Kwame Dawes : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

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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.

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09.05.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Kwame Dawes

A Brief History of the Computer and Me

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.

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09.02.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

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)

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

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)

Kwame Dawes

On Promoting Poetry

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….

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08.23.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Author Archive

Kwame Dawes

Naipaul on Walcott

Kwame Dawes

A Brief History of the Computer and Me

Kwame Dawes

The Games Poets Play

Kwame Dawes

All Memory is Fiction, Again

Kwame Dawes

Reflectons on Porridge

Kwame Dawes

Finding Poems

Kwame Dawes

The Dark Night of the Soul

Kwame Dawes

Apropos of Nothing

Kwame Dawes

Judges, Editors and Poetry Manuscripts: Some Musings

Kwame Dawes

On Promoting Poetry

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