Ottoman History Podcast - Good Poets & Bad Poetry at the Ottoman Court

Episode Date: June 28, 2019

Episode 416 with Sooyong Kim hosted by Nir Shafir and Elisabetta Benigni Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | GooglePlay | SoundCloud What made for a good poet in the Ottoman Empire? It is a question that far too few historians tackle because Ottoman poetry, especially that of the court, is often regarded as inaccessible. In this podcast, Sooyong Kim brings to life the social world of Ottoman poets, focusing in particular on Zati, a poet plying his trade in the imperial court in the first half of the sixteenth century. We speak about how poets succeeded and failed and why Zati's successors erased him from the canon of good poetry. « Click for More »

Welcome to another episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Nir Shafir, and we are sitting here in our TomTom Mahalase recording studio, overlooking the Golden Horn. And with me is... Hi, Elisabetta Benigni. And today we are going to be recording a podcast with Soo Young Kim. Soo Young is an assistant professor at the Department of Comparative Literature at Koch University. He's had quite a number of works. He co-translated of Leah

Celebi's Seyahatname with Robert Dankov. But today we're going to be talking about the topic of his most recent work, which came out in 2018. And it's a book called The Last of an Age, The Making and Unmaking of a 16th Century Ottoman Poet. Thank you, Nir and Elisabetta. Glad to be here. Today we are going to be speaking about a topic that we often don't really discuss on the podcast, which is poetry, Ottoman poetry. A lot of you might have heard of divanshiri, that is court poetry, or more basic forms of poetry, but this isn't really something that we tackle often as historians, as scholars of the Ottoman

Empire or the Middle East, And part of it, it's quite hard to deal with. And this is why I've invited Suyong to come on this podcast, because I think his book and his work is really important in explicating this world. And we are going to be talking about the focus of his book, which is the 16th century poet Zati, who was quite famous in the beginning of the 16th century and then gets marginalized over time. Sooyoung, I wanted to start with this, almost this very basic question, hear me out here, which is, what makes for a good poet? Ah, Nir, what makes for a good poet? Well, as you know, part of the problem with dealing with poetry is there's no critical

literature proper in the sense that we're more familiar with in the early modern European context. You don't have necessarily the 16th century, you don't have anthologies or you don't have necessarily the 16th century you don't have anthologies or you don't have tracks that articulate what makes a good poet what's at least clear if you think about the production of biographical dictionaries or teskera or teskera to shuera literature in the course of the 16th century that it was particularly the use of sanat or rhetorical figures whether you can handle them in a sort of refined manner that um distinguished a poet so it's very technical as a technical measure about what makes a good poet and particularly the case of turkish poets

or poets producing in turkish to be more accurate the real issue at the beginning of the 16th century was their ability to sort of indigenize or nativize the Aruz with a quantitative metric system that the Turkish composers had inherited, Arabic, Bavarian through Persian, and the use of particular rhetorical figures, things in English would be more basically variations on punning whether verbal or visual i know this is maybe for those that are not that familiar with the nature of poetry what is a rhetorical device what is a meter no we're all familiar with rhetorical devices i mean everything from alliteration um technically metaphor and simile is not considered sonat in the in the traditional definition at least in the Islamic poetic context.

It's wordplay, what have you. It's adding semantic richness to words. These kinds of quantitative meter, unlike for English speakers out there, that English meters are qualitative. So the best example is the iambic, you know, the to boldly go, right? The split infinitive from Star Trek,

which is native to English go, ah, ah go uh you know where quantitative is just fixed it's um there are certain stresses based on i'll put into linguistic terms uh constant clusters with natural long vowels or what have you so if you know turkish turkish doesn't have natural long vowels. So one of the problems of adopting quantitative meters is how do you actually fit the short, long feet with a language that has no natural long vowels? So, you know, and if you know Arabic, you know how Turkish speakers shorten Arabic long vowels, like from instead of Nadim, it's Nedim, what have you.

