Calabash 2008 – Sunday May 25th

Calabash Sunday manages, somehow, to become something of a church service. Of course, the entire festival is about the word, and the spoken word and the received and given word and people at the festival like to talk about spirit and vibe and heart and such the like. But Sunday is Sunday and it is hard to shake the feel of Sunday morning in Jamaica. Early in the morning, in the silence before the sound system kicks into gear in the tent area, you can hear choruses and hymns carrying over the acacia bushes and zinc roofed houses—the rituals of prayer and grace. Some Calabashers want to have a real service at the festival on Sunday. They pull me aside each year, and pitch this ecumenical service for all who will come. I suspect it could happen, but I realize also that in the throes of the festival, I can only think that it would be another brilliant idea to be managed. And we have many brilliant ideas. We don’t try all of them. We simply can’t. But the suggestions will always come. These are not to be seen as criticisms. They are the gestures of those who see the festival as their own and they would like to see it embrace something of their own image. I think, though, that there is so much open beach at Treasure Beach, and praying people do not need the stamp of Calabash to make something happen. Calabashers have been known to turn a simple gathering at the beach into a service to music and dance, or a service to political discussion, or an improvised outdoor hotel, and much else.

DISPATCHES
Saturday Part 3

Very early on in the life of Calabash, we decided that it would be a good idea to partner with organizations and entities that had something to do with authors. We had thought about deeding out some curating and programming to some individuals, but it seemed to make better sense to think of book agencies, publishers, arts organizations and other entities that seemed to have access to writers, and still had a solid sense of style and engagement that worked well with the basic values of Calabash: daring, earthy, diverse and inspirational. It has amazed me how these words, (at least one that seems rather overused--“inspirational�) conjured up by Colin Channer, with a briefing to support and define each of them, have come to represent a splendid litmus test for what happens at the festival—and here I mean EVERYTHING that happens at the festival. Over the years we have sought partnerships with a handful of organizations, and one of the most productive of partnerships has been with the independent publishing house Akashic Books. This year, Akashic joined with us again and helped us program an eclectic and sophisticated readings that took place late afternoon into the night on Saturday, when the cool air off the sea wafted around us, skirts flicking in the breeze, bodies relaxing with the calming of the sea rhythm, and the moon dangling overhead. The audience had spent a few hours resting, eating, taking a swim, showering, and getting dressed for the evening activities. Where the anticipation for the Walcott session created a frenetic kind of energy, the evening mod was more laid back. Three Akashic published authors would read. Juan de Recacoechea, a Bolivian fiction writer; Nina Revoyr, a Japanese American novelist; and Abraham Rodriquez, a Puerto Rican descent American living in Berlin who writes novels. They would then be followed after a short break by three other novelists, Margaret Cezair-Thompson, a Jamaican living in the US; Gerard Donovan, an Irish novelist and poet; and Lawrence Hill, a Canadian essayist and fiction writer.

Saturday Part Two

The sky is clean of clouds. Standing on the stage, the sea stretches out towards the horizon, a sheet of turquoise with the interruption of surf a hundred yards out where the reef breaks the waves. Treasure Beach’s coastline is rocky, with the occasional scraggly tree—these biblical structures of gnarled branches and sparse fat leaves—they are made to silhouette artfully against the blue. In the early morning at Calabash people sneak up on you. Jamaicans move with the slow casualness of tropical people who have learned how to conserve their energy in the sun. The empty tent area will slowly fill out—one minute you are looking at the cool insides lined with white plastic chairs and only a spotting of people, and then you look away. When you look inside again, there are a hundred bodies, calmly fanning, sipping drinks, eating fruit. The audience, as Valzhyna Mort, the waif-like Belarusian poet would announce on Saturday night, is so sexy. She is talking about the way the bodies, move, the way clothes flow on these bodies, the complete sensuality of the laughter and the quiet in the audience. It is a spiritual thing, actually, and you watch as these folks, dressed for comfort, dressed for style, and dressed to please the body, walk under the tent that now smells of heated crushed grass, take their seats and speak softly to each other. By 9:45, the hundred or so people, has miraculous multiplied into nearly a thousand bodies and you still have the sense that the place is not crowded, that this is a church picnic, that there is enough space for all these bodies to enjoy their own personal space.

CALABASH 2008--IMAGINE

SATURDAY 1
The hardest thing to do is to find time to Blog at Calabash. All day the audience, true owners of this festival, will accost to ask questions, make suggestions, express gratitude. I can’t bring myself to do stock answers, even when the questions are the same:

“Kwame, Kwame, [fishing into a worn satchel] I have this book, man. This book of poems. I want your critique. Let me read you a poem and I need you to assess it…�

“Right now?� the crowd is thick, people bouncing off us.

“Oh yes…�

I say no, I say it is a bad idea, it is unfair to their poetry for me to try and assess it right now—under these circumstances. Disappointment. But we smile.

Someone has the constant question:

“You, star, you are the man to ask, they say.� I can tell this is an open mic poet. The dread locks, the worn sheets of paper in hand, the pure intensity, the hunger….

“We will announce the open mic in a few minutes check the program.� I say, quickly They smile, nod.

“I just reach.�

“You came for the open mic only?�

“Yeah, I have these poems. I want you to assess them for me….�

Calabash 2008 – Friday May 23rd

At 7:30 PM, under a cluster of white tents and in the presence over eight hundred people sitting patiently on white plastic chairs, with the constant moaning of the sea in the background and the distant thump of a the bass coming from sound systems kicking up their Labor Day night sessions on the south-western coast of this island, I introduced three writers whose task it is to celebrate the work of other writers in their capacity as editors. M. Mark, Editor of the Pen Journal, Thomas Glave, editor of Our Caribbean: Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writers of the Antilles, and Achy Obejas, editor of Havana Noir yet another in the remarkably readable Noir series put out by Akashic Books. Glave has been apprehensive all day. He is a Jamaican who writes and teaches abroad, but continues to spend a lot of time in Jamaica, being a outspoken advocate for gay rights on the island. He is aware that to speak up on these matters is not without some risk, but he also knows that Calabash is a festival that boasts one of the most open-minded and gracious audiences one could find. The best kind--an audience filled with people with strongly held opinions and yet people who understand that when a writer goes on stage, they are taking a risk, and that hospitality is the overriding spirit that should guide their reaction. Glave, despite his nervousness, is cool, steady and begins with a small speech directed at Jamaica's Prime Minister who recently declared to the BBC that he would not have any homosexuals in his cabinet.

If you depend on television for your sense of what is hot in the news, you may be forgiven for not knowing about the Jena 6. But there is something happening around these six teenagers from Jena, Louisiana. It is all over Black talk radio. And this is no small thing. These quite popular radio hosts are devoting their entire shows—three and four hours—to exploring issues around this story. Al Sharpton, Jessie Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, and anyone who is anyone in the African American world are weighing in. There is going to be a protest demonstration in Jena and busloads of people are planning to head down there to protest the injustice of what is going. The boys are facing massive jail sentences for being involved in what can be safely called a “school-yard fight�. Tellingly, all the elements of a railroad trial seem to mark this case: peculiarly incestuous juries, small town anxieties and the persistence of long-standing race problems. Jena is, apparently, eighty percent white, thirteen percent of the population is black. The blacks of Jena are coming on the radio talk shows to say that racism has been a way of life in that part of the country for as long as they have lived there. So people are outraged. People want to see justice done. People see this as a case not unlike several recent cases in which African American youths have been meted out absurdly weighty sentences for activities that would normally get a reprimand. And the most damning thing about Jena is that the white kids who carried out their own set of troubling acts, seem to have gotten off lightly.

