Ilhan Berk was born in 1918 in the Aegean city of Manisa. He once said "If a poem is written and goes out into the world, something in the world has changed." Berk's poems have been changing the world of Turkish poetry for the best part of seven decades. His innovative poetics have marked him out as one of the vital modernizing forces in contemporary Turkish literature and earned him a reputation as a literary enfant terrible, even an "extremist." Yet others deride his linguistic experimentalism as the work of a "French renegade." Few poets in Turkey today would dispute the significance of his work. Even in the year of his death, at the tender age of 90, more productive than ever, Berk remained a force to be reckoned with.
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Berk's writing was a process of steady, careful refinement and, though his language never stopped changing, the vision remained remarkably clear. "The important thing," Berk tells us, "is to live the life of poetry, the writing always comes later."
