brooklyn Tag

Exit Strata is pleased to invite you to an exciting event celebrating art, collaboration, and community in Brooklyn this coming sunday. F.O.K.U.S. [Fighting Obstacles Knowing Ultimate Success] is an arts organization founded at UMich in 2003 by art students committed to promoting and creating opportunities for creative individuals and communities -- it now has chapters in New York and Ann Arbor, and is a fully fledged 501c3 nonprofit, which has been organizing public events like this one ever since! Awesome Creator Anna Barsan, of the Signified Project [in collaboration with Jessie Levandov] started working with FOKUS in Ann Arbor, and is now a member of the NYC chapter; along with Gio(vanna) Fischer, Anna was instrumental in bringing this event into being... and to our attention! The focus of FOKUS is right in line with our own, and we could not be more thrilled to introduce our communities to each other. Without further ado, THE FLOCK:

  [caption id="attachment_791" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="HELIOPOLIS presents The Industrious Revolution, May 2010"][/caption] The Heliopolis Project is a storefront gallery and project space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn NY dedicated to fostering a dialogue across all disciplines of making. Founded in 2010 by Eliza Swann and Jason Grabowski, Heliopolis has recently expanded. Collaboratively run, its members now include Bill Abdale, Georgia Elrod, Baris Gokturk, Leo Goldsmith, Rachel Rakes, Sarada Rauch and Andy Wolf. The first show curated by the new members was Soft Opening, March 9th-April 11th, 2012. The space was established to support artists with experiments in literature and art and to foster interdisplinary and translocal dialogues by hosting poets and artists in residence from around the US. As the economy and art market plummeted in the past few years a tightly knit arts community emerged that granted themselves authority over their own work and gave each other mutual permission and support to pursue an alternative way of thinking about the purpose and formal nature of art.

I’m going to level with you; I know nothing about Turkey and I know even less about Turkish Poetry. Luckily, I have Buké, my sole Turkish friend. Buké is tiny, smokes cigarettes, and speaks with a directness that can sometimes be mistaken for rudeness. It is she who introduced me to the Turkish poet Orhan Veli Kanik (1914-1950). I can’t speak to Kanik’s stature but, like Buké, his poetry is about as direct as a poet can get. Like the work of William Carlos Williams or, more contemporarily, Billy Collins, Kanik’s poems have been described as the kind of poetry that convinces readers they, too, can write a poem. Take, for example, “The Hill”.
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THE HILL

In the next life, after the factories end their work If the road taking us home In the evenings Is not So steep Death Is not a horrible thing At all. It reads like something your grandfather might say and that’s what makes it so effective. A good poem is a story that never gets old. It stays with you and no matter how often you tell it there remains the same spark of truth. In “People”, Kanik expresses a single thought simply and profoundly. The profundity is apparent upon first reading but the genius of it is a slow burn.

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