For a long time, I have wondered what the West Indies' two living Nobel Laureates thought of each other’s work and success. Perhaps there exists some recent article somewhere by Derek Walcott about V.S. Naipaul. Walcott, I know, has reviewed Naipaul in the past, and made some passing comments and some insightful comments about the value of Naipaul’s work and its problems, but nothing, recent, as I recall, and no real dialog. And until this week, I had seen no comment on Walcott by Naipaul. For a while, the Calabash International Literary Festival has tried to get these to share a stage in Jamaica: so far, no luck. We will keep trying.

Part of the fascination is with the idea that these two prodigious talents, men of quite frank and uncompromisingly opinionated ways, would represent a remarkably intriguing moment of creative power on a single stage at a time when they have quite little to lose in terms of reputation, and frankly, very little to gain by pot-shots or trite silliness. More than that, their importance to the English-speaking Caribbean cannot be understated. Walcott has given his life and art to offering us a poetic sense of what our landscape looks like and the value of the rich and complex cultures that have been forged on these islands. He declares himself a poet devoted to doing justice to the beauty and force of these small islands, but in his plays and poems, he is not writing postcards. He is helping us to understand that the world in these islands are sophisticated enough to warrant a stunning talent’s attention.

It occurred to me today that I have been using personal computers since 1988. Prior to that, I had a tangential relationship with computers. I had people use them to get things done for me. In 1987, I began to use a PC in the computer lab in the basement of one of the University of New Brunswick buildings. I was both excited and intimidated by this. My good friend and fellow graduate student from Sri Lanka, Walter Pererra, had already been using the PCs and he seemed to have a handle on things. I was impressed with his ability to code the PC and to produce reams of attached sheets of paper with the jagged, official looking texts stretched across. The printer hiccupped out these sheets, and it all seemed amazing to me. You will understand that prior to that, my last moment of amazement was when I had purchased a brand new Smith Corona electric typewriter that auto-corrected mistakes, and that had a peculiar delay in the system making me type for a few seconds before the digital ball of letters would start to tattoo out the text on the paper before me in that rapid way of hi-tech things. I transcribed many sheets of poems into clean type-written form over the space of a few weeks. This was the height of technology for me.

So when I came to the PC, I was entering another level of excitement. This system could save what I had written, store it on a really large (in retrospect) floppy diskette, and then, at a command, print out all of the work I had done. I was writing a number of papers and several plays at the time, and soon my Smith Corona seemed dated. Still, I never got the hang of the PC. Instinctively, the business of learning all those codes and commands seemed like an unnecessary annoyance. At one stage, the computer somehow devoured nearly fifty pages of writing I had done and no one seemed to think it could be retrieved. Frankly, nor did I. In my logic, this box had somehow done exactly what I feared it would do—take in my text and keep it for itself. Recovering data seemed like an impossibility to e—the very thought was an indulgence.

Sometimes poems are riddles, hard to decipher, complex mazes with clues scattered all around to help us find our way to some understanding. The poet is taking a risk there. The more difficult the task of working out the clues, the greater should be the pay-off. There is nothing worse than that sensation of finally cracking some code and then saying, “That’s it?� For a long time, that poet becomes a little suspect. However, the real pleasure of this quest is often similar to the feeling we have when we have completed a particularly difficult crossword puzzle.

If there were some kind of ancestral prototype for such poems, I like to think we would find it in some ancient culture where the priests were given the codes of herbal remedies or the laws of family and faith in riddle packed proverbial conundrums called poems. Only the priests would be expected to unravel these mysteries, but occasionally, some gifted soul manages to do so, and that person becomes Queen of King. The mystery of language, though is the thing retained.

Don’t worry about the facts, the truth is what is important.

Writers are told this all the time. There is this idea that there is a truth that transcends the facts and that we may find in what is not factual some profound truth. This is most obviously the justification for great fiction. The very name makes the point. Fiction is a cluster of lies, fabrications, inventions, that somehow have the capacity to communicate some of the most profound truths about human beings and about human experience. The characters are invented, the things that happened to them did not happen, but what they learn, why we discover about ourselves and about the world from what they do represent a clear example of truth despite fiction or because of fiction. And this feels quite comfortable. But not entirely. Even as we allow for the rich possibilities of fiction to go outside of “fact�, we seem to always demand, at the same time, a few things that are dangerously close to being substitutes for fact. We ask for probability. We also ask for plausibility. We imply that while we accept that it did not happen, we want to be able to think it did happen. In other words, while we are not sticklers for fact, we are for almost facts, that which might have seemed like fact if we were not told that it was not, in fact, fact. And if the near facts are presented, and once we have accepted the contract that these are not quite facts but near facts, then we can find truth comfortably. Truth, though is somewhat hard to pin down.

My grandfather lived in Lome.

We drove from Ghana to Lome, waiting patiently to be waved through the Ghana/ Togo border with a sense of anticipation and excitement. From there into Lome, the European language would be French and not English, but Ewe had long been the language even deep into Ghana. Ewe stretched across the border, another example of the hubris and high-handedness of the acts of Europeans partitioning Africa.

In 1995, Rosalie Richardson was one of the women I interviewed in Sumter about their lives growing up in Jim Crow, South Carolina. These stories have been a rich source of music and insight for me. But sometimes I return to their voices, just as they spoke to me, to remind me of the grace and poetry inherent in the cadence, the syntax and the care for detail in these tellings.

I discovered a found poem in Rosalie Richardson’s retelling of where she was born in 1924 and where she came from:

The town I was born in
was called Statesburg Township
during the time I was born.

It was in Smter County
and its between Highway 261
and the river going to Columbia.

Going over,
that would be the right,
between Horatio,
Borden and Hagwood.
That area.

I was born at home.
mid-doctors,
maybe you do not know of those—
you’ve heard, right? That’s it.

She then went on to talk about growing up on a farm.

Take me where the light is
John Mayer

I have still not worked out quite why the recent Time Magazine article on Mother Teresa’s book of private correspondence, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, has fascinated me so much without my even reading it. The obvious reason could have to do with my interest in matters of the human experience of faith, but that is not often enough to draw me into an article about faith in Time. I have never really been interested in Mother Teresa—I have admired her, but only in that vague way of knowing that she has done remarkable things as a nun in India, and little else. So that can’t explain my interest. The truth is, I don’t want to understand this fully until I have read the book (which I will), but I can say that over the last few hours since reading the article, there is something about Mother Teresa’s anguish to find the voice and presence of God in her daily life that makes sense to the artist, even the poet, in me.

In 1973 I entered high school. That year, my school, Jamaica College, did not play in the schools’ football (read soccer) contest—in fact, no school did. That year the entire season had been suspended for reasons I can’t recall right now. Something had happened the year before, and so there was no season. But there were games. And the games we played assured us that our team was the one that would have won had the contest happened. It was a painful year of going to various schools to watch the matches of these skilled young players. The illusion of greatness was so intense that I remember having serious arguments with my fellow eleven year olds about the best way for Jamaica to make it to the World Cup finals—a notion as absurd as anything we could conceive of then. I, along with other profound eleven-year-old thinkers, knew without a bit of doubt, that were the members of our current football team pulled out of the routine of everyday life, the mundane preoccupations of going to school, for instance, and were they then not compelled to play with the lesser players from other schools and clubs, that team, that stellar team, would go on to secure a place in the World Cup, and would, no doubt have won. This is how devoted we were to our high school team.

