Geoffrey Philp

April 20, 2011

21 Days/ 21 Poems: A Poem About AIDS

I Keep Coming Back to This Longing

to be larger than my life.

To do something more than go on day by day

within the limits of my understanding:

AZT’s four-hour clock,

the lovely buttered bodies of the disappearing men

who in loving each other are loving, not death

but the life which rises to meet it, when it must,

just as the land’s edge seems to tilt

raising itself to meet the sky

and the sky settles thick as a heavy snow

into the body’s crevices--

the sand striated with the branching tracks of birds

my life planted among the falling lives

“I Keep Coming Back to This Longing” by Ruth L. Schwartz. Accordion Breathing and Dancing. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.

I have always been amazed at Ms. Schwartz’s courage in writing about AIDS and “embodiments of human fallibility.” In the face of this scourge that has taken the lives of so many friends, she can write such delicate lines: “the lovely buttered bodies of the disappearing men.” Out of the brutality of the disease, she celebrates the beautiful: “my life planted among the falling lives.” These are poems of compassion.

Ruth L. Schwartz (born 1962 Geneva, New York) is an American poet. Her most recent poetry collection is Dear Good Naked Morning (Autumn House Press, 2005). She graduated from Wesleyan University, with a B.A., from the University of Michigan, with an M.F.A., from the University of Integrative Learning with a Ph.D. in Transpersonal Psychology. The San Francisco Bay Area has been Ruth's chosen home since 1985; she has also traveled extensively in Latin America, and speaks fluent Spanish.

She has taught at Cleveland State University, Goddard College, Mills College, California State University-Fresno, California College of the Arts. She teaches at Ashland University,^[1] and offers workshops and one-on-one mentoring on the theme of The Writer As Shaman nationwide.^[2][3] She lives in Oakland, California.

Source: Wikipedia

April 19, 2011

Mervyn Morris - Poetry Archive

From the Poetry Archive: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=14625

Mervyn Morris (b, 1937) remains one of the most resourceful and technically brilliant of Caribbean poets. After studying at the University College of the West Indies, and winning a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, he embarked on an academic career which would eventually take him back to Mona as a teacher and later Professor of Creative Writing. Alongside his own collections he has written extensively on West Indian literature, and edited various anthologies, as well as the selected poems of Louise Bennett, the iconic Jamaican Creole poet ‘Miss `Lou’. In 2009 he was awarded Jamaica’s Order of Merit.

In the Sixties and Seventies he belonged to a small group of young poets who met up in Kingston, reading each other’s work, exchanging political and poetic ideas, ambitious for the future and struggling to get noticed and published. Thus most of Morris’s literary life has been lived in the post-colonial era of independence and its subsequent political struggles, characterised by tensions and choices between personal and collective commitment which are explored in a variety of ways throughout his work. Despite a keen awareness of continuing injustice, he has always taken a philosophically long view, bound by “smouldering restraint”, convinced that discovering or reinventing identity is better than shackling it to a disinterred tragic past. So he is probably less popular with angrier figures, and never writes the big political poem, the propagandist’s occasional poem or the slogan-filled doggerel of the uncompromising activist. He often tells painful truths, but without rancour.

His poetry eschews obvious historical causes, rather taking up the abiding concerns of all men: sexual desire and spiritual love; mutability and mortality; friendship and betrayal; joy and grief. He is a supreme poet of the everyday, the potency of the familiar with its safety and its limitations, its disappointments and consolations. Many of his poems are shards of personal memory, fragments of autobiography. Like a melancholy comedian, he moves from social observation to fleeting introspection with ironic detachment, his craft and intellect joined in refining language and feeling to tellingly spare effect. His poems of domestic life compel with their familial routines masking deeper frustrations; yet his intimacy avoids sentimentality, pares down the emotional truth, always alive to the ambiguity in close relationships. This is especially revealing in his sequence of poems On Holy Week, where the Crucifixion is flecked with Caribbean colour, and peopled with locals. Turning from sacred to profane, Morris inhabits his amorous verses with intense self-awareness and erotic power, which is to say he writes sexy poems about lust. love, seduction, deception and conquest. And of course he has a fine ear for nuanced shifts from Standard English to Jamaican Creole, transpositions which give locality and music to those poems at once linguistically conscious of their origins yet unconstrained by them.