So how do you, so there's an oral quality to it, but then, so there's one that we forget that poetry is a spoken art, and there's also a, you know, oral quality, but it's also meant to be, it's not simply, it's not everyday speech. I think there's a, sometimes there's a tendency in the field to identify, make a distinction

between what we call divanchery as something that is not a vernacular, but that's a, you the field to make a distinction between what we call divanchery as something that is not a vernacular, but that's a you know, I would argue that's a misunderstanding of how high poetic traditions actually evolve. It's meant to be a language of public discourse and one

that's supposed to be elevated and refined. I mean, it's no different than giving speeches nowadays in the public sphere. Right, but also again, I just want to kind of pull this out I mean, it's no different than giving speeches nowadays in the public sphere. Right. Also, again, I just want to kind of pull this off for the listeners. You know, often when we think of poetry today, we have this kind of romanticist, romantic notion of poetry. Poetry is supposed to, a good poem is supposed to make you feel something. It's supposed to elicit emotions.

But here, their vision of what poetry is, is, I mean, so much based around this linguistic world. Yeah, so better poetry is supposed to elicit emotions, but it's not necessarily the aim or the end all for the poetry. So this idea that we tend to think of poetic practice as a practice that's supposed to be emotive in the end. But in fact, if you look at, for example, the development of the sonnet in the early modern European context, I'm going to put this in very reductionist terms. It was an exercise in rhyming poetry that fits a particular meter.

If you read sonnets over and over again, they're not particularly interesting after a while. You can say the same thing about gazelles. They tend to be repetitive or what have you. It's a technical skill in many ways. So let's jump into the main topic of our conversation, which is Zati. Can you just give us a snapshot of his life? Why is he important? Why did you decide to focus on him? Well, he's interesting because we assume that there are sort of social and literary

hierarchies that actually neatly converges when it comes to Ottoman culture. We tend to assume that Ottoman culture tends to be elite culture. He's probably one of the handful of most popular poets in the first half of the 16th century, by popular meaning that his poetry was reproduced in the form of parallels, responses, nazira. He was a mentor to a number of younger poets, including Baki, who's the best-known poet of the 16th century in the Ottoman context. But he also represents something interesting that he comes from a guild or esnaf background so part of my interest is why is this poet who was not medrassa educated as far as we know from the biographical literature he didn't know arabic one of the biographers claimed that he his persian was okay uh decided to produce elevated poetry and and it's a fairly succeeded

at least in the first half of his career. So, I mean, when you say he's an Esnaf, he's from a guild, his job, if I remember correctly, he was a fortune teller. Right, he ended up being a fortune teller once he was in Istanbul, but he came, you know, he came from Balıkasir, and he came from an Esnaf background. And of course, the problem with the biographical literature is that they're very selective in what they highlight or not. But once he ended up in istanbul you know he spent some time at the vefa teke in what's now the old part of town and then he learned how to become a good poet he apparently had a natural talent and sort of made his way through sort of the various poetic networks in the city and made a name for himself and the best example we have of historical evidence is that from the gift registers that comes from the reign of Bayezid II, that he's among about one of 30 plus Turkish poets who are recorded to have regularly received remuneration for poetry.

So that's, I mean, quite fascinating. So basically, he's a provincial guy, a worker, an artisan, comes into the capital, learns how to compose poetry, and then all of a sudden is presenting poetry regularly to the Ottoman Sultan in the early 16th century, right? And he's getting rewarded for it quite handsomely. Related to what you were telling us about his life, what we know about his life, so how did he learn about how to do poetry? How was his training? And how was also, if this, like, I was just wondering if this fortune teller

kind of occupation was related to this art of poetry or not in some ways? He became a fortune teller after he arrived in Istanbul sort of circa 1500 after he lost the patronage of Bayezid II or the court of Bayezid II. The question of poetic training is a good one. It's something that I've been fixated on for years, particularly before Ottoman urbanization properly took place in the course of the 16th century, for example. So, you know, Balikasir had a few, they had one major jami or congregational mosque, and they had a medrasa. So, there were people who produced poetry as a cultural marker. Why he decided to produce poetry, why he thought it would actually be profitable, who did he learn the basics of metrics, for example, or prosody, that's not clear. Except that poetry was circulated around, if you think about what they call folk poets

or mystic poets of the time period where they produce poetry and meter the best example someone like Ashok Pasha from a century before so people were familiar now what makes someone who made it decide to become a professional poet in many ways decide to say okay I have some talent I have a good year presumably to produce poetry I can't say for sure why, you know, what motivated him, except that there was, by the time he was in Istanbul, it's very clear that the court wanted to encourage and support poetry being produced in Turkish. And that's something that Nira and I have talked about with the Topkapi Palace book library inventory, where it's clear that there was produced 1502 to 1503,