I have been wondering how much poetry collections these days are being structured around the habits of readers of book contest entries. Someone commented some months ago, that much of the poetry published today does not come out of these contests. This is quite true. But I suspect that many first books these days are published through contests. It occurred to me recently that reading poems to judge a contest is vastly different from reading poems as an editor of a series.

A few confessions apropos of much of the discussion about how to promote poetry:

1. I promote poetry. I say, “Y’all need to read poems, they are great.� I say, “Y’all need to read Terrance Hayes, he is really a smart poet.� I say, “Girls are still into guys who can find a poem and give it to them.� I say, “Do you want me to write a poem about you?� They always say, “Yes, yes, yes!�.

2. I like reading novels. They are full of stories. They transport me into a narrative world. I like Seinfeld, too, and I find that show funny mostly because it has stories. I like television. It makes me think. But mostly, it is the mythic story-box. Americans love stories. Even bad predictable stories. If you asked me whether I liked The Simpsons, I would say no, not really. But sometimes I am idling in front of the television and once I have made it through eight minutes of the show I want to see the rest. I like Girlfriends. Truth is I tell people who send me novel manuscripts to read, “I will probably get into your story even if it is bad. I am a hopeless gossip, and I like to know what happens even if what happens is really daft.� Novels and books of poetry are different from each other.

...and there is more....

With anthems like this coming through the radio in the 1970s and 1980s it is hard not to develop a poetics of rebellion. This is Burning Spear in a song whose lyric, as strangely elliptical as it may seem, remains profoundly rooted in the fittingly contradictory idea of a creation rebel--one grounded in creation, in the fact of creation, in everything that creation suggests, and yet one who is shifting the norm and trying to evoke something new. His rebellion comes from the quest to sing his own sing in a world that will continue to disappoint. From the alienation of shouting out loud for bread and hearing no response, the artist must sing his song. It is a rebellion towards hopefulness. I understand this intimately, understand it as the instinct that I want in me--a creation rebel poet. Man, you have to love this reggae business!

CREATION REBEL

I travel all the whole of Rome
to find my bread,
to find my bread.
Call so loud,
search all around;
no one to hear my cry
but what am I to do?
I don’t know, that’s why
they call me, now, creation rebel don;
they call me, creation rebel don, rebel don.
Creation rebel they call me.
Creation rebel they call me.
They call me.
They call me.
They call me.
They call me.

One ting more for I to tell you,
for I to tell you,
for I, for I to tell you.
One ting more for I to tell you:
One shoe on my feet,
one pants to me waist,
one shirt on my back;
its gone, its gone,
what am I to do?
I don’t know.
That’s why
they call me,
creation rebel don,
that’s why they call me
creation rebel don, rebel don.

Rebels in the morning.
Rebels in the evening.
Rebels inivershally.
Rebels was from a dat time,
until this time
I made up my mind
to go on,
sing my song.

Maybe,
maybe,
I will find good round the other side;
and that’s why they call me,
creation rebel they call me;
they call me creation rebel;
is they who call me,
creation, creation rebel,
creation
they call me,
its they who call me.

Winston Rodney, The Burning Spear

The funny thing is that had I gotten a better A Level grade for History than I did for English I would probably not be a poet. Everyone, including me, was sure that I would do better in History than English. I liked History, the journey into the past, the dates, the analytical. I got it. My History teacher was sure I would have a distinction and that was the expectation right until the afternoon I walked through the bougainvillea festooned garden path that led to the principal’s office of my high school. The secretary gave me the slip of paper with my grades, smiling. She knew I had done quite well—gotten all my subjects with good grades. But the English grade was the distinction. The History was a solid grade, but it was lower. Now, I regard this as something of a flaw in my character, one that I have come to accept and sometimes to turn into a strength: Things can change my mind. Until I saw the grades I was going to university to study History, and after a year I would transfer into the Law program and work my way towards my dream of great wealth, fame and power as a big time lawyer. My fall back plan was more History. I could teach History in high school or even at university. I had never had a History teacher that I did not like. Mr. Mills was a cool campaigner who opened up history to eleven and twelve year olds in remarkable ways. He spoke as if he had a mouthful of cotton, but he spoke with an easy facility with the material and he would even get passionate as he told stories. He had an afro, he was cool, and he taught history. Mrs. Sobers also taught history. You could sense beneath her petite, smiling veneer, a ramrod of rebellion, resistance and political consciousness. She taught us slavery and took us there. Once, our anger about the slavery system almost stirred a race war in class. This is an exaggeration, but in my imagination, something had shifted in me—people had histories, we came from somewhere and the world that stretched in the past was fascinating and limitless.

On the BBC World Service early this morning there was a cluster of talkers, apparently of some note (I don’t remember who they were—it was four-fifty in the morning, Two Notch Road was dark and steaming, and I was busy trying to wake up for the gym), lamenting that there are no rebels anymore. One musician admitted that there were no musicians that one could call rebels like Bob Dylan or Bob Marley. The commodifying of rebellion was killing all rebellion. The final comment was provocative—the true rebels are the men and women who are strapping bombs around their bodies and detonating them in large crowds—these rebels are conservative believers but people who are acting against the status quo. By the time I turned into the wide parking lot of the gym I began to wonder what was so appealing about being a rebel. Bob Marley and the Wailers singing:

I’m a rebel
Soul rebel
I’m a capturer
Soul adventurer...

kept running through my head.

Warning: There is poetry somewhere in this blog, but you are going to have to dig deep to find it…

The things I am reading and the things I am writing and the things I am doing are all making me think about America and Americanness. Recently I was asked in a public forum what were my thoughts on Barak Obama’s dilemma with African Americans. The person quoted the often used statement (not sure who came up with it, and I am not entirely convinced that black folks did) that Obama is not “black enough.� The implication being that Obama is not black enough to have automatic access to the black vote. It reminded me of Steve Harvey’s retort to another often used phrase: “You musn’t vote for Obama just because he is black.� Harvey’s question: “So what, I must vote for you just because you are white?� Think about it. It is actually a profoundly insightful and clever retort, as that has to be the only available conclusion one could reach. In other words, it is going to be about race if you bring it up, and since you have brought it up, you have to be saying that you want me to vote for a white person because that person is not black. But I did not use Harvey’s retort to answer the question. Instead I offered a statement that sounded on the surface counter-intuitive and wrong. Obama’s problem is not that people suspect he is not black enough, but that people fear he is not American enough. And by people, I mean first and foremost, black people. In other words, the reticence that some blacks feel about Obama is actually a kind of xenophobia, the worst form of patriotism that seems unlikely for a people who have fought so hard to be accepted as Americans in their own country. Still, it is a peculiar brand of xenophobia because it is one that emerges out of a myth of African America survival and triumph that has very clear dimensions—a distinctive narrative that is perhaps one of the most admired features of the American Dream. African Americans are uncertain about Obama because he represents a breach of one strain of the American Dream.

