Abstract:

Meta-narratives in literary texts have become increasingly widespread as a conscious choice after modernism and especially postmodernism. These narratives, which have strengthened their place in the literature with metafiction in the world of fiction, have found their counterparts in poetry with metapoetry. The origin of ‘metapoetry’, which poets self-consciously put forward after modernism, can be traced back to the ancient period in the West, and to Classical Ottoman poetry in the Turkish culture as far as we can discover. In its most general definition, metapoetry is a layer of meta-meaning in which the poets, by going beyond/above the visible, ordinary meaning layer of the poem and by creating a different layer of meaning, reveal the nature of poetry, the formation process of poetry, the poet’s own poetic thoughts about both his own poetics and the poetry tradition he or she is in, with a conceptual, symbolic or imagist language. Artists and especially poets, after modernism, have turned to meta-narratives and meta-poetry by questioning the relationship between reality and fiction, with the tendency of individualistic, narcissistic self-consciousness that emerged with capitalism on the one hand, and scientific developments that envision uncertainty on the other. Although we come across verse poetic texts on poetry in Turkish literature, in the Classical Ottoman poetry, the Ottoman poets did not write these texts with a modernist consciousness. Ahmet Cemâl Nâbedid (1869-1942), who we have discussed in this article, wrote 30 poems as examples of “metapoetry” in the modernist book Arabadan Şiirler (Vesaiti Nakliye) that he wrote between 1918-1919 and published in 1932, which (“the metapoetical nature of the book”) is “clearly” stated by himself in the preface of his book. We did not find any record in the international literature that there was a work consisting of “metapoems” produced with such self-consciousness, at the level of a thematic book, in the West or the East in those years; in this case, Nâbedid’s book is probably one of the first works in the world where metapoetry is “overtly” applied throughout the book, or to put it somewhat cautiously, one of the first works; on the other hand, it seems possible to argue that in the Turkish literature this book is the first poetry book that is “metapoetic” from beginning to end, unless historical evidence is shown to the contrary. In this respect, we think that the aforementioned book of Nâbedid, regardless of its limited recognition, should be considered as a “literary event” when looked back with conceptual/theoretical attention. The fact that all three of Nâbedid's books are “thematic” and that the aforementioned book is metapoetic shows that Nâbedid embodied some dimensions of Hilmi Yavuz’s (a famous poet who published books many years after Nâbedid) “Concept of Poetry (book)”, as early as 1919-1932. There is still very limited information in the Turkish literature about the concept which is referred to as “Metapoetry” in the Western literature and which we propose to transfer to the Turkish literature as “Metaşiir” in this study; metapoetry is discussed in our study in the context of conceptual framework, theoretical ground, and historical development process. The fact that Nâbedid “overtly” put into practice, in poetry, and moreover within the unity of a thematic book, in “Arabadan Poems (Vesaiti Nakliye)” in the 1930s, a “post-modern” technique such as metapoetic narration which is sometimes intertwined with irony, which became widespread in parallel with the general trend in the world literature after 1980 and encountered in Turkey in the poems of many poets such as Cahit Koytak, Nazmi Ağıl etc. besides Hilmi Yavuz; suggests that Nâbedid may be one of the early “sources” of poetical positions that embody modernist and even possibly postmodernist qualities. One of the poems, the “Devil’s Vehicle” of Ahmet Cemâl Nâbedid – who has been largely forgotten in our literary history, but who has not been seen before in terms of his understanding of “literary theory” and his technique of putting it into practice, and who wrote original, distinctive, ironic, “self-conscious”, modernist poems within the framework of his ‘concept of (Metapoetic) Poetry (book)’ – which can be shown as a clear example of metapoetry, has been examined and evaluated in this article.