that there's not a single divan or a collection of poems of any of the sort of poets we would expect in the first half of the 16th century or the latter half. So who would, I mean, what do you mean by that? Who should we expect? So if we follow the narrative from that's already, which has become sort of consolidated in the middle of the 16th century,

in particular by Ashik Celebi and his Tezkete, that, you know, so what's basically taught in any kind of, if you have a chapter or subchapter in Ottoman poetic production, you know, someone named Ahmed Pasha, who was a vizier under Mehmed the Conqueror, and he was the first real proper Ottoman poet, and there's someone like Nejati Falsoparticular, but for example, Ahmed Pasha's divan is not recorded in the palace library inventory, neither is Nejati. There are a couple of divans in in Turkish but there were palace functionaries they weren't really just

they're not considered good poets so it's very clear that if you think of the when the inventory was produced for 1502 to 1503 as sort of breaking point a starting point that something happens at the court where they decide that it is a matter of prestige to support poetry. It's always been a matter of prestige. And we know that for the surviving register of inamat defteri or gifts from the court, it starts from 1503 onward. So at least if we look at the historical record, it's very clear that towards the end of his reign, Bayezid II decided that he would like

to promote poetry in Turkish. So it seems like what we're talking about here is really the creation of a canon. There is an effort to create a corpus of Turkish poetry. Now, whether we can consider that a canon, I mean, I argue that the canon formation actually happens in the latter part of the 16th century. That, you know, if you look at what's happening in the palace, there was no guarantee that Turkish was going to be regarded as the literary language in the empire

when the position of the shanamaji at the court was producing First Chronicles and Persian. So Persian was still the elite language of culture in the early 16th century. Right, if we're going to talk about the Ottoman Empire or the Ottoman state at the beginning of the 16th century as part of the larger Persian world, then yes, Persian was considered, was the preferred vehicle for literary expression. I mean, why are they so interested in trying to build up Turkish in this period? So, in the case of Herat under Sultan Hussein Baykır, particularly the figure of Neva'i, what's clear is that at the end of the 15th century in Herat, there was poetry being produced, what we'll call Turkic, or Chagatai. Whether the Ottomans were, in fact, influenced directly that, okay, they're producing another sort of Turkic dynasty is producing poetry or encouraging poetry in in another vernacular shortly i mean sure i'm sure they

i don't know if they take as a direct uh inspiration but certainly uh when it comes to quarterly cultural production there's always an it's always competitive and it's a part of how do you increase your prestige um an Islamic dynasty, what have you. And then, of course, it's been well documented when it comes to the visual arts, particularly by Girodini, Ecebolu, and onward. But, of course, when it comes to poetry, it's a little different, or any kind of verbal art, because it's relatively cheap, as I would put it. You don't need materials or expensive materials to produce things and when it comes to potion also

music would fall into that that it allows for a wider particip social participation than you would have then you would have in the visual arts so I just want to unpack this what you're saying is that while the Ottomans created a sort of Ottoman idiom an imperial Ottoman India about the visual arts in the let let's say, late 15th, early 16th century. Here in poetry, it's not quite clear. It's more difficult to create an imperial idiom or they weren't interested in it. What are you trying to push here exactly? I'll help you out, Nir. I mean, part of the question is there's this whole fixation on canonization, broadly speaking, not just of visual production, but also of knowledge production

in the course of the 16th century, what becomes Ottoman or what we identify as Osmanla at a certain point in time. The question is where do the verbal arts fit into this? Because ultimately Islamic cultures tend to privilege the verbal, if anything, based on everyone knows the first verse of the Quran is to recite.

And it's been part of rhetoric and we can talk about that later. So whether or not it actually coincides or follows the same trajectory as what, what the current scholarship about canon formation in the Ottoman context or in the cultural context. So, it's easy to talk about cultural production from the palace because we have the archival materials, we have, it's something that the court was vested in. But how do we deal with poetry when we don't have the

first record? And of course, everything goes back to the period of Suleyman, but even that's slightly problematic that the first biographical dictionary by Sahih was produced in 1538. That's quite late. And if you actually do, and of course there are number of studies in Turkish that do statistical breakdowns, but it's only about 200 plus poets

and half of them are not very good or half of them disappear in the succeeding biographical dictionaries. So there was obviously an interest in promoting poetry in Turkish, but even we would say by 1538, it's not clear to me how widespread poetic production in Turkish actually was. And it's also, I mean, of course, then there's a second one by Latifi in 1546. And of course, he does a redaction of it much later.