August Wilson’s monumental project, the Century Cycle of plays is soon to be released as a single publication—a beautifully (it seems to me) packaged production of all ten of the plays in the cycle. This is exciting news. I have been thinking a lot about August Wilson lately having spent most of this week at the National Black Theater Festival in Winston Salem, North Carolina. I have been attending this festival every two years since the early nineties, and I have participated in the symposium attached to the festival since that time. The festival is usually a celebrity fest, a crowding of black film, television and stage celebrities in this tobacco enriched town, a week in which fans will gather around the marquee hotel of the festival (it is now The Marriott, but used to be Adams Mark) where the sport of star gazing/spotting takes place. And stars like to be gazed at, like to be spotted—they walk around as if they are looking for somebody, and they never make eye contact when talking to anyone while in the lobby. They all seem to have mastered that rude habit of looking around for someone more important while they are talking to you. They are always in a hurry, and when you do find out what they are hurrying to, you realize that they are not really in a hurry to do anything—they just do the hurry thing because it looks cooler to be rushing through a crowd to your waiting limo than it does to saunter along and casually step in. Some are not big enough stars to be panicked about people coming around. Most are stars who probably go to bed at night feeling like crap because not enough people seemed to realize who they were during the day.

Lately, so many lives I know have been strained by what have become ordinary tragedies—fatal accidents, sudden deaths, collapsing marriages, unexpected illness, prison, unemployment, crippling depression and it goes on and on. Nothing much, I know has changed in the world. I imagine that for a pastor, a doctor, a therapist, a lawyer, a nurse, or police officer, this is the way the world is organized, this is the norm. I, however, exist in a space of the uneventful as the norm, such that all events can become just that, events. It is a way of shaping my life into an arc of dramatic consequence: Today all was well, then suddenly, the world was no longer the same. Come tomorrow, calm is restored, and then suddenly the world is no longer the same, and so on.

Apart from the Psalms, there is only one other biblical book that seems wholeheartedly and unequivocally devoted to the art of poetry. Of course, virtually all the minor prophets make their pronouncements in verse, and there are lengthy stretches of verse in far more areas of the Old Testament than there are not. The Book of Proverbs, The Book of Jonah, and Job, for instance, are beautifully rendered long poems that one imagines to have been written with a clear sense of Hebraic Prosody. I think I understood something about the poetic patterns of the bible before I even understood that they represented a certain formal Hebrew poetics. And even now, much of what I know has not come from a careful study of Hebraic prosody. It has come from the habit of reading the scriptures a lot and mining them for the poetic turns that prove to be so enduring in their clarity that I learn so much from them all the time. I have even threatened myself to one day attempt a “translation� of Psalm 119, patterning the extremely demanding acrostic that the psalmist used in the Hebrew. Of course, this is one of a long list of impossible poetic challenges that I have given myself—few, if any, that will ever be attempted much less completed.

Two blogs back, I wrote about Nikky Finney's poem, "The Afterbirth, 1931", but what I did not do is quote much from the poem and so I fear I deprived us of the chance to look at the poem. Some of you have gone to find the poem, but I thought I would share it with you. The entire Rive is a beautiful book and worth picking up, and this is just one of many really lovely poems in the collection.

The Afterbirth, 1931

We were a Colored Clan of Kinfolk
who threw soil not salt
over our shoulders
who tendered close the bible
who grew and passed around the almanac at night
so we would know
what to plant at first light

I have always scribbled notes in collections of poems while I am reading them. A curious entertainment for me is to return to books and see what I thought about certain poems. Often I realize how much I completely misunderstood a poem, and at times I see scribbled my own meditations art the time which bear only tangential relevance to the poem at hand. I have a worn hard cover copy of the first edition of Derek Walcott’s The Gulf with the huge picture of Walcott’s assured chin, dark curls and brooding eyes on the back. He looks all of the poet and quite seventies with his extended sideburns. My notes are in a ball point pen all over the collection. Sometimes the comments are amusing, other times I am annoyed at not getting something, and more often than not I seem to be making notes for a class discussion—hoping to sound intelligent among fellow students. “Hic Jacet� is the final poem in the collection. I have marked off the penultimate stanza and written “This is the theme.�:

Convinced of the power of provincialism,
I yielded quietly my knowledge of the world
to a grey tup steaming with clouds of seraphim,
the angels and flags of the world,
and answer those who hiss, like steam, of exile,
this coarse sop-smelling truth:

In a letter written in 1879, Hopkins described this poem as “the best thing [he has] ever written.� I should pay more attention to the poem for that reason, to its genius, to its qualities, to why he liked it so much; but, instead, I am distracted by the very act of a poet naming a poem—a single poem—“the best thing he has ever written.� To know this, to be so sure of this, represents a clarity of poetic vision and ambition that I can only admire. Mostly, I am wondering whether what I have written is any good, whether it has any value as a poem. Hopkins, though was clear about this poem’s achievement, and the achievement was found in the act of making it, the act of revising until he felt it ready to go. From where we stand now, we can agree that it is an achievement, as poems go. Such a lively, unorthodox, almost playful poem when it comes to language, and yet a tidy homily in praise of Christ that is heartfelt, tender, risky, and complex. It is beautiful. Like many poems that I have come to admire and return to, this was a difficult poem for me. But I should qualify that. I had problems making a step-by-step journey into meaning with the poem. The syntax, the diction, the theology all defied me, distracted me and left me quite uncertain about the meaning of the poem. Yet, oddly enough, the poem still moved me—its energy, the rhythm and the richness of alliteration all suggested energy and drive:

I have been thinking about poems lately. Not poets. Just poems. I realize that poetry is often like food for me. I like to have a good diet with enough roughage, greens and meat. But I have an emotional connection to some foods and surprisingly the foods that I have fond memories of are not always the unhealthy foods. Poetry is like that for me. I know that some poems are good for me, and some poems are dear to me for various reasons. So I am thinking randomly of some of the poems that I seem to return to.

Nikky Finney’s “The Afterbirth� appears in her book Rice, a beautifully designed book of poems filled with daring poems of painful eloquence by Finney. Rice was Finney’s second book of poems, arriving some ten years or so after her first book was published in the mid-eighties. Remarkably, the book did not win the interest of a US press, but was published by the exceptional Sister Vision Press of Toronto, Canada. As part of the promotional drive of the work, Finney was distributing small burlap bags full of rice—all very tasty and effective. But it is the poetry that is still most powerful, and the poem “The Afterbirth� remains a haunting presence in my imagination.

First, a quick word of congratulations to Jeff for his book deal and a word of farewell from Harriet. We will miss you, Jeff. Muchly.

Now onto our blog:

I have been asked for my “papers�.

At some level this is a flattering. Someone thinks my “papers� are worthy of keeping. Of course, the larger question is, what are my “papers�? It is an interesting question. And there is an implication that the papers are only important as a legacy—as the kind of thing that people look at and think about and access when I am dead. So, in a sense, the collecting of my papers amounts to preparation for death.—my death. Which raises quite a number of issues for me. I do wonder whether I am too young to be thinking of my papers without a certain vanity. But vanity is built into this business of making books, rankly, except that there is civility in the art of pushing the vain impulse to the place where we place all necessary but unseemly impulses—farting, telling people exactly what we think of the shirt they have on, responding to other people’s bad breath, etc. So to consciously start thinking of the junk in my filing cabinets and in boxes all over my office would as my “papers� is to indulge openly in that vanity. Further, to think of organizing these papers for the sake of posterity is to think of posterity, which is the same as thinking of dying, which is different from vanity but equally unpleasant.

But I have been asked for my “papers� and I have been forced to think about these things.