But although he is a serious poet, Morris is also a performer, a wisecracking cynical versifier with a sharp wit and a sparkling gift for ingenious rhymes. He conjures resolution out of tension with satisfying aplomb. In telling his brief narratives he can be a subtle, even sly, master of tiny, wounding reversals. He can also shift from satirical flair to magical reflection with sureness of delicate touch, as in the haiku ‘Garden’: “after a shower/ blackbirds preening on the grass/ dressing for heaven.” Complex simplicity, with faint echoes of Blake and Clare, captures a moment of epiphany in this exquisite Franciscan benediction.

Mervyn Morris has chosen a dozen poems from his recording specially made for the Archive, and they give some flavour of his marvellous facility and range. The Creole comicality of ‘Peelin Orange’ dissolving into bitter resignation, the surprising epigrammatic depth of ‘Walk Good’ and the wonderful Caribbean Garden of Eden hinted at in ‘Eve’ – these wryly amuse where ‘Cabal’ appals, with its conversational cruelty, a bleak morality tale about cronies and corruption. Among the rest, ‘Casanova’ is a perfect exposure of the vanity and self-delusion mingling in the damaged heart-throb, while ‘The Day My Father Died’ speaks of death’s finality and the birth of grief, a new life for the living to bear, especially so for the poet’s mother. Morris reads his work beautifully, with memorable clarity, in a warm, richly hued voice, colloquial, declamatory, always attuned to music as well as meaning. The recording was made for The Poetry Archive on September 7th, 2010 at The Audio Workshop, London, and was produced by Richard Carrington.

Mervyn Morris - Poetry Archive

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YardEdge » Velma Pollard Launches New Book, Considering Woman I & II

On Sunday morning, Dr. Velma Pollard’s new collection of short prose, Considering Woman I & II was launched to a large appreciative audience at the UWI.

Now retired, Velma Pollard is a former Dean of the Faculty of Education. She has published several collections of poetry, including Crown Point and Other poems (1988) and Shame Trees Don’t Grow Here (1992). Her novella, Karl, received the Casa de las Americas prize in 1992. Dr. Pollard is also well known for her 1994 landmark publication Dread Talk: The Language of Rastafari.

YardEdge » Velma Pollard Launches New Book, Considering Woman I & II

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21 Days/ 21 Poems: The Poem That Made Me Decide to Become a Poet

For the Last Time, Fire

That August the birds kept away from the village, afraid:

people were hungry.

The phoenix hid at the sun’s center and stared down

at the Banker’s house,

which was plump and factual, like zero.

Every good Banker knows

there’s no such bird.

She came to the house like an old cat, wanting

a different kind of labor.

But the Banker was busy, feeding his dogs, who were nervous,

Perhaps she looked dangerous.

The child threshed in her belly

when she fell. The womb cracked, slack lipped,

leaving a slight trace of blood on the lawn. Delicately,

the phoenix placed the last straw on its nest.

Mrs. So-and-So the Banker’s wife beat time

in her withdrawing room. Walked her moods

among the fluted teacups, toying with crusted foods.

The house hummed Bach, arithmetic at rest.

The phoenix sang along with the record,

and sat.

But the villagers counted heads, and got up.

So, logical as that spiral worming the disc to a hole in

the center,

one night there were visitors, carrying fire. The dogs

died first

then they gutted everything.

Something shook itself out of the ash.

Wings, Perhaps.

“For the Last Time, Fire” by Dennis Scott. Uncle Time. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973.

