2007 August : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Archive for August, 2007

There are certain songs I cannot listen to anymore because they remind me of someone associated with the pain of loss. R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” reminds me of an old heartbreak in college, Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” of a more recent heartbreak, and listening to Luther Vandross’ “Dance with My Father” is my quickest trip to tears because it speaks to the emptiness I feel after the death of my own father. Music, it seems, owes its popularity and success to the way it can be absorbed by the listener and given a personal context. We give intimate meaning to a song, responding to the sentiment of it in the same way we will mouth the lyrics—we make it about us.

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08.31.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (8)

Kwame Dawes

The Games Poets Play

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.

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08.30.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Kwame Dawes

All Memory is Fiction, Again

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.

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08.29.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Kwame Dawes

Reflectons on Porridge

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.

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08.29.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Ange Mlinko

Further Reflections (on Starsdown)

In 2005 I had a part-time job in midtown, and I would walk two long blocks across 55th St. from the subway to this office building (mechanically reaching into my bag for my ID card/barcode, without breaking my stride, as it came into view). There was little to recommend this stretch of parking garages, restaurants, delis. A whimsical umbrella shop. A second story window that one day in the middle of February lit up with a daffodil-yellow frock—the atelier of, I think, Comme des Garçons. A couple of famous hotels I would never enter. Antique stores with Meissen figurines and enormous dynastic urns.

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08.28.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Kwame Dawes

Finding Poems

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.

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08.27.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Ange Mlinko

Half a List

Technically speaking, can there ever be half a list? Lists of ten are a form more ingrained than sonnets. Here are 5 books being shuffled and reshuffled on my desk—at the risk of sounding blurbish—
Jasper Bernes, Starsdown
“The following are urban samples uncovered during crisis drills.” Thus begins our ride through a visionary L.A. As a former New Yorker, I think I experienced some version of Jasper’s quandary: how to describe a city which has become such a symbolic construct that the “concrete” (an old metonym for the urban experience) — disappears. What stands in its place is everything you know about finance, real estate, infrastructure, gas prices. So the book replicates that freneticism; it delivers you “boulevards of vertigo” (driven, it seems, by morphemes mutating virally into near-rhymes and near-anagrams). But I think my favorite moment in the book is its stillest: “Desiderata on a Desert Island.” Stillest, and most majestic:

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08.26.07 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Kwame Dawes

The Dark Night of the Soul

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.

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08.26.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Kwame Dawes

Apropos of Nothing

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.

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08.25.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Kwame Dawes

Judges, Editors and Poetry Manuscripts: Some Musings

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.

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08.24.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Archive for August, 2007

Rigoberto González

Necessary Poetry

Kwame Dawes

The Games Poets Play

Kwame Dawes

All Memory is Fiction, Again

Kwame Dawes

Reflectons on Porridge

Ange Mlinko

Further Reflections (on Starsdown)

Kwame Dawes

Finding Poems

Ange Mlinko

Half a List

Kwame Dawes

The Dark Night of the Soul

Kwame Dawes

Apropos of Nothing

Kwame Dawes

Judges, Editors and Poetry Manuscripts: Some Musings

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