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Solidarity Park Poetry

Solidarity Park is a space created by poets for poets from all over the world in a show of solidarity with the Turkish people as they struggle to own what is theirs. Edited by Sascha Akhtar, Nia Davies & Sophie Mayer, and with Gonca Özmen as consulting editor, the space has in just a few days attracted contributions from several notable poets including Katerina Iliopoulou, John Kinsella and Damir Šodan.

It was important to me, for several reasons, to register solidarity with the people of Turkey and their efforts to reclaim public spaces and freedom of expression, so I offered 'Voice of The Polytechnic' from my book Spitting Out the Mother Tongue to the project. It refers to the Athens Student Uprising of November 1973. The 5th line, translating as "Here is The Polytechnic, Here is The Polytechnic" or "This is The Polytechnic, This is The Polytechnic" links to a short sound clip with those very words as broadcast by the occupied student radio station in 1973.

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