Source: School of Foreign Languages
Written by: Austin Woerner
Edited by: Wang Dongmei

In the third and final Literary Tea of the fall semester, held on Friday, December 18, 2015 by the Sun Yat-sen University Center for English-language Creative Writing, Nazli ?nal, who recently joined the School of Foreign Languages faculty as an international instructor, spoke to an intimate gathering of students and teachers about a lifelong passion of hers: reading poetry. The title of the talk, “This Poem Is Addressed to Me”, is a play on the name of one of ?nal’s favorite poems, “This Poem is Not Addressed to You” by Donald Justice. When she first read it, her reaction was: “Not true! This poem is addressed to me, and only me!” In this spirit, her talk focused on the intimate dialogue between poem and reader, the vast realms of the imagination that it opens up and the personal nature of the mind’s journey through them. 

?nal, who is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s nonfiction MFA program and who is currently teaching a course on Shakespeare in the Department of English at Sun Yat-sen University, grew up in Turkey but studied English from a young age. When recalling her earliest encounters with English-language poetry as a high school student in Istanbul, she fondly recalled “the pleasure of not really understanding everything.” This sense of mystery continues to animate her relationship with literature and the English language. She repeatedly stressed the importance of asking questions rather than finding answers: “If there’s an answer, you’re probably not asking the right question,” ?nal said, when speaking of her approach to teaching literature. 

As a way of sharing the pleasure that comes from reading poetry in this “questioning” manner, ?nal walked the audience through two of her favorite modern American poems: “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart” by Jack Gilbert and "i carry your heart with me” by E. E. Cummings. Her own style of reading, ?nal explained, is a habit she likes to think of as “slow reading”: pausing after every line to consider every angle of its meaning, savor the rich web of associations that surrounds every word. “What we feel has / no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds,” runs the last line of “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart,” and when ?nal and her listeners arrived at it after an epic voyage through this 25-line poem, it was hard not to agree.

The session concluded with a free form discussion about poetry and language. The Sun Yat-sen University Center for English-language Creative Writing looks forward to another round of stimulating talks in the spring!