A centennial volume, with previously unavailable poems, by Turkey's greatest poet. Published in celebration of the poet's one hundredth birthday, this exciting edition of the poems of the Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963) collects work from his four previous selected volumes and adds more than twenty poems never before available in English. The Blasing/Konuk translations, acclaimed for the past quarter-century for their accuracy and grace, convey Hikmet's compassionate, accessible voice with the subtle music, innovative form, and emotional directness of the originals.

Approaching post-World War II poetry from a postmodern critical perspective, this study challenges the prevailing assumption that experimental forms signify political opposition while traditional forms are politically conservative. Such essentialist alignments of forms with extra-formal values, and the oppositional framework of innovation versus conservation that they yield, reflect modernist biases inappropriate for reading postwar poetry. Biasing defines postmodern poetry as a break with modernism's valorization of technique and its implicit collusion with technological progress. She shows that four major postwar poets - Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery and James Merrill (two traditional and two experimental) - cannot be read as politically conservative because formally traditional or as culturally oppositional because formally experimental. All of these poets acknowledge that no one form is more natural than another, and no given form grants them a superior position for judging cultural and political arrangements. Their work plays an important cultural role precisely by revealing that meanings and values do not inhere in forms but are always and irreducibly rhetorical.

Approaching post-World War II poetry from a postmodern critical perspective, this study challenges the prevailing assumption that experimental forms signify political opposition while traditional forms are politically conservative. Such essentialist alignments of forms with extra-formal values, and the oppositional framework of innovation versus conservation that they yield, reflect modernist biases inappropriate for reading postwar poetry. Biasing defines postmodern poetry as a break with modernism's valorization of technique and its implicit collusion with technological progress. She shows that four major postwar poets - Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery and James Merrill (two traditional and two experimental) - cannot be read as politically conservative because formally traditional or as culturally oppositional because formally experimental. All of these poets acknowledge that no one form is more natural than another, and no given form grants them a superior position for judging cultural and political arrangements. Their work plays an important cultural role precisely by revealing that meanings and values do not inhere in forms but are always and irreducibly rhetorical.

Written during the Second World War while Hikmet was serving a thirteen-year sentence as a political prisoner, his verse-novel uses cinematic techniques to tell the story of the emergence of secular, modern Turkey by focusing on the always-entertaining stories of sundry characters from all walks of life. As his vignettes flash before our eyes at movie-like speed, it becomes clear he is also telling the turbulent story of the twentieth century itself and the ongoing struggle between tradition, which trusts in God, and modernity, which entrusts the world to human hands.

Hikmet's final book--an autobiographical novel about a man who is imprisoned for being a Communist, his friends, and the women he loved. Considered to be a major work in his oeuvre. This is the first publication in English translation.

Nazim Hikmet (1902 1963), Turkey s best-loved poet and a commanding presence in its public life, lived through a turbulent era the end of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Communist Russia, and the birth of the Turkish Republic. Born into the Ottoman elite, Hikmet embraced Communist ideals and joined the revolutionary ranks at nineteen. Of passionate temperament, he lived his life full-tilt, deeply romantic in his loves and uncompromising in his politics for which he spent more than a third of his life in prisons or in exile. His stirring free verse in simple words, praising his country, his women, and the common man, was considered subversive and banned for decades. Today it is available in more than fifty languages, and Hikmet is recognized worldwide as a major twentieth-century poet."

Lyric poetry has long been regarded as the intensely private, emotional expression of individuals, powerful precisely because it draws readers into personal worlds. But who, exactly, is the "I" in a lyric poem, and how is it created? In "Lyric Poetry," Mutlu Blasing argues that the individual in a lyric is only a virtual entity and that lyric poetry takes its power from the public, emotional power of language itself.

In the first major new theory of the lyric to be put forward in decades, Blasing proposes that lyric poetry is a public discourse deeply rooted in the mother tongue. She looks to poetic, linguistic, and psychoanalytic theory to help unravel the intricate historical processes that generate speaking subjects, and concludes that lyric forms convey both personal and communal emotional histories in language. Focusing on the work of such diverse twentieth-century American poets as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Anne Sexton, Blasing demonstrates the ways that the lyric "I" speaks, from first to last, as a creation of poetic language.

The chapbook of the Second Annual Nazim Hikmet Poetry Festival opens with the Festival's invited speaker, the renowned literary translator of Hikmet and a scholar of literature, Professor Mutlu Konuk Blasing of Brown University. Her analysis, "Nazim Hikmet: The Forms of Exile" establishes important insights about Hikmet's poetry of exile as reflected in the poet's mixed use of traditional and free verse forms. The rest of the chapbook is dedicated to poems submitted by the winners of the poetry competition. The competition received over five hundred poems from one hundred seventy poets representing places as far afield as Alaska and Malta. The festival and the poetry competition were organized by American Turkish Association of North Carolina. The festival has taken place on April 18, 2010 in Cary, NC. The festival organizers were Buket Aydemir, Pelin Bali, Erdag Goknar, Mehmet C. Ozturk and Birgul Tuzlali.

Autobiographical literature especially reveals the processes by which writers convert their own historical experience into fictional form and suggests how literary forms function in life. This volume defines an original theory of autobiographical writing and provides intriguing analyses of major American works of literature.

The Art of Life examines the transformation of history into literature in Walden, "Song of Myself," Henry James's Prefaces, The Education of Henry Adams, Paterson, and the poetry of Frank O'Hara. These works are approached as events in themselves and are analyzed as conversions of form and history, fiction and fact, and even aesthetics and politics. Thus the work of literature is set in the total experience of living, and the writer is seen not only as an artist but also as a person in a historical, political, and cultural environment. As well as a creator of literature, the writer is viewed as a social, psychological, and biological being.

Chapters on the narcissistic economy of Walden, the mythicizing of history and personality in "Song of Myself," the self-conscious relation that makes the Prefaces of Henry James the autobiography of an artist. the comic perspective of The Education of Henry Adams, and the radical innovation of Paterson and O'Hara's poetry provide new readings of major American works. Each chapter contains some distinct critical insight which not only contributes to, but can be relished apart from, the book's overarching theoretical argument.

The Art of Life is a sophisticated theoretical discussion of autobiography with rich psychological, philosophical, and cultural ramifications.