It is at once humbling, startling, and puzzling. Every so often, I have to do a cleaning out of my office. This means going into files spilling with slips of paper, old manuscripts, unpublished poems, letters, posters, galley proofs, students’ papers and more of the detritus of a life spent collecting papers, filling pages with words and negotiating the written word. Invariably, I will come across an old note pad or a yellowing pile of sheets with typewritten text on them. Inevitably, I come across some of my writing of the past. Today, I ran across poems I had compiled and typed out in 1984. I would have been twenty-two then. It occurs to me that I was about the same age as some of the first year MFA students I sometimes teach. The same age as many of the poets I work with who are trying to shape their craft. I wish I could say that I see tremendous promise in these poems. What I see are poems that would make me think hard about what to say, think hard about what is working here, think hard about how to understand what is making this person want to write poems. I would have a lot of questions to ask this young writer about what he is reading and what he admires in poets. It is hard to see in these poems the trace elements of what I now see in my own writing. That is the puzzling part: how did I get from one place to the other?

Many years ago, while embarked on the ambitious task of defining myself as a writer, I actually came up with a motto—a kind of coda that I crafted into a carefully designed logo and plastered all over what I planned to be stationery. I was ambitious, but the truth is that I was inventing a narrative for myself as a writer. I felt the need to do so having published three books of poems without seeing articles about me doing that work for me. I had imagined it would have been quite different. To comfort myself, I blamed the fact that my books were published in Canada and the UK and I was living, at the time, in a tiny southern town called Sumter, South Carolina, and teaching at a two-year college.

I had done something of the sort years before when I was primarily and comfortably a playwright. Then I began by trying to collect all the plays that I had written and staged and pulling them together into an attractive binder—a pseudo manuscript, if you will. My plan at the time was to collect these plays—nicely typed out and decently bound, to give as a gift to my father, with whom, until that time, I had never had a discussion about my writing, my ambitions as a writer or anything of the sort. In retrospect, the reason was complicated. At the time, though, I just felt that it would be an act of vanity to talk about myself to him, and I also felt that I really was not a good enough writer to engage in conversation with my father—an established author in his own right. But mostly, it was because I was Christian, and all my plays were Christian plays. I mean, I worked on these plays as part of my commitment to evangelism and as a way to work through the meaning of my faith in Jamaican society. I knew I was making art. To reassure myself that art is what I was making, I studied the work of the 17th century poets—Donne, Herbert, and Marvell—as a way of understanding the nature of faith in art. I read Shakespeare’s plays as morality plays. I studied all the Morality cycle plays, paying attention to the way in which they evolved from the liturgy of the church and moved out into the market place. I read with some fascination and a hint of affirmation, all I could about T.S Eliot’s conversion, and I found some gratification in The Four Quartets, even though I knew that I was closer in spirit to the faith of C.S. Lewis than to the more philosophical ideas of T.S. Eliot. Still, the idea of Christian literature had value for me. But I was still working it out, and when I looked closer to home, namely to my father and his friends George Lamming and John Hearne, I knew that I would find no useful models of faith and literature that I could embrace.

In June 1961, my father was in the Soviet Union on a tour. He took the time to write a daily journal. On June 16th, he wrote:

…My birthday. Gilly Osei’s present –Lenin’s MATERIALISM AND EMPIRIOCRITICISM.

Gorky Collective Farm. Saw Repair-Service station, dairies, crèche, school, hot-houses for vegetables. The Party Secretary who showed us around knew about Ghana and Nkrumah. Studied the plan for the development of the farm in to an agricultural town and its detailed place in seven-year plan.

Visited a hostel of Friendship University; saw three Ghana students. Conditions not so good but new University buildings are nearly complete: the Ghanaians are looking forward to that.

Celebrated my birthday on a river restaurant. Drank quantities of champagne and brandy provided (as well as a gift) by Alexander Ivanovitch. I had a bad cold, though. Perhaps it would turn out to be symbolic that I spent my middle of the way birthday in Moscow.

He was then thirty-five years old. He expected to make it to seventy (three score and ten) and saw it as perhaps symbolic that he would be in Moscow for his birthday. He was still a young man and his faith in Marxism was intact. He was on a delegation to the USSR sponsored, it appears, by the Nkrumah government that was engaged in dialogue with the Soviets, much to the annoyance of the USA. These were cold war years. My father was clear about where he wanted to be and what he hoped for in Ghana and the rest of the so-called Third World. Yet what moves me is the speculative quality of his phrasing: “perhaps it would turn out�… There is something ominous about the phrase, as if he was planning to do something, to be involved with something, something he was not sure was going to happen. I am not sure what that might have been. What I do know is that his eyes were open in The USSR, and yet his heart was also open to the world he saw and the humanity he felt connected to.

Where is the pulse of poetry, today? Is there a pulse? Is there any point in trying to find one? For a while I really felt that the pulse of poetry was this blog site. We were being quite brilliant, insightful and hip to what is going on around us and there were hints here and there that we were going to try to, if not fix the ills of poetry, at least define them and study them and expose them. Of course, this was not what any of us were about, and we should all be grateful for this. Still, I am sure that those of us who write poetry and hang around with poets find ourselves in situations that convince us that we are sitting in the epicenter of poetry in America, and we even offer statements like, “Wow, this is what is happening in poetry, this is where it at!� Then we return to our ordinary lives and we go back to writing our poems, and doing our workshops, and making our livings and dealing with family, and not only does the epicenter of poetry seem like an unlikely place, but it also seems quite irrelevant. So is there an epicenter, a hub? And does anyone care?

There are good Samaritans, but mostly there are people who can be kind and who happen to be there when you need a little help. There are holy people—the good Samaritans who go out of their way—but mostly, there are people who do their jobs and sometimes, because of our desperation, those jobs make them look like good Samaritans. Like the driver of the tow truck who “rescued� us in Waverly, Louisiana, who said, “I am the undertaker. You don’t want to see me, but you know you need to see me and you are happy I am here.� He made me laugh. That was kind. He also said, “It is amazing what two heart attacks, a divorce, the loss of fifty pounds and the selling off of all your businesses can do for your health.� He does his job. He loaded the van, let us pile into his truck and drove us to Monroe to pick up a rental and leave the van at the dealership. “It is a tough job,� he tells me as he recalls a conversation he had with a man who asked him, “Why do you do this job, man? The hours are horrible, it is twenty-four seven on call, and it does not matter what the weather is like…� “It is a tough job,� he replied, “but the tips are great.� I tip him well. He does his job. He is kind. He is a good neighbor. Good neighbors do their job, they are decent, you give them what they deserve and they say thank you. They are there when you need them and they try.

Three hours earlier, while speeding through three states along the I20West, I said to myself, “There is nothing much to say about this journey across this country—the landscape changes ever so subtly as we pass through the different states, but mostly, it is a long high way, an occasional sighting of local color and little else.� Then the strange sound starts in the front wheel, and then we are stranded on the road and then we meet a real-life Louisiana man, and it is clear to me that without this, I might as well have flown from Columbia to Dallas, Texas. Truth is, everyone has been kind. Even the Hertz Rental lady at the impossibly parochial Monroe Regional airport smiled, took my card, pointed out the car and just let it all seem easy, non-crisis-like and manageable.

So I can now quote, fittingly, Tennessee Williams with all his Louisiana connections—himself, a stranger here: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,� or was it, “I have come to depend on the kindness of strangers�? No matter, the point is made.

I do know that this is how a poet collects images even while living from day to day. Life is so ordinary, and then you face the extraordinary and you busy yourself trying to make that as ordinary as life should be. Maybe that is the heart of the poem. For me, my job is to make poems. My job is to do so as a good neighbor. My job is to be the undertaker or the plumber or the man who tows wrecked cars, but to do so with poems. And if I can do this, just do my job with kindness and consistency, then I will be as happy as my tow truck friend: "I was the black sheep of the family. After Vietnam, I came and did things.... One day a woman comes into the office and says, 'I been knowing you for years, I seen you...' she is a black woman. 'I seen you working your ass off in here like you ain't got a penny to rub together. Why you do that when you know you are doing just fine?' I tell her, 'Cause I love it, that's why." So we go on.

