100,000 Hits!

When I wrote my first post on 12/13/05, I never thought I'd get 100 visitors--much less 1,000. Yesterday, Geoffrey Philp's Blog Spot had its 100,000th visitor.

Give thanks to everyone who has supported this blog by reading, subscribing, commenting, and buying my books. It has been a real pleasure writing these posts and developing some very interesting relationships--many with people whom I've never met, but feel a deep sense of comradeship.

One Love,

Geoffrey

Writers of Africando

On Saturday, September 20, 2008, I had the honor of reading with several writers of African descent at Africando 2008 at Miami Dade College, North Campus. Besides listening to new work by Preston Allen (All or Nothing), we were also treated to the life stories of Chief Adedoja Aluko (Sixteen Major Odu Ifa from Ile Ife ), Sam Grant (The Opposite Sex), and Joseph McNair (O Se Sango).

Here are some pictures from Africando: Writers of Africando

And an excerpt from Joseph McNair reading from O Se Sango:

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Africando 2008

Technorati Tag: Africando 2008

Unveiling of the Poster for the 25th Annual Miami Book Fair International

The unveiling of the poster, designed by Pulitzer Prize-winner Art Spiegelman, for the 25th Annual Miami Book Fair International took place on September at Texas Brazil Restaurant, Miami Beach on Thursday, September 18, 2008. The event, which was covered by local and international media, featured a few of Miami authors and celebrities.


For more information, please follow these links:

Miami Art Zine

Business Wire

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"Ibises" by Geoffrey Philp

Ibises

Slowing to a halt under the withered
arms of a poinciana that shaded


my windows against summer's glare,
I am greeted by a swarm of police cars


among the yellowing notes of foreclosure
on my neighbor's lawn, the red and blue



lights almost blind me to the lifting
wings of ibises digging for rumor


and insects in the wet grass blackened
by the grunts of SUVs lumbering


towards chaos and traffic
flowing under a sickle moon


that binds this earth with one promise
as she catches the tails of overhead


cargo planes--the raw music of the city
clinging to my shirt, as I drag my shadow


up the driveway, open the door to the usual
quarrel about mortgages and money


that silts my eyes with soot, my tongue
with grime, and bows the head of rain


lilies, their pursed lips barely whispering,
"Let there be peace in this house."

***

Geoffrey Philp is the author of Benjamin, my son, Uncle Obadiah and the Alien, numerous poetry collections, and a children's book, Grandpa Sydney's Anancy Stories. Geoffrey teaches English at Miami Dade College where he is the chairperson of the College Prep. Department at the North Campus. His next collection of short stories, Who's Your Daddy? and Other Stories will be published by Peepal Tree Press in March 2009.

The Caribbean Review of Books: August 2008

Yesterday evening I got my anxious hands on the latest copy of The Caribbean Review of Books which I began reading immediately.

Here are a few highlights from August 2008 issue:

Hail to the Chief

Jeremy Taylor on Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey, by Colin Grant

What Lies Within

Lisa Allen-Agostini on Shell, by Olive Senior

I Know the Language is True

Lorna Goodison talks to Nicholas Laughlin about writing her family memoir From Harvey River

My reading lasted way into the night—hence the brevity of this post. Even the marginalia was great!

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Source of photos: The Caribbean Review of Books

New Book by Sasenarine Persaud

From TSAR Publications:

From the very first piece in this collection, the title poem “In a Boston Night,” Sasenarine Persaud signals a return to the passionate and sensuous that informed much of his earlier work. Persaud, the poet as craftsman, is ever present in this collection, using a complex series of personas and “voices” moving back and forth in time and place. Boston, the focal point of this collection, is like a needle hole through which the poet deftly threads his reflections about places, events, and histories: a conflict between Anglo- and Franco-Canadians at a Brookline art exhibition; Georgetown and Mumbai; Tampa and Toronto; the “Boston Tea Party” as a symbol of resistance to American English, subtly underlined by the description of a Walcott reading in an overflowing university hall. This is a fine, multilayered collection of poems by an important and accomplished contemporary poet.

STONE ON MY HEAD

Burn this shell of tea-stained teeth

and graying hair, when consciousness

takes flight from body—if you can.

Scatter my ashes in the clucking Atlantic

as we did your grandfather’s and mine.

And if by chance it is in some remote place

or wayward village, and I am coffined

like my mother, shoved in a tomb

surrounded by palms, do not pelt me with earth;

someone placing a wet clump in my tiny hand,

women chanting strange songs from a holy land,

and when no one looked letting the dirt fall at my foot.

