Gülten Yalmanbaş

- Turkey -

A graduate in Communications with a degree in Cinema-Television, Gülten Yalmanbaş was born in 1977 in a city surrounded by sea on three sides, in a country similarly embraced by waters, and now resides in Istanbul – another city sharing this geographical destiny. Since 2019, she has served as director of an art gallery and auction house.

 

Having experienced both individual and collective creative processes through cinema and literature, the poet aims to introduce the concept of "creative gallery curation" to Turkey's plastic arts scene, informed by these dual disciplines.

 

Her poems have appeared in various literary journals, and she serves on the organizing committee of the Offline Istanbul International Poetry Festival.

 

 


The Poetic Universe of Gülten Yalmanbaş: A Labyrinth of Wounds, Myths, and Existential Inquiry

 

Gülten Yalmanbaş's poetry is a visceral cartography of the human condition, where the boundaries between body, memory, and myth dissolve into a language of startling originality. Through her work, she constructs a world where wounds speak, landscapes breathe, and the past bleeds into the present with relentless urgency. Her poems reveal a consistent artistic vision that intertwines minimalism with maximalist emotional depth and existential inquiry with surreal imagery.

 

I. The Body as a Battlefield and Archive

Yalmanbaş's poetry is rooted in corporeal consciousness. The body is never just flesh; it is a site of transformation, a palimpsest of scars and secrets. In Untitled 31, the speaker's body becomes a terrain of volcanic desire and surgical precision: "a cesarean scar: minor lovemaking's memory." The juxtaposition of clinical language ("suture," "cysts") with raw eroticism ("Did I mention I love being watched while I fuck?") underscores her preoccupation with the body as both witness and wound. Similarly, untitled 64 frames the body as a vessel for inherited trauma—a needle snaps into the palm as the mother's warning about a world that "feeds on human flesh" becomes literal. The earthworm metaphor ("sucking at poison / we ourselves poured underground") implicates the body in ecological and generational violence.

 

II. Myth and Subverted Archetypes

Yalmanbaş's work destabilizes classical myths, replacing them with personal symbology. Untitled 44 invokes desert tribulations and alchemical transformations: "a thing made of fire and fault" becomes "a meek leopard or a wingéd horse" when confronted by the beloved. Here, the poet borrows from Sufi imagery (the "elixir within the mirror") but subverts it—the "fairy of flaming hair" is also a "Bedouin of the evil eye," blending enchantment with menace. The poem's incantatory structure ("repeat three times") mirrors ritual, yet its content—whispered secrets, Saharan bushes—grounds mysticism in earthly grit. This duality reflects her bio's assertion that poetry emerges through "sometimes mystical, sometimes extra-scientific routes."

 

III. Time and Cyclical Ruin

A relentless awareness of time's erosive power permeates Yalmanbaş's verse. Untitled 55 depicts memory as a polluted pool where "figurative fish swim backward" and "shelled sea monsters crawl out." The speaker's lament—"all I know abandons me"—echoes her bio's description of poetry as a "reckoning and awakening." The past is not linear but collapsing geography: concentration camps, fallen houses, and fetal coins coexist in a single psychic space. Similarly, untitled 62's "one-winged birds abandoned to fate" and "childhood's long winter" frame time as a series of irreparable fractures. Yet, there's redemption in cyclical return—the final image of kissing the past's "bleeding mouth" suggests that wounds, too, are a form of dialogue.

 

IV. Minimalism as Radical Precision

Yalmanbaş's sparse language—"The vertical movements of grass don't interest me" (untitled 66)—belies profound philosophical weight. Her rejection of superfluous motion mirrors her bio's "minimalist approach to word selection," where each image is a "symbol corresponding to her personal alphabet." In Untitled 64, the copper tray, rusted screw, and quilt needle are not mere objects but nodes in a network of meaning. The mother's admonition to "keep your eye fixed on the coastline" becomes a metaphor for poetic focus—attention as survival.

 

V. Conclusion: Poetry as Existential Lifeline

Yalmanbaş's work aligns with her bio's declaration that poetry is "an existential lifeline grasped in desperate urgency." Whether through the "wingbeats" of a bleeding past (untitled 62) or the "concentration camps" smuggled into memory (untitled 55), her poems confront the unbearable by naming it with unflinching clarity. Her genius lies in balancing opposites: the mystical and the scientific, the brutal and the tender, the said and the unsaid. Like the "light clusters" in untitled 66 that "clarify when evaporated," her poetry distills chaos into luminous, unsettling truth.

 

 

By Gökçenur Ç.

More about the poet

Poetry

  1. untitled 31 / isimsiz 31

  2. untitled 44 / isimsiz 44

  3. untitled 55 / isimsiz 55

  4. untitled 61 / isimsiz 61

  5. untitled 62 / isimsiz 62

  6. untitled 64 / isimsiz 64

  7. Untitled 66 / İsimsiz 66