It might have been two months ago when I posted some thoughts about translation. At some point, I observed that it was possible for a good translator/poet to transform a bad poem into a beautiful poem in another language. I am sure this is not a profoundly original observation. I can’t imagine that the thought has ot crossed the mind of many translators, and ore than that, that such a thought has not bee the subject of several major books on translation. Still, the idea fascinates me. And today, I was pushed into contemplating this idea some more when I read a review of the translation of poems by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. The translation was done by an apparently young translator, Alissa Valles. I know very little about all the major players in this scathing epic of a review—all I know of them comes from what Hoffman offers in his review, but I know enough to feel deeply sorry for Alissa Valles, and to stand amazed at Hoffman’s authority in slamming her translation of Herbert with such ferocity. It is worth the read, because the entire drama is predicated on Hoffman’s conviction that the translations are bad and that they do not do justice to the original writing of the Pole in his Polish language. This would be an unassailable and commanding assertion if there was not the small detail of Hoffman’s admitted lack of knowledge of Polish. He has German (he is quite an authoritative and respected German translator) and some other languages, but no Polish, and he does seem to be basing what he knows of the “originals� on the already existing translations by two of the other characters in this melodrama, John and Bogdana Carpenter, two translators of Herbert who clearly have devoted all of their professional lives to translating his work into English. Hoffman is decidedly upset that for whatever reason, these translators were not asked to do this authoritative Collected poems by Herbert, but that the task was handed to an unknown (certainly to Hoffman) woman, Allissa Valles. In his review, Hoffman eventually offers specific examples of how bad her translations are compared to the translations of the same poems by the Carpenters.

I have said I various places that my first real influence as a poet was Gerard Manley Hopkins, the British poet of “God’s Grandeur�, “Pied Beauty�, and “The Kingfisher�. Sometimes I have hesitated about admitting this influence because it can sound a tad quaint (black Jamaican school boy taken in by the work of a so-white-he-probably-did-not-know-he-was English poet of the 19th century), and like a failure of post-colonial and reggae resistance. My reticence s especially acute when I am speaking to Euro-shaped poets of the Tradition, who will find a point of affinity in my admission to this connection to Hopkins, at best, and at worst, an affirmation of the ascendancy of Great Tradition of Pound and his “ABC� rubric to western poetry. But I resist al of this for the sake of truth. Hopkins was an influence. But calling him an influence is a poor way of describing the role of his work on my coming into poetry. The truth is that after my encounter with Hopkins, chances were quite good that I would not continue to be a poet. Hopkins got me interested in the writing of poetry, but Hopkins was not enough to make me want to continue to be a poet. When I faced that challenge, the question I was asking was not “Do I like to write poems?� but “Do I have the right to write poems?� I was also asking, “Do I have anything to write about as a poet?� I was asking a question about possibility and permission, and Hopkins was in no real position to offer me permission at that point in my life

Kenneth,

First, a message for you. The legal folks at the New York Transport Authority have delivered a court order to me to testify against you. Apparently, they have decided to sue you for plagiarism. There is a very angry team of train schedule writers waiting to either get justice or jump you for robbing them. I tried to explain about "found poems", but they were not feeling me. One really irate worker shouted, "So, you think you can just find anything along the way, knowing full well that it belongs to someone, and all you have to do is call it 'found' and it is yours? That is a load of caca!" They are just not feeling me. I tried to explain that you really made no money on the book, and more than that, you really are not interested in becoming famous for having "written" all that stuff. They were not really convinced. I know they were quite angry. I may have to testify, Kenneth, I am sorry, I just don't know what to do...

Now to your questions:
- Do you copyright your poems? Why or why not?
I don't. I rely on publication to copyright my work. Why? because I find it very hard to believe that anyone would want to steal my poetry; and in a sick kind of way, if they do, I would be flattered. Now I am not so blase about song lyrics and story treatments and that kind of thing. But the poems? Naaah. I know a lot of less experienced poets who will ask me how to secure copyright for fear of someone stealing their work. Most of the time I want to tell them that no one is going to want to steal that stuff, but that would be rude. Still, it is fair to say that with poetry there is far less at stake financially than with other genres. Hence my quarrel with thieves would be mostly a principled one about morality, more than anything else. A year ago, a friend of mine read a passage of text in a memoir that seemed just too familiar to him. The narrative was so close to one that he had retold in a poem. The thing is that the author of the memoir had been the editor of an anthology to which my friend had submitted a few poems including the one in question. The editor did not accept the poem, but it seemed he had borrowed from the poem. My poet friend wondered what to do? I could think of nothing. What was at stake? Principle, really. The most my friend could do was publish his poem and date it in the published text amnd hope nop one would accuse him of plagiarizing the prominent poet and memoir writer. A more attractive option would be for him to write a poem about how he was robbed by a major poet. But sue? That would seem excessive. It would be a hard case to win. That is why I tell poets to try to secure copyright by publishing and if they can't publish they might try the old self-addressed-selaed-envelope trick. I hear that it has some legal standing. I remember feeling this anxiety about folks stealing my work when I was much younger. I have a more realistic view of the currency of poetry now.

- As a poet, what is your relationship to copyright issues, in general?
Not a big issue for me as a poet, but as a writer in general I have serious concerns about the existence and enforcement of strong copyright laws that will allow artists to be paid and that will discourage plagiarists and other thieves. Of course, as a scholar and critic, I have to deal with copyright issues in my own work. What is "fair use", for instance? The laws in the US are quite different from the laws in the UK which are equally different from the laws in other places and the implications for a writer seeking to quote from the work of another writer can be quite significant. I had to rewrite my entire book, Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius when I could not secure permission from the Marley Estate to quote as much of Bob Marley's lyrics as I wanted. And what about photocopying short stories for class or showing Block Buster videos to a larger audience than simply my household? The issues are important and I have to stay abreast of them.

Not sure if there is anything especially profound about this matter, but there it is.

I have been writing this final entry on Calabash for four days. Having returned to South Carolina to finish teaching my short semester course, "Love African American Style", a close look at romantic black fiction, I have had to fit in the bits and pieces of the final day of the Bash between everything I have to do. It has been good to think about the festival, about what it all means, but mostly, I write this to complete the circle.

So, we are on day three of the festival. It all begins early in the morning...

For the entire day, a sheltering cloud settles over Treasure Beach, and when it rains, the thousand and a half people find shelter under the tent where poets and novelists are reading, their voices clean and assured against the drone of rain beating against the canvas and hushing through the trees. Somehow, the lines marked out for passageways through the crowds remain intact, and the spirit of the festival has not changed--people are happy to be there, they are there to listen to writers read their work, and a little rain (or a lot of rain) will not spoil this for them.

It is just past midnight. From the seaward end of the tent, just at the edge of the stage with its rustic columns, its thatched roof, its gazebo-like utility when this tented area has been transformed back into a large hall filled with rows and rows of white plastic chairs into a thickly grassed sloping lawn; I am watching people greeting each other as if service has just ended and someone has said, "greet one another with a holy kiss". Aaron Patrovich has just startled us with a stunning reading of a Beckettian-like stretch of complexly philosophical prose with the intensity and skill of a gifted slam poet--all from memory, no book in hand, just speaking in modulated tones, making characters come alive from his weirdly surreal novel The Session, and nearly a thousand people in the audience have taken the ride with him, laughing at the absurdist jokes, nodding at the twists in ideas, and applauding with force as he leaves them hanging at the end, saying: "And if you want to know who came through the door, buy the book" .It is charming, it is a tour de force, and Calabash2007 has just been launched.

