May 2013
6 posts
“Poetry which concentrates upon energy — its generation, control and unleashing —...”
– D.K. McKay, ‘Aspects of Energy in the Poetry of Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath’, 1974, The Critical Quarterly, 16, no. 1.
“… Then the birds
began arriving, and the message was not one
of...”
– From ‘Anaconda’ by Vahni Capildeo, Undraining Sea.
Wasafiri special issue
I am honored to have been entrusted with the cover for a special issue of the international contemporary writing magazine Wasafiri, which is entitled ‘Brighter Suns: Sixty Years of Literature from Trinidad’. Special thank you to Malachi Macintosh and Stephanie Decouvelaere, editors of the special issue. Thanks as well to the entire Wasafiri editorial/layout team, including...
April 2013
22 posts
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Teju Cole on crossing borders
“As far as categories go, I welcome them all. So many of us, wherever you may be in the world, you are both foreign and domestic. It is not that we have to repudiate influences. Where we are is where we are.”
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Writer Teju Cole in conversation with Nicholas Laghlin at the recently-concluded Bocas Lit Fest in Trinidad and Tobago.
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“The best of this kind are but shadows”
– Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
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In the last 365 days
I saw the Blue Mountains of Jamaica; saw the oilbird at Asa Wright; met writers like Olive Senior, Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Anis Mojgani, Kevin Young, Mervyn Morris, Kendel Hippolyte; watched the sun set over Treasure Beach, Jamaica, while sipping Red Stripe and feeling the warmth of a fire; started reading too many books and finished too few; enjoyed Kendel Hippolyte’s Fault Lines;...
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April showers
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
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Poem in Landscapes journal
…until, my brothers,
We lick tongues again
Pleased to have my poem sequence ’A Journal of Unrelated and Complete Events’ published in Landscapes: the Journal of the International Centre for Landscape and Language at Australia’s Edith Cowan University. You can READ the entire sequence here.
PHOTO: Schipp, Renee (2012) “Dining on Detritus, Sydneys Dale,...
Notsirk on 'Caliebirri' →
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“Those eyes did it, wide-lidded and sea-dark. I looked into those eyes, but they...”
– Vahni Capildeo, ‘A Book Of Hours: From Aidoneus To Zeus’
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DH Lawrence and me
IT UNCOILS itself slowly. Only after a good few years do you realise that D.H. Lawrence’s great poem ‘Snake’ has never quite left you – first read so innocently in a childhood bedroom housed under the strange-scented shade of a great mango tree at Belmont, Trinidad, and then, somehow miraculously, found again to be at the centre of everything decades later, still as hot and intense as that noon...
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“The story ends before the book
But how?”
– Ryan Nowlin, ‘Terra Inviolata’
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For Poetry Month, Exit Strata features poets on...
Exit Strata begins its Poetry Month series on the inspiration of poets with Lynