Virtually all the literature periodicals of Turkey published in the last three months have dealt with the Gezi protests in reportages of various length. Edebiyatta Üç Nokta, the literary journal directed by Cenk Gündoğdu, has even devoted a 200-page new issue to the recent wave of anti-governmental protest in Turkey. The issue published two days ago has four sub-sections, and in the editor’s preface titled “This is not a demonstration” (directly referring to Magritte’s “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”), Cenk Gündoğdu points out that each decade has its own peculiar poets. Starting from the “Second New” wave, he names Ataol Behramoğlu, Ahmet Telli, Nevzat Çelik, Emirhan Oğuz, and in the 1990s küçük iskender, as embodying the spirit of the decade. The question that comes to the fore is obviously “where was poetry while people were protesting in Gezi Park?”. From the linguistic point of view, the protests have been extremely creative.
Poets, scholars, and journalists of very different backgrounds have been discussing what has changed with the protest in the intellectual life of the country. Stella Morgana has offered a different perspective, analysing the Italian reflection of the protests. Ahmet Erhan, Çiğdem Sezer, Sina Akyol, Betül Tarıman, Cihan Oğuz, Mesut Aşkın, Alper Gencer, Didem Gülçin Erdem, Cengiz Kılçer, Selahattin Yolgiden, Cihat Duman, Müslim Çelik, Mustafa Atapay, Faris Arşivlik have contributed to the issue with their poems. Probably the biggest merit of this issue of Edebiyatta Üç Nokta is to open a confrontation on the linguistic and literary aspects of the protest, stimulating the reader with multi-faceted analyses and valuable contribution in verse.
Defter - Poesia Turca Contemporanea 