Author: ORHAN VELİ KANIK

Orhan Veli Kanık or Orhan Veli (14 April 1914 – 14 November 1950) was a Turkish poet. Kanık is one of the founders of the Garip Movement together with Oktay Rıfat and Melih Cevdet. Aiming to fundamentally transform traditional form in Turkish poetry, he introduced colloquialisms into the poetic language. Besides his poetry Kanık crammed an impressive volume of works including essays, articles and translations into 36 short years.

Orhan Veli shunned everything old in order to be able to bring about a new 'taste', refusing to use syllable and aruz meters. He professed to regarding the rhyme primitive, literary rhetoric techniques such as metaphor, simile, hyperbole unnecessary. Set out "to do away with all tradition, everything that bygone literatures taught", although this desire of Kanık limits the technical possibilities in his poetry, the poet broke new grounds for himself with the themes and personalities he covered and the vocabulary he employed. He brought the poetic language closer to the spoken language by adopting a plain phraseology. In 1941 his poems embodying these ideas were published in a poetry volume named Garip, released jointly with his friends Oktay Rıfat and Melih Cevdet, which led to the emergence of the Garip movement. This movement had a huge influence especially between the years 1945-1950 on Republican era Turkish verse. The Garip poetry is accepted as a touchstone in Turkish verse for its both destructive and constructive effects.