Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Poetry Scores shown love by Turkish newspaper


Here it is: physical evidence that Poetry Scores is now big in Turkey. There it is, a story about our poetry score to the great modern Turkish poem Blind Cat Black being discussed in the Turkish press.

The notice appeared yesterday in a national Turkish newspaper called BİRGÜN. It comes described as a "left-wing daily" that was "founded in 2004 by a group of Turkish intellectuals. The most important point of the newspaper is that it doesn't have any owners."

Those are our people.

Our main person in Istanbul is the poet Zafer Yalçınpınar, who discovered our project when putting together the first-ever website devoted to Ece Ayhan, author of Blind Cat Black, though we scored the gorgeous English translation by Murat Nemet-Nejat, and we are doing our best to bring Murat with us into the glory days of the Ece Ayhan revival.

Zafer has promised to mail us a copy of the actual newspaper, which will be nice to have indeed, and he may find the time to translate the article so we can understand what those left-wing intellectuals in Istanbul have to say about us.

For now, I actually am just excited to read ".. turkishturkishturkishturkish Chris King turkishturkishturkishturkish Poetry Scores turkishturkishturkishturkish ..." It makes me feel like, I don't know, I did something with my life. That we. Are doing something. With our. Lives.

Zafer also has expressed interest in screening the silent movie we wrote, shot and edited to our score for Blind Cat Black in Istanbul. Lead editor Aaron AuBuchon and I have set aside a month of Wednesday nights in January to do final color treatments and master this thing, and the Ece Ayhan events in Istanbul are in February. So I'd say we have got ourselves a deadline here!

As a little treat for any Turks who find this item and are trying to download and collect all of the pieces from our score that I have been posting up, here is a good one we haven't posted yet! Enjoy!

Free mp3
From Blind Cat Black
Poetry by Ece Ayhan
Translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat
Music by Flatrock
Reading by Pops Farrar
Produced by Chris King
Recorded by Lij
Mastered by Adam Long