Long after, when my uncle came from his jaunt

deep in the South American bush he placed the soil

I dropped, and a stone, on her grave—why, why,

I cried. If you will, plant a tree for flower

or fruit or shade, for bird, for beast, for bat.

But do not place a stone on my head

at any time, please do not place a stone on my head

***

Sasenarine Persaud is the author of three books of fiction and six collections of poetry. His awards include: the Arthur Schomburg Award for his contribution to Caribbean Literature; the K.M. Hunter Foundation Award; two Canada Council awards; and fellowships from the University of Miami and Boston University. He was born in Guyana and has lived for several years in Canada.

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Sasenarine Persaud

Will Troy Davis Die Today?

In what he phrases as a "failure of the justice system," Rethabile urges us to write "American Sentences."

clipped from poefrika.blogspot.com With no evidence blacks don’t walk but on a technicality, die.

House Slaves, Field Slaves & Dead Slaves

Sometimes I feel it's better not to say anything--to keep quiet rather than to get into a pointless argument. This is not to say that I haven't gotten into a few verbal sparring matches. Once in high school, the verbal sparring even got physical and almost cost me an eye after one of my classmates blindsided me with a punch the day after I had torn his argument to shreds and ridiculed him. I've learned from that experience.

Perhaps this is why I said nothing during a recent conversation which went something like this:

Man: What I'm saying is that back during slavery there were three types of slaves. House slaves sort of like your complexion, Geoff. No offence.

Geoffrey: None taken.

Man: Field slaves and dead slaves. I couldn't have been a house slave. I wouldn't have been a field slave because I'm so much of an individual…I believe in freedom. I would probably have been whipped to death. I could only have been a dead slave!

I let him continue without saying a word.

Up to that point it had been a delightful evening and I knew I'd never see him again. Besides, despite the scars, I still like to think of myself as a JC Old Boy--one who continues the tradition of a Jamaican gentleman (an idea that is now lost in our current vocabulary) by upholding a code of personal honor and integrity.

I probably would have forgotten about the incident if I hadn't heard the idea repeated by a young brother in a different locale and realized how pervasive the idea had become.

Besides being illogical, the idea continues the old slavery paradigm and the division among Black people based on the melanin factor. Rather than saying "Never again" and stopping this idea from gaining life in the next generation (there are many ideas/behaviors that we must end in this lifetime), this line of thinking continues the old "one drop"--not Bob Marley's--and allows this noxious, racist seed to bloom in our lives.

Most importantly, however, the idea dishonors the sacrifice of our ancestors who gave their lives so that we could be free. If an ancestor had not swallowed her pride, I would not be typing these words and my brother would not have been alive to demean her memory. The premise of his argument and his seeming moral superiority is that our ancestors were cowards for living under slavery, and that such conditions would have been so unacceptable to him that it would have resulted in his death. He would no doubt like think of himself as comparable to those Africans who threw themselves overboard from ships like the Zong rather than accept slavery in Plantation America.

But I've had enough of these latter day heroes whose bravery exists only in their febrile imaginations. They denigrate the memory of our ancestors who sucked salt, bore the whip and the yoke of slavery, and invented stories in the dark so that one day their children could argue on luxury liners in the Caribbean about slavery, freedom, heroism, and death.

Enough!

Both memories should be honored. Those who died rather than enter into servitude and those who lived through the holocaust. (And for someone like me whose ancestors stood on both sides of the whip, sometimes forgiven.)

But we should never forget that we are here today because of ancestors who never gave up on the hope of freedom and cut the cane, cooked the ham hocks and the tripe, made miracles out of the mundane, and continued to live even when their backs were breaking, their hands were tired, and their souls were weary with worry. Yet, they continued.

They continued to live.

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Update (9/26/08): Make sure to check out the Comments!

Reggae United.

If you’re interested in the latest in news about Reggae with interesting articles about artistes such as Sizzla, Anthony B, and Capleton, then head over to Reggae United.

They have also reprinted a few posts from my blog, “Many Rivers to Cross: The Theme of the Diaspora in the Reggae Lyric,” “The Rastafari Memeplex,” and “So Jah Seh: Telling I-Story Inna Babylon.”

In the next few weeks, I’ll be writing a review of Brother Man by Roger Mais, so check out Reggae United. They’re only a click away.

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Nalo Hopkinson Wins Sunburst Award

Nalo has won her second Sunburst Award for New Moon's Arms.

Congratulations, Nalo!

clipped from www.sunburstaward.org About The New Moon's Arms, the jury said: "Nalo Hopkinson crafts an engrossing story featuring an unforgettable character. With generous doses of mystery, humour, magical fantasy and insight, The New Moon's Arms is an entrancing read."