But he also tends to choose all these poets from Anatolia who also tend to be forgotten. I mean, they're quite mediocre poets, or at least if you look at hindsight from the end of the 16th and early 17th century. So there is production in Turkish, but whether or not the poets that are recorded become part of a curriculum of poets to be emulated as a separate matter. So I think there's a tendency to conflate corpus building versus creation of a canon. And this is what's inside the court. So we are speaking about a war that was turning around

the court, so these poets were working inside the court, were producing, who are the consumers of the- Well, that's a good question, right? So there are, who are the consumers? The court was obviously one area of consumption. And obviously if you got rewarded by the court, you got paid quite generously. I mean, the amounts are like, you know,

for casitas anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 akche, which is actually a considerable sum. And if you produce the mesnevi, it's as much as 10,000 akche. So like a year, over a year's salary of a professor, for instance. Yeah, I mean, for a mid-level medrassah professor, you would actually make more.

So in fact, being a professional poet was profitable. You had three times during the year, the two Bairams and Nev Ruz or No Ruz, where you got to recite a casita and you produced a few other casitas to sort of high officials. And it's actually quite profitable to be a poet. And at least the court actively patronized poetry until the end of Ibrahim Pasha as Grand Vizier. Now the problem becomes the court might be, the sultan or high officials might be consumers, but does that make them actual connoisseurs

or critics of what is good poetry? Because a lot of things that are recorded, as you know, it's the Bethar Casitas and they are performative and they're ceremonial and ritualized. So it's less about necessarily about content or about how great the poem is, but rather that someone,

if I want a little bit of bachiche from you, Elisabetta, I would invite a casita, produce a casita, and the social obligation is you give me something back in return, right? Right, and as a courtier or as a king or a vizier, you're expected to hold these salons or these sessions in which people recite you poetry and you give them money, and that's what you do as a ruler. Right, so it's more economic

rather than necessarily more literary critical. But obviously there were growing interests by, broadly speaking, ulema or people who were better understood as literati who wanted to be more critical in their assessments. We get that from Latifi, for example, is the first example of sort of having more critical judgments. And Walter Andrews has written about that. But it's clear that there are different tiers of poetic consumption and how it was consumed. So the best example I can give you is, you know, Zati at a certain point, particularly from the reign of Selim I onwards, you know, his courtly patronage was intermittent. Not as big, not as consistent as Bayezid II.

And he would produce gazelles for his fellow esnaf, a tradesman, and he had his fortune-telling shop was in Bayezid Meydana or Bayezid Square. It was an exchange in kind. So he'd write a gazelle about a particular apprentice of a particular trade, and he would get something. Which turns out the best example I can give you is something I teach and I've written about,

is that he has this gazelle he produced for the end of Ramadan or Ramazan, and it was probably written for a cook or an ashti. And the whole, the beginning metaphor is comparing the beloved to white pilaf and the lover as saffronron and how we go well together and it's written in a very it was clever but it's not like it's not rhetorically sophisticated so it gives you a clear sense that we know through him in particular that he also had consumers who were of surprisingly

people who are not educated as we would assume and we also know that he also ghost wrote poems for both men and women that's also documented where some you know and so well-known story that there's a full translation of the episode and the age of the beloveds by walter andrews and that some servant would come from some noble lady and said you know please write a gazelle with this particular meter and and rhyme and he would do it for for you know for if he's lucky for a gold coin not for a few or some gifts of like helva for example so so so what we don't have is a problem is any we talk about culture in the early modern period and so same in europe it tends to be elite culture people record things tend to be a very

small social social circle but that doesn't mean that the people who actually consumed and appreciated were elite and and it works with you can you can actually do it with sati because he's well documented and by one um biographical dictionary by ashok Chalabi in 1568 because he met him and he interviewed him. The biographical notice is almost like an interview style, but he doesn't do that with any, but that's the only poet we have, right? So the question is, does it change in the latter half of the 16th century? Does it become something different? Except that there's less interest on the part of the biographers who come after Ashok Chalabi from 1568 onward to privilege or highlight poets who came from

