Renowned poet and playwright Tank Gunersel may well be Turkey's most versatile living writer--as well as its most visionary and experimental. Gunersel's work spans the spectrum from literature written in the classical vein to more avant-garde forays into the genre-defying realms of visual and numerical poetry.

In a review in the Autumn 1990 issue of World Literature Today, Talat Sait Halman says that "no one else in Turkey recreates life and language with

Gunersel's cataclysmic innovations." Comparing Gunersel's work to the music of John Cage, Halman goes on to declare that both artists "demonstrate a similar audacity of form and substance, comparable flights of the imagination, and the same revolutionary way of seeing objects and hearing sounds."

Dawn Kotapish, introduction to A Conversation with Tarık Günersel World Literature Today 2011 Jan-Feb issue

A Conversation with Tarık Günersel - World Literature Today 2011 Jan-Feb

Interview for Sampsonia Way
http://www.sampsoniaway.org/blog/2012/10/15/a-cataclysmic-innovator-pen-turkey-president-tarik-gunersel/

Muhafizgücü:1 - Hayalgücü:0
(Rearguards:1, Power of Imagination: 0 )

-World Literature Today autumn 1990

"Admittedly, analogies between genres can be misleading, even perilous, but it is safe to liken the avant-garde poetry of Tarik Günersel to the music of John Cage. The two artists demonstrate a similar audicaty of form and substance, comparable flights of the imagination, and the same revolutionary way of seeing objects and hearing sounds. At any rate, no one else in Turkey recreates life and language with Günersel's cataclysmic innovations. A true original who not only has gone far beyond most of the daring explorations of modern Turkish verse but has also probed the outer reaches postmodernism, concrete poetry, computer esthetics, postdeconstructionism, and grammatology, Günersel (b.1953) unfurls a world that exists only in his imagination. His poems bear no resemblance -or relationship- to those written by anyone else in the Turkish language.

Günersel is Turkey's premier assassin of romanticism. If he occasionally offers dramas of the self, they are either done in jest or are clinical in nature. He is the first Turkish poet who is not a troubadour and the first who has gained an understanding of the scientific possibilities of verse. Not that he avoids the temptations of ancient mythology or lust or love. He is as receptive -more than that, as voracious- as a computer. He is programmed to make a new synthesis of all the data he receives and to restructure it all into poems of a unique esthetic technology.

A dramatist whose plays scare producers with their boldness, a librettist who has given new vigor to the genre, a short-story writer whose voice sounds unlike any other in Turkey, Günersel creates stunning juxtapositions of abstractions and concrete elements in his poetry. If would be too facile to herald him as an enfant terrible; his is a far more serious-minded vision -and mission- to transform the Turkish poetic experience. The present collection stands (or, rather, takes a quantum leap) as a new dimension of imagination. His novelties predictably encounter resistance from the literary establishment. As the title indicates, for the present the conservatives are ahead of the innovators."

Prof. Dr. Talât Sait Halman