Djelloul Marbrook
1. Question: Is there one school or philosophy of writing which is particularly compelling to you?
No. There are certain writers who have strongly influenced me. Among more recent writers I think of Glenway Wescott, Mark Helprin, Iris Murdoch, A.S. Byatt, Elmore Leonard, John D. MacDonald, and of course Hemingway. In a way, I missed my calling as a scholar. I was suited to the scholarly life, but not institutions. I get lost in a crowd of three people. I don’t have good enough filters to deal with more than two or three people in any circumstance, and so this unsuited me for universities. But I have read voraciously and eclectically all my life, even scholarly works. In my early 20s and throughout my 30s I tended to write experimental and often obscurantist poems. Some of them were published in literary journals, and I did receive some encouragement from poets like Rolfe Humphries and Alan Dugan. But in time I began to recognize that I didn’t want to be caught saying what I meant or meaning what I said.
Hugh Pope, an Istanbul-based journalist and author, wrote an article for Today's Zaman, a new English-language newspaper in Turkey, about the poets of Istanbul. Hugh Pope is the author of Sons of the
Conquerors, The Rise of the Turkic World. His article was prompted by Daniel Pendergrass's volume of poetry, 23 Istanbul Karabitsi, published by Arabesques Press.
Molly Fisk was born in San Francisco. She earned her B.A. from Radcliffe College/Harvard University, her M.B.A. from Simmons College Graduate School of Management, and began writing at the age of 35. She's the author of Listening to Winter, Terrain (with Dan Bellm and Forrest Hamer), and the letterpress chapbook Salt Water Poems. (See Books/CDs)