Nalo Hopkinson
Sunburst Award

"Flying" by Olive Senior

For those longing to read a good short story grounded in Caribbean reality, history and mythology, check out “Flying” by Olive Senior at The Maple Tree Literary Supplement.

Here’s a taste:

His father had bought him a return ticket, first class at that, but as the plane banked sharply for its descent, he wondered if airlines reimbursed for the portion unused in case of death. He knew he would never return on that ticket. He was twenty-six years old, and he had come back to the island to die. His father didn’t know that, although he had recognised he was ill enough to warrant the comfort of first class. He was touched: his father was normally tight-fisted. Perhaps he did know. Perhaps everyone knew. Family, friends, strangers on the street. Everybody knew but nobody wanted to know.

Olive Senior was born in 1941 to peasant farmers in Trelawny, Jamaica, the seventh of ten children, and later migrated to Canada. She is the author of several collections of short stories: Summer Lighting (1986), Arrival of the Snake-Women (1989), and Discerner of Hearts (1995); collections of poetry Talking of Trees (1986), Gardening in the Tropics (1994), and Over the roofs of the world (2005); and non-fiction about Caribbean culture: A-Z of Jamaican Heritage (1984) – greatly expanded and republished in 2004 as The Encyclopedia of Jamaican Heritage – and Working Miracles: Women’s Life in the English Speaking Caribbean (1991).

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Olive Senior

A Rubric for Poetry?

As the chairperson of the College Prep. Department at Miami Dade College, North Campus, I am now a team leader on "Authentic Assessment," and we are using the methods developed by Jonathan Mueller to enhance our measurements of our learning outcomes. To this end, we have been developing rubrics with performance based criteria in order to evaluate holistically student essays in our department.

Of course, deciding on these descriptors for the criteria are never easy, especially if the team uses standards of performance such as unacceptable, acceptable, and excellent to develop a rubric. One method that Mueller suggested in our workshop was to start with the finished product and to work backwards. In other words, if you have a clear idea about "excellence," you can then decide by degrees the categories of unacceptable, acceptable, and excellent.

This, of course, got me thinking about my criteria (especially after a spirited discussion over at Jahworld with Pam, Fragano and JDID) for evaluating poems:

The poem has a distinctive "voice" or point of view.

The economic, connotative language seduces me into thinking and feeling about the subject in a new way. In other words, after reading the poem, every time I see the subject, I think and recall the emotional tone of the poem.

Although the language suggests new ways of thinking and feeling about relationships/connections among subjects, the word choice and imagery are unified and coherent.

"An image or group of images that are analogical, melodic, and rhythmical.”

Language does not draw attention to itself, but allows the reader to enter a "vivid and continuous dream."

(9/30/07) Using these criteria, a teacher could then develop a simple grid using performance levels such as Never, Sometimes, Always to create an analytic rubric or merely keep the criteria in mind while evaluating holistically a portfolio of poems or book.

Here is my poetry rubric: Poetry Rubric

By evaluating analytically a teacher could assign different weights to each criterion depending on one's particular bias. The importance of this exercise is also to recognize one's bias, especially since some of the best poems convince by inference. For as I always say to my students, a successful poem is like a dirty joke: you are talking about one thing, but you really mean something else.

Do you, Dear Reader, have similar criteria that you'd like to add?

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12/9/08: Jonathan Mueller has linked to the rubric: English/College University

Thanks, Jon!

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Books by Geoffrey Philp

Related Post: The Top 10 Things Every Writer Should Know

"...poems are, or should be, experiences
in themselves, and not just accounts of or
commentaries on experience; they should be
additions to the world, not simply annotations
to it."
~~ Reginald Shepherd

Poetry Rubric

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Help for Haiti

After the devastation in Haiti, we are all pulling together to help.

Miami Dade College, where I work, is also assisting in these efforts:

In cooperation with the City of Miami and other community partners, MDC is participating in a community-wide effort to bring relief to the Caribbean nations hit by the storms, including Haiti and Cuba.

Beginning on Monday, Sept. 15, through Friday, Sept. 19, MDC will collect nonperishable food, baby supplies and new or used clothing in good condition at the drop-off points listed below. Food items may include powdered milk, peanut butter and canned goods. "

One day, when true democracy reigns in the republic where "the modern world was invented," the damage caused by deforestation, perhaps, will be lessened.

clipped from caribbean-beat.blogspot.com After the island was hit by four successive and powerful storms (Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike), several humanitarian organisations – including the United Nations, World Food Programme, World Health Organization, Red Cross, Pan-American Health Organization, Oxfam and others – have launched an appeal for funding to support relief efforts in Haiti.