A City of Words: José F. A. Oliver’s Istanbul Poems

Abstract

José F. A. Oliver’s experimental urban aesthetics requires a rethinking of the iconic figure of the flâneur. In Oliver’s Istanbul poems, the flâneur is disembodied, giving way to a peripatetic consciousness that engages the experiential heterogeneity of the encounter with the city on multiple levels — emotional, visual, cognitive, rhythmic, auditory, verbal — and versifies this engagement as a city of words. Through this poetic practice, the readers experience the city in their imagination, with vicarious trepidation and excitement. There is a democratic ethos underlying this non-instrumental creative mode, as it is not only the city that comes into being but also the poet and the reader.