slightly different social... So on that note, let's take a quick break and then we'll jump back into it. Welcome back. I'm Nir Shafir, and I'm sitting with Elisabetta Benigni, and we're speaking to Soo Young Kim about poetry in the Ottoman Empire, especially in the early 16th century. And we have been talking about this one poet in particular, Zati, who rose to the forefront of poetry in the early 16th century, but was marginalized over the 16th century. 16th century, but was marginalized over the 16th century. And so, Soo Young, can you maybe tell us the story of why that is? Why was he eventually kind of pushed out of this pantheon of poets? It becomes clear in the later biographical dictionaries, particularly from what I would consider the most important biographical dictionary of the late 16th century is by

Kunal Azadeh Hassan Celebi, produced around 1568. Much of it's based on Ashik Celebi's notice on him, but what's very clear that all of a sudden he's referred to being part of an older generation. So he's part of the Kodama. He's the first one to sort of mimic the language of the, of the basses, the distinction between the moderns and the ancients. Oh, and I found when I was first looking at researching

into Zati, I found it when I was first looking and researching into Zatia, I found it quite striking that he's only like a generation and a half removed. The poets whom he had mentored were still active and actually some of them were quite,

had a good reputation as poets. But he started mentioning that it's a quota. He calls his poetry too Turkane, too Turkish, meaning it's uncouth in actual usage. And he attributes that to indirectly that it's because his knowledge in Persian Arabic was lacking.

But he doesn't state it outright, but something's happening by the, you know, what I would call the late 1570s onwards when you have, when I would call the emergence of a proper Ottoman literati, sort of literate men who had a vested stake in articulating a particular kind of elevated Turkish poetry, who identified themselves as Ottoman. The first example I know,

and I'm sure someone out there will correct me, of the use of the term Osmanlis in poetry is by Baki in a gazelle. Before then you don't have poets identifying themselves as Osmanlis in that kind of cultural context but it gets reinforced

by Mustafa Ali in a sort of world Sorry, can I just, why don't you give some major centuries or dates? So let's go back to this question of Baki. When was he? So Baki died in 1600. He's usually compared as the Shakespeare

of the Ottoman poetry. Baki ended up being the Kasa Sker or the chief military judge of Rumeli. He's someone who's canonical. Yeah. But he really emerged as this poet from the 1550s onwards. So when I talk about the emergence

of a proper Ottoman literati, they're really sort of younger men coming from the 1550s onwards who sort of make their mark in the 1570s onwards. And the biographer I mentioned before canola zada hassan chalabi comes from that same generation so ashok chalabi who i refer to sort of did an interview style with sati his biographical dictionary is 1568 but he's sort of in between um so and then there's and sort of the more the most important the one everyone's been well-recorded,

and Cornell Fleischer's done the translation that everyone's quoted, and I have as well, that by 1599, we have this social critic and historian, Mustafa Ali, he has a world history, but he has a section on poets, where he singles out Sati, now it's left incomplete, he doesn't have an entry on Baki, it really reads like an entry of Sati and Baki.

Part of it is that he wants, it's clear that he wants to correct the notion that Sati was a mentor to Baki, although Ashok Chalabi mentions it. And he states in so many words that Baki couldn't have learned anything from Sati because Sati didn't know Arabic and Persian proper. And so you see the culmination of this sort of,

as Nero puts it, marginalization, wherein that's no longer about, they don't question his Turkish poetry or his use of sonata or particular rhetorical figures. That's already been recorded. What they emphasize is that he doesn't have full command of not just Persian, because he's required to have known Persian,

but it goes back to Arabic. That's the fundamental basis for any kind of poetry. And of course, it makes sense by people like, you know, Hassan Chalabi and Mustafa Ali to make that argument because they were all Medusa graduates and Medusa trained. So all of a sudden, poetry is no longer, it becomes like, so there's a move to identify a certain kind of elevated poetry that is a marker of a particular social group and they're the ones who produced the biographical dictionaries the latter half of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century so they basically wrote him out not based on the quality

of his verse but on the type of person or education that he had right basically wasn't someone whom they couldn't identify with or as I put it in the book, as anyone knows who's done a PhD at what we would deem an elite institution, we don't like to give credit to people who do good work who just happens