We leave Montego Bay at about one o'clock. I warn novelist Joe Meno and his wife Koren who are in the car with me, my son and Cavell the driver, that this is going to be a long two and a half hour drive. We are going to drive south across the western end of the island, and then make our way from the North Coast down through two parishes and across one, into St Elizabeth where Treasure Beach is tucked away. I ask the driver whether it has been raining a lot. I am worried about another flooded Calabash. We have had two of those early on in the annual cycle. Some who were there that year assured us that those storms were aberrations. Of course they had their use. Calabash was named by a few writers in the media as--"The Woodstock of literary festivals" . Woodstock? Stars. Lots of drugs. Lots of mud. Free love. We had mud. There may have been drugs but I can't say, though I do know that the haze over the outskirts of the crowd may not have been fog. I can't speak for free love, but the audiences gave the writers mad love. But there was mud and there were star writers. And from the first year, it was special. But I always ask about rain. He offers that while it has rained steadily in Montego Bay, it has been extremely dry on the south coast. The farmers are understandably unhappy about this, but I am happy at the news.

Every May, for the past seven years, I have made my way to the south coast of Jamaica with one of my three children (they are on a rotation schedule) to join my two dear friends, Justine Henzell and Colin Channer in running the largest literary festival in the Caribbean and what many are wisely realizing is one of the coolest literary festivals in the world: the Calabash International Literary Festival. In two days time I will head down to Jamaica again--the seventh year, and the roster is exciting (www.calabashfestival.org) this year and already the excitement is starting to spill across the Caribbean Sea. Here is a taste: Terrance Hayes, Michael Ondaatje, Mike Farrell, Patricia Smith, Elizabeth Alexander, Maryse Conde, Gabeba Baderon, Caryl Phillips, Kendel Hippolyte, Linda Susan Jackson, David Adams Richards and so, so, many more.

Some of the larger and decidedly political work that Linton Kwesi Johnson did through his poetry involved reciting his poems at rallies and marches in the UK to protest real atrocities and abuses to real people and to argue for the changing of laws. He marched in tandem with political organizing and speech making. Those marches, those recitations, those expressions of protest through art, actually did change things. Laws were rescinded, consciousness was raised, and things have happened in the UK because of this work. Making a distinction between LKJ the poet versus the musician is misguided and limiting. That his music becomes a vehicle for his poetry is not, to my mind, an indication that poetry has failed while the music has not. For LKJ there cannot be one without the other. For me, the music and the poetry are not only engaged, but they are defining of each other. Yes, music brings people to the table, but every poet knows this even when that poet does not have a dub band backing them up. The music is in the language, too.

Lucille Clifton’s poetry is a gift. There is no question in my mind about this. Yet when I think of Lucille Clifton, I realize that I think of the two occasions when I had the chance to listen to her talk to a group of gifted black poets about poetry. The curious thing for me was that her talk reminded of someone who in many ways is as far away from Lucille Clifton as any writer I could think of. I remembered James Dickey. Not the Dickey of legend who has given anyone who has met him a colorful array of stories to tell and tell again. Not the heavy drinking Dickey, the arrogant Dickey nor the Dickey whose office was in the same building I worked in but who, despite my efforts, did not really think it a convenient or useful thing to meet me. There is the Dickey whose poetry at times stuns me with its technical force and its wonderful musicality and deep intelligence, but this is not the Dickey I was reminded of. I was reminded of the Dickey whose wavering voice I heard on a recording done not long before his death. On the recording he was talking about the poet as priest. He was speaking of the vocation of the poet and how important the poet is in human experience. Yes, you knew that this elevation of the poet was not unrelated to Dickey’s penchant for expressing his self-importance at any opportunity. If Plato could elevate the status and value of the philosopher by dumping all over the poet, then why could Dickey do the very same for the poet? But there was a lot that was not self-serving about his articulation. He spoke of the vocation of poetry, its place in human intelligence and its indispensable place in any civilized society. Any poet listening would find some comfort, some assurance in the idea, He was an old man, cynical about many things, and in a position to be cynical about poetry, but his faith in the art had not waned, had not be jaundiced by a world that seemed less interested in the heroism of the poet. I found something like inspiration in his words; and I was reminded that it was possible to draw truths from some of the most unlikely places.

In an earlier post of a few days ago ("Political Poetry"), I spoke of political poetry and I asked folks to share some of the political poems that they admire here in the US. The list began, and I hoped it would continue. But it has not continued.

I am curious about how "poltical" is defined. Would Robert Pinsky be safely called a political poet? I suspect that one could posit that poets who shatter how we engage the world through the rupture of language, for instance, are engaged in a political act. And those children that Patricia talks about who write about their abuse--surely their capacity to break silence is a political act and their poems, though confessional in nature and probably not calling for action, are political, are they not?

But it cannot be as simple as that. I suspect that when I speak of the political poem I am speaking of the poem that seems engaged in using language to effect some kind of political change or transformation. I also suspect that when I speak of the political, I mean that somehow, the poems are rooted in speaking to present realities and offering a political view point on them.

But all of this sounds like the fodder for really bad poetry--for propaganda. Still, this anxiety is based on a lie. There are great poems that manage to achieve all of these things I have listed and still be remarkable as works of art. Kenneth Goldsmith says that utilitarian poetry fails as art. I can't accept that when I think of Linton Kwesi Johnson's poems, "Five Nights of Bleeding" and "Sonny's Letter".

But I am still searching for the language to talk about political poetry. The examples of political poets working today will help us to do that. I encourage folks to add to the list.

For those who are anxious about this seeming downer of topic, I will soon be asking about whether it is possible to write an erotica poem that is artful. Kenneth, what about the erotic?

My children are musicians. In this I am living a desire vicariously through them. I have been scrupulous about avoiding that kind of thing. After all, while it seems quite difficult to come up with any unselfish reason for having children, to blatantly try to live out one’s fantasies through them seems somewhat self-involved and, at worst, a clear path towards therapy for the child as an adult. But in this I have not been able to avoid that pathology. They are, all three of them, musicians. And I just think it is fantastic. Now I could be called a musician, but I don’t really believe that. I learnt how to play the guitar when I was eighteen. This means that some friends taught me three chords and that was it. My then girlfriend (who would become my wife) took time to teach me chords and to encourage my playing. She was a real musician. She had done music lessons—piano lessons. She could read music. She could harmonize as a singer, and she played the guitar. She would always look too small for the guitar as she ran her fingers over the frets, bar-chording and picking out phrase by phrase notes. Whenever I got the guitar, I worked my three chords, learning, in the process to complicate my playing with rhythmic ploys. I was no musician. Reading music was (and still is) a mystery to me. I would go on to play in a three bands, record two CDs, to write hundreds of songs, and to even compose music for a full-blown musical that was performed on the West End in London, but I still don’t call myself a musician. My children, though, are musicians. They real deal, they are. You see they can read music. They play instruments, the play in band and orchestra, they talk music. It is a fascinating thing to me that pleases me no end.

