I spent my childhood in a small beach town in Aegean. My parents were people who abstained from almost anything out of fear that something might happen to their child. This protective instinct was so strong, that it was virtually impossible for me to play outside.
It was as if the gypsies had camped at our door, waiting to kidnap this child when he was allowed outside.
And the bold friends who came over and knocked on our door to invite me to play outside had to put up with the difficult questions from my mother.
Because my dear mother wanted to know where his child would go to play with whom, she would put my friend at the door through a thorough interview, including the name of his parents, what his father did for a living and where they lived, then I could go out only if my friend was able to give reasonable and logical answers to all of these questions.
And not only was the time I would be getting back strictly established as I went out, but I also would be told a truck load of warnings.
I guess my childhood would be no different than the fish in a fish tank if we lived in Istanbul.
So, of course I did what almost every child would do in such a setting and drilled my mother saying I was bored.
Again on such a day, when I said “I’m bored,” my dear mother took a book from the bookcase and threw it at me saying, “If you’re bored then go ahead and read a book”.
Though I grunted at first, I involuntarily started reading the book since I could not find much else to do at home. And that was how I met literature, with that first book that my mother threw at me.
I do not know if my mother made a conscious choice, or if it was a coincidence, but she threw Sadık Fehmioğlu’s Rooster Pasha, which was a wonderful kid’s novel just for my age.
Although we had a bookcase in our home, there were not that many books in it. Still, there were enough children’s books for a child, some novels and Orhan Veli’s book called Complete Poems as poetry.
Turns out reading is a magical thing. It was like the doors to a whole another universe opened up to me the moment I dove into any book. I kept running from adventure to adventure with the heroes of the book.
And of course, when I got this joy of reading, it was time for the other books in our bookcase and I read all of the books, some of them even many times.
And my meeting with poetry was of course thanks to Orhan Veli, the poet of the only poetry book in our bookcase. As I approached puberty from childhood, I was noticing how poetry was actually a really special expression, and how poetry was a great means to express feelings. Orhan Veli told his feelings in a really plain and sincere style, which had a big effect on me; I wanted to explain myself like that as well, and immediately got to try writing poems. Surely what I wrote was nothing but childish plays on words. But writing poems, that is, being a poet, was now equivalent to growing up to become a decent person to me. And I definitely had to write good poems when I grew up.
During my high school years when my peers ditched school sometimes and went out with girls and stuff, I had a reading fever that was passionate enough to go to a library to read a book when I skipped classes. As I read, it was as if something lit up in me and the more I learned new things, I started noticing how little I actually knew. I opened my first poetry notebook when I was just 15. I wrote poems to fill up a 100-page notebook on average per year. I carefully kept them and tried to improve myself in poetry.
Thus, I was also good with poetry books. I had already read almost all of the works of great poets like Nazım Hikmet, Hasan Hüseyin, Özdemir Asaf when I was only in high school.
On the other hand, my head was in the clouds because I was young and I was falling in one platonic love after the other.
I was having spectacular adventures with my platonic loves in the infinity of my imagination. I could not imagine what I would feel when I experienced real love if I was so affected by what I experienced in my dreams.
And years passed… That sensitive, emotional young man had relationships, and I had emotional and sensual contacts of various qualities. And of course, I have accumulated many things from my experiences.
As I got older, I started noticing the dialectic in life more and more, and I wrote, wrote, wrote…
However, I was incredibly discreet about what I wrote. I had never had anyone read or see my poems.
Several people at most knew that I had written notebooks of poems.
The things I wrote were piling up in notebooks, in the dark corners of my home.
And a reason for why I did not share was because of an irrational concern that they would get stolen.
I thought if I were to bring them to light, someone would see them and lay claims to them right away.
This did not change, until several years ago.
It was several years ago, I was going through depressed days, at the stage of separating with my wife. When my dear older sister from the family council told me maybe it would be good for me if I wrote something, at least scribble something, I said nothing, went and got about 20 notebooks from where they were hidden and put them in front of her.
I can still vividly remember the astonishment in her eyes.
Many of my family members, including my older sister whom I love more than my own life, did not know that I wrote poetry.
I told my family how in fact I had been writing and secretly piling up all these things for all these years,and I noticed that I actually got relieved the more I told them.
I understood at that moment that I had to absolutely share them.
I did not write them to hide them. I secretly imagined that one day, they would be liked by other people and read with love.
So apparently those days had arrived.
But where to start? First, I sent my poems to a magazine. They paid no attention to me at all. I thought I could publish a book, but I did not know how I would do that exactly, either.
Finally, since it was all about sharing; I thought that was what social media was for and opened an official page on Facebook. I started publishing my precious books which I believed someone would steal from me openly, without even using my real name.
Of course, before opening this page, I read all that I had written in my notebooks in a period of about a year, and I transferred the ones I liked on my computer.
Then, I started sharing one poem per day. My poems were a big hit; my page got 160.000 followers in a relatively short time. The interest and likes of my readers made me extremely satisfied; and the thought of publishing a book outweighed once again.
Meanwhile, I bought the copyright of the name Anacreon and began making the internet site that you are on right now. This is my story; the story continues; hoping to meet with new poems and new books…