to not come from a top-tier university or what have you, right? It's a way to sort of undermine someone's work by saying you're not one of us right so you build social networks and you know this year right we can talk about graduate researchers in istanbul and there's it's about a handful of schools who come out here but the same idea that education

becomes very important as a as a component of your poetic training so it's not simply about maybe learning poetry because you had a natural gift. It's the idea that poets are made, right? You have to be trained to be a proper poet. And to do that, you need to know Arabic well first. And so, what's clear is that Sati doesn't really disappear because he still appears in the first major anthology by Kavsat F. Aizy in about 1620, he's still recorded. He's just not, his notices get smaller and smaller. So by the time you get to the last of the sort of classical biographers, Riazzi in 1609, he's just simply referred to as a poet of an older generation who trained some poets.

There's no recognition of his connection to Bacchi. There's no, it's simply said that he might have been good, but he represents an older generation or an ancient group of poets in a discourse that is clearly referring to the Basset discourse about the moderns and the ancients, that something new has happened at the latter half, from the 1570s onwards to the beginning of the 17th.

The only thing I'll add is i think there's a you know i think there are a lot of um you know young researchers i know who are we uh re-questioning certain assumptions we have about cultural production particularly um in the late 16th or the course of 16th century but i would say that you know um this idea of what is autumn and what constitutes proper practice it's it's still an ongoing debate going on even in the 17th century and it never really, it doesn't really, I would argue in sort of my next project that it really gets what we consider Ottoman as canonical

at multiple cultural levels, really get fixed in the mid-17th century. That's when we really see the production of anthologies. And if you think about anthologies as a way of as a way of reinforcing a particular curriculum but do you see him as like a failed attempt to create this Ottoman cultural identity or like a premature attempt?

no, for Zati? yeah I don't think it was a failed attempt he produced poetry at a time when there was there was nothing necessarily poetry did nothing so you have to follow certain rules to be an Ottoman poet.

People just wanted, or if there were people interested in poetry in Turkish, there have always been people interested in poetry in Turkish from the Seljuk period onwards. The real question is, when does poetry produced in Turkish get identified with a particular kind of education, educational background, and where it gets set back to,

you know, people always assume that it's, you know, Ottomans are, you know, it's Persian they're worried about, but in fact, at least for the literati in the latter half of the 16th century, they go one step further and it's really Arabic. And in the book, in the end as a part of the epilogue you know i i mentioned that whether this is also shaped by the fact that there's more competition from the arabic speaking parts of the ottoman empire towards the latter half of the 16th century so that's a separate matter and you know i know people are working on

we assume just because you know um you, under the conquest under Selim, that things were incorporated fairly quickly. I'm not sure about that. It's at least, to me, if you think about the concern about Arabic knowledge, it has to be a reflection of something. And I think there's competition, and people forget that half the empire,

or actually more than half was Arabic speaking. Yes. So at a certain point, you have if you're going to try to set yourself apart culturally, if you were Turkish speakers and producing poetry, you have to deal with the fact that Arabic still persists and will always persist as a prestige language, whether it's a religious, but also at the cultural level as well. each language, whether it's a religious, but also at the cultural level as well. And I think that's something I know near dealing with that, but I think that's an issue that a lot of people have ignored because they're so focused on Persian at the expense of Arabic. But it's clear to me that Arabic becomes something that, you know, Ottoman literati whose primary language is Turkish, they're quite concerned about in the end of the 16th century.

Well, on that note, I think we'll wrap up. Thank you, Sooyoung, for providing us this amazing glimpse at the world of 16th century Ottoman poetry, about how a poet could become famous and then, less than a century afterwards, marginalized from the pages of Ottoman

poetic history. And I think you've really shown us also the centrality of poetry to the political and social world of Ottoman culture so thank you again for coming on the show. Great, thank you for having me here and thank you Elisabeth. Thank you to you, that's great. And for those listeners that would like to find out

more, check out our website where you can find a short bibliography with some extra sources and you can of course check out Sue Young's latest book The Last of an Age, A Making and Unmaking of an Ottoman Poet, released in 2018.

And please join our Facebook group, follow our podcast on iTunes or whatever podcast provider you would like. And until then, ciao. A good poem is supposed to make you feel something. © transcript Emily Beynon