“The house hummed Bach, arithmetic at rest.” There was always something magical about this poem that I’ve never been able to shake. The combination of social engagement, myth, allusions to contemporary literature, and the ironies--all in a few lines. This poem was a standout in Dennis Scott’s Uncle Time and has been a major influence on my own work. After reading this poem, I wanted to be a poet. I wanted to create something as beautiful, as musical as this poem…

Dennis Scott was born in Jamaica in 1939. He had a distinguished career as a poet, playwright, actor (he was Lester Tibideaux in The Cosby Show), dancer in the Jamaican National Dance Theatre, an editor of Caribbean Quarterly and teacher. His first collection, Uncle Time (1973) was one of the first to establish the absolutely serious use of nation language in lyric poetry. His other poetry collections include Dreadwalk (1982) and Strategies (1989). His plays include Terminus, Dog, Echo in the Bone, and Scott’s work is acknowledged as one of the major influences on the direction of Caribbean theatre. He died at the early age of fifty-one in 1991.

Dennis Scott: Dennis Scott Biography - (1939 –91), Caribbean Quarterly.

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April 18, 2011

21 Days/ 21 Poems: A Poem to Recite to a Child

For Belonging

May you listen to your longing to be free.

May the frames of your belonging be generous

enough for your dreams.

My you arise each day with a voice of blessing whis-

pering in your heart.

May you find a harmony between your soul and

your life.

May the sanctuary of your soul never become

haunted.

May you know the eternal longing that lives at the
heart of time.

May there be kindness in your gaze when you look

within.

May you never place walls between the light and

yourself.

May you allow the wild beauty of the invisible world

together you, mind you, and embrace you in

belonging.

"For Belonging" by John O'Donohue. To Bless the Space Between Us. Doubleday, 2008.

The poems in To Bless the Space Between Us by John O’Donohue’s are marked by grace and clarity. The seven sections of the collection move the reader from birth through death and mirror the sacraments in tone and mystery. These are poems written by a Celtic mystic who also happens to be a fine poet.

“For Belonging” is a poem I wished I could have recited to my children from the time they were born. Which is not to say that I did not repeat some version of this in my own jumbled way. It’s just that O’Donohue has said it best. So now that my children are grown, I have to say this when they aren't listening and bless them when they aren’t looking.

John O'Donohue (1 January 1956 – 3 January 2008) was a poet and Hegelian philosopher from County Clare, Ireland, where his father was a stonemason.^[1] He is best known for popularizing Celtic spirituality . O'Donohue received a PhD in philosophical theology from Tübingen University in 1990. He was ordained as Catholic priest, but left the priesthood in the 1990s.

Source: Wikipedia

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April 17, 2011

The Guyana Cultural Association of New York Awards: Call for Nominations

The Guyana Cultural Association of New York Awards

Call for Nominations

Guyana Cultural Association of New York celebrates its 10-year anniversary in 2011. The anniversary theme is “Aal bady – waan bady” to acknowledge Guyana’s cosmopolitan heritage and the emergence of a common culture. Our annual Awards Ceremony on August 31^st, 2011 will mark the occasion. Nominations for awards are now open until May 14, 2011.

Since 2001 the Guyana Cultural Association of New York has been the leader in recognizing those who have inspired us. This year’s awards ceremony on August 31, 2011, is in Brooklyn, New York. We will acclaim creators and enablers of various features of our culture where all of us are one people - Aal bady, waan bady.

Award Categories

Our awards celebrate outstanding contributors in the following categories:

Guyana Cultural Association Award
Guyana Cultural Association Award - Youth
Guyana Cultural Association Exemplary Award
Guyana Cultural Association Lifetime Achievement Award

What We Do - Nominations Are Open April 14th to May 14^th 2011

Request nominations from anyone or entity and assess the submissions that are complete and on time.

Nomination can be submitted for a person or an entity whose work fits within the theme – Aal bady, Waan Bady

Youth nominations must detail the academic and extracurricular accomplishments that position the nominee above the average in his or her area of scholastic and cultural activities.