Tonight, I spoke about the importance of the imagination at the commencement ceremonies at one of our larger technical colleges in South Carolina. Afterwards, the presidents shook my hand firmly and said, “You are not the person I saw in your poems, you must have a double personality…� She was smiling. I laughed. In her introduction she hoped that I would give them a taste of my Caribbean rhythm. I spoke about the imagination. I had on a suit and shoes. My sandals were strewn in the back seat of my car. I spoke about the value of dreams, of vision, of expanding one’s horizons, of empathy, and I proposed that these were all products of the imagination. I was talking to nurses, mechanics, food technologists, electricians, chefs—all people who were trained to be something very specific. These people knew what they were going to be. These people were what they were going to be. But I spoke of the imagination. And someone else shook my hand telling me that my talk was thought-provoking. “At least it was brief,� I laughed. It was twelve minutes long. The auditorium was filled to the rafters with family and well wishers, and the space was thankfully cool—a major national political event had taken place there a week ago and so the air was working now for the first time in years. Afterwards I made my way through the throngs of people—it was like a day at the state fairgrounds. I tried to make eye contact. A few people nodded, fewer muttered, “Nice message.� In three minutes, I was back in my car, sandals on, jacket tossed in the back, tie loose, and speeding back to Columbia along a darkening high way. I had told the students that when I was twenty two I decided not to be a lawyer but instead to be a teacher. I told them that my change of heart happened because of a vision of Kwame the future lawyer. Thus imagination changed my life. I embraced teaching. It is what I do. Or is it?

George Lamming, a West Indian novelist, observed something interesting to me yesterday on the phone. He was speaking from Bathsheba, Barbados. He referred to a book that he thought I should read, although I can’t recall the name. The point of the work was that somehow, in the last fifteen years, the concept of the market became the accepted model for engaging just about anything. He spoke of it as the insidious triumph of market values.

Kenneth’s (Goldsmith) recent blog about readings is a tad depressing. This is one instance when I know we must occupy different spaces in the world. I like readings. I like doing readings and I being an audience member at readings. There is probably one central reason why I like doing readings. Generally, the people who are there to hear me read are there to hear me read and this means that they care about the work they are going to hear. There is something affirming about this. A reading for me is locked into something quite old and elemental. I try to invoke a series of experiences that are rooted in my childhood.

A jazz combo played short standards during the period between each contestant. Scott Simon’s face was too far away for me to think of him as anything but a voice as he read the names of the young people coming on stage to perform. He was witty, as completely giddy about the proceedings as he does when he is interviewing someone who is supposed to be funny on the radio. It is charming, even if not always funny. The Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University somewhere in the middle of DC is packed to the brim with parents, relatives and a large contingent of supporters for the performers from Maryland, Virginia, and DC. They are noisy, enthusiastic. It is the kind of atmosphere that the really enthusiastic planners and boosters of the event will describe as being like any high school basketball game. That would be an exaggeration, but one can understand hyperbole—after all, the subject is a poetry recital contest during which high school aged kids, most of them with clear aspirations to be actors, recite poems by often dead people and some living poetic geniuses.

In a poem “Pastoral�, Natasha Trethewey reminds me of a conversation I have had every time I spend a few hours in the Northern states:

Patricia,

Thank goodness your story was soooo theoretical because it would have been quite a dilemma had it actually happened. This is, at some level, a tough one, but for me it is not so tough. I am afraid my answer will not please the freedom of speech folks. The teacher’s declaration at the end of the class was wrong but understandable. You see, if he was in some schools here in South Carolina the entire thing could have been on tape. Indeed, one of our local poets was faced with a similar situation. It seems as if the administration at the school had decided that they would monitor her guest sessions in the classroom as a cautionary policy. Without letting her know, the intercom in the class room was kept open so that an administration could hear everything that was going on in the class. She found this out after there was some question about a poem that one of the students had written and the discussion that ensued. It was nota funny or lewd poem, but a poem expressing anger and pain about a rape she had experienced. The students wanted to talk about it and did. It was a painful session, but after the class, the poet was told that she should not have broached such a topic in the class or encouraged further discussion about it.

I am not sure what it is, but today, on two different occasions my children asked me whether I liked the idea of National Poetry Month. Actually, I know what prompted it.

The second form block was on the other side of the campus. At age eleven, you arrived at the new school in which the playing fields were green and cared for. There was even a stretch of ground called “Holy Ground� that was out of bounds for anyone but athletes and sportsmen waiting to play, and even then, only the older boys dared to step on Holy Ground. Holy Ground was on the more welcoming side of the school, the side where the First Form Block was. The first form rooms—four of them, were clustered around a late nineteenth century building of wide solid walls with only the latest layer of plaster covering the walls. The floors were wooden, with cracks and narrow crevices—there was no sheen on the floor, polishing had stopped years ago, now the floor was a dull stained stretch. First Form seemed safe in a school of boys as old as nineteen or twenty. The second form block was close to the Third Form and the Fourth Form cluster of buildings, some more modern than others.

A snippet of a quite engaging and sensitively written review by Conor O’Callaghan on Louise MacNeice called, quite badly, “His Master’s Voice� in Poetry, posited a curious idea that has been riding me since. Here is O'Callaghan's statement:

“The received thinking has long been that MacNeice hit a drab spell during the late forties and early fifties. Apart from those odd bright spots, it is true. Most good poets recognize the corked wine and fall silent. MacNeice was one of those who, floundering, write more than ever. Autumn Sequel, the most commonly cited example, is a jaded updating of its earlier, more energetic cousin. Never less than competent but seldom more than terminally dull, it is probably the kind of overworked, underinspired landfill Hopkins had in mind when he used the term ‘Parnassian.’�

So while plowing through a recent translation edition of Poetry, I began to underline a few interesting phrases and sentences that struck me as a useful addendum to my other posts on translation. I am intrigued by most of these statements because they are so rich with cliché and tautology, and yet they have this quality of contriteness and apology that seems to reflect a wonderfully refreshing level of care, concern and tenderness for the work of the poets they are translating, as well as a kind of fatalistic hopelessness about the capacity for us to reach across the divide of language and culture. Babel’s aftermath, I suppose, worked. All efforts to rebuild the tower are fittingly quixotic.

A very Oxford-like self-deprecating snootiness (only the Oxbridge crowd can manage this) pervades this disclaimer by Reynolds Price.

An early result of reading her [Enid Starkie] life of the poet [Arthur Rimbaud]—and my attempt to read all the boy’s poems in French—was the effort to translate a few of them into compelling and at least partially brilliant English. I failed, of course, but then so have all the English language translations known to me, however valiant and useful their tries. But I have never stopped trying--Reynolds Price

So here is my take on the Imus matter. Might as well get it out here before it decides it wants to be a poem or something. Wouldn’t want to devote my poetic reserves on something that has already gone past its “sell-by-date� in the media market-place. (I am being ironic, people).

I have watched Imus without regularity but with enough frequency to know that at some point something like this was going to happen. Imus, like Howard Stern and many others has created a persona that seeks to push the envelope on daring speech. He presents a a casual everyman persona that is impatient with preciousness, political correctness and insincerity. He never struck me as a "loose canon" in the way that Stern can be--he always seemed interested in the people he spoke to on his show, and he seemed quite proud of his juice--the friends he talked about who were clearly in high places. But in his banter with his producer or side-kick (I was never sure what the official role of this guy was) the banter would turn to jokes about people, elliptical comments about situations, and that now common practice of radio show hosts of talking an issue to death through these seemingly sudden and unexpected returns to the topic when we least expect it. I have not watched the clip of his comments about the Rutger's basketball team, but I know that my reactions may help me to understand what all of this can mean to me.

Martin Espada dances when he reads--his tall, full body twists elegantly, and he lets his right hand create waves of grace in th