a title that has forgotten what the psalmist swore he would remember, the book imagines our world — the United States and its adjacent cultures — as the new Jerusalem: a place of fractured genealogies, slippery language, and simmering injustice, lorded over by the dread confetti culture of global capitalism and waiting to complete its dissolution. The book claims that this place is also worth remembering, though it may no longer be worth its name."

Freud says that modern man has been subjected to three basic blows that completely shook his truth perception:

"Cosmogonic coup" makes him learn that it is no longer the center of the world because he is no longer fixed.

The "biological blow" that followed: One has to understand that his pedigree is not based on the prophets and the gods of mythological times, that he is descended from apes, and that the foundation of the world is no longer the natural light of reason but a blind nature that operates through a selection by which the fittest survive.

With the 'psychological blow,' he realizes that 'his self is no longer the master of his own home,' that he is floating on an ocean of unconscious and irrational forces, and that what he is in the habit of calling 'history' is just a scene of catastrophe where primitive and irreconcilable instincts collide. In the words of Daryush Shayegan, after all these blows, humans cannot turn to the holy in order to survive; even if he forgets his oath, at least he creates a hybrid consciousness that will keep his memory alive. It is possible to see the traces of this hybrid consciousness in Ian Dreiblatt's poetry.

Dürdane İsra Çınar, January 2022 - Istanbul