The nominations form is here:

http://www.guyfolkfest.org/awards_nominations2011.htm#Nominations

More information on the 2011 Awards and the Folk Festival events are available at www.guyfolkfest.org or you may contact the GCA Cultural Director, Claire Goring.

Ronald H. Lammy

Co-Chair, Guyana Cultural Association Awards Committee

Arts & Academics - Teaching Pan a New Way

Visit the eCaroh Caribbean Emporium
http://www.PanOnTheWeb.com - Pan and More
http://BourdaMarketPlace.com

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April 15, 2011

NEW BIBLIOGRAPHY ON GLOBAL REGGAE STUDIES AVAILABLE FROM AFRICAN DIASPORA PRESS

Despite its popularity, reggae, and the myriad Jamaican popular music forms from which it springs, has long lacked a bibliographic resource that could aid its legion of fans, students, and scholars. Until now.

Based on more than 15 years of research, Jamaican Popular Music, the second volume in ADP’s Black Music Reference Series, offers some 3700 entries on the the island’s commercial music scene from its inception in the 1950s to the present. Idioms covered range from the calypso-like mento of the late 1940s and ’50s to ska and rock steady of the 1960s, roots reggae and dub poetry of the 1970s and ’80s, dub and dancehall from the mid-1980s on, and international offshoots such as British 2-tone, Puerto Rican reggaeton and Brazilian samba-reggae. It also provides in-depth coverage of the music’s diffusion to more than 51 other countries along with a biographical section documenting the careers of some 800 individual artists, producers, and others. Sources range from fanzines and newspaper reportage to books, theses, journal articles, and audio-visual materials from Jamaica, Australia, Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Much of this material is cited here for the first time. Particularly notable is the attention given to local reggae and dub poetry scenes in Britain, the US and Canada, along with lesser known, but equally vital, scenes in France, Germany, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Japan.

The result is a ground-breaking effort offering insights into all facets of Jamaican popular music and its local, regional and transnational impact.

The compiler is veteran bibliographer John Gray whose previous works include Blacks in Classical Music, African Music, Fire Music: a bibliography of the New Jazz, 1959-1990, and, From Vodou to Zouk.

To order please visit the ADP website: www.african-diaspora-press.com. The book is also available through most library wholesalers.

Also available: From Vodou to Zouk: a bibliographic guide to music of the French-speaking Caribbean and its diaspora (Black Music Reference Series; vol. 1)

Forthcoming (Fall 2011): Afro-Cuban Music: a bibliographic guide (Black Music Reference Series; vol. 3)

Praise for the author’s previous works:

—From Vodou to Zouk: “...will prove an indispensable, in-hand reference to current French Caribbean music scholarship”—Library Journal

—African Music: “...a truly outstanding achievement...likely to become the standard reference tool on African music for the next decade or so. Supersedes all previously available bibliographies in scope, the clear organization of its data, and of course, in its up-to-dateness”

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21 Days/ 21 Poems: A Poem Whose Meanings Have Grown with Rereading

Excerpt from SHAR by Kamau Brathwaite. SHAR. Savacou Publications, 1990.

From the first time I read it, SHAR’s meanings have grown with me.

The poem combines the existential trauma of living through a hurricane with the historical tragedies of the Middle Passage, and is, perhaps, one of the best examples of Braithwaite’s Sycorax video style.

The language and text of the poem begin with early warning signs of the tragedies of the past, “Four hundred years of Columbus dragging us here,” and a foreshadowing of what is to come: “O longshore late light duppy Kingston nights.”

Then, just as a hurricane would intensify before it makes landfall, in a remarkable feat of mimesis, so does the text and language. It would be extremely difficult to portray the full text of the poem while maintaining the integrity, so I can only offer this sampling. For is no other way of saying this: SHAR is a poem to be experienced.

And once experienced, its meaning(s)--one of which is a region trying to define its identity in the face of physical and psychic terror which belies the paradise of tourist brochures--will grow on you. The Caribbean will never be the same.

About Kamau Brathwaite

Kamau Brathwaite is one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon Brathwaite is the 2006 International Winner of the Griffin Poetry A holder of an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Sussex and co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), Brathwaite has received both the Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, and is a winner of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Bussa Award, the Casa de las Américas Prize, and the Charity Randall Prize for Performance and Written Poetry.Prize, for his volume of poetry, Born to Slow Horses.

Brathwaite is notedfor his studies of Black cultural life both in Africa and throughout the African diasporas of the world in works such as Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica;The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820; Contradictory Omens; Afternoon of the Status Crow; and History of the Voice.

Kamau Brathwaite is currently Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, a position he has held since 1992.

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April 14, 2011

21 Days/ 21 Poems: A Poem About Place

Boyhood in Tobacco Country

All I can dream tonight is an autumn sunset,

Red as a hayrick burning. The groves

Not yet leafless, are black against red, as though,

Leaf by leaf, they were hammered of bronze blackened

To timelessness. Far off, from the curing barns of tobacco

Blue smoke, in pale streaking, clings

To the world’s dim, undefinable bulge.

Far past slashed stubs, homeward or homeless, a black

Voice deeper and bluer than sea-heart, sweeter

Than sadness or sorghum, utters the namelessness

Of life to the birth of the first star,

And again, I am walking a dust-silent, dusky lane, and try

To forget my own name and be part of the world.

I move in timelessness. For the deep and premature midnight

Of woodland, I hear the first whip-o-will’s

Precious grief, and my young heart

As darkling I stand, yearns for a grief

To be worthy of that sound. Ah, fool! Meanwhile,

Arrogant, eastward, lifts the slow dawn of the harvest moon.

Enormous, smoky, smoldering, it stirs.

First visibly, then paling in retardation, it begins

The long climb zenithward to preside

There whitely on what the year has wrought.

What have the years wrought? I walk the house.

Oh, grief! Oh, joy! Tonight

The same season’s moon holds sky-height.

The dark roof hides the sky.

“Boyhood in Tobacco Country” by Robert Penn warren. Being Here: Poetry 1977-1980. Random House, 1980.

I first encountered Robert Penn Warren’s poetry in the Reading Room of the U.S. Consulate in Kingston, Jamaica. What drew me to the poems was the subtle intelligence behind the poems and the attempt to create community in a post-agrarian setting in which religious values were in decline.

I was moved then as I am now by the voice in “Boyhood in Tobacco Country” and the speaker’s yearning “To forget my own name and be part of the world,” in the face of a landscape that will that is oblivious to human passion.

And yet, the speaker despite his awareness of nature’s disregard, yearns to respond to "the first whip-o-will’s/ Precious grief,” and to be “To be worthy of that sound.” The act of witnessing becomes the speaker’s answer to the “namelessness” of the landscape and is in a sense, heroic.

About Robert Penn Warren

Robert Penn Warren (April 24, 1905 – September 15, 1989) was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for his novel All the King's Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.

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April 13, 2011

Author Event: Under the Sun

Lip Service is teaming up with the award-winning radio show Under the Sun for an evening of live storytelling.

This is a night like no other. You will experience the heartbreaking, hilarious, personal stories of Lip Service--like watching people read their diaries--AND you will go behind the scenes to see how radio is made.

Date: April 23, 2011

Time: 8 p.m.; doors open at 7:30 p.m.

Location: Actor's Playhouse at the Miracle Theater

280 Miracle Mile, Coral Gables, FL 33134

Tickets $15. They will sell out, so buy yours today!

Storytellers:

Andrea Askowitz

Terence Canterella

Aaron Curtis

Maria De Los Angeles

Robert Foote

Jeremy Glazer

Allison Langer

Esther Martinez

Brenda Mezick

Lip Service, produced by Andrea Askowitz and Esther Martinez, is a co-production of Books & Books.

Under the Sun, created by co-hosts Dan Grech and Alicia Zuckerman, is a co-production of WLRN and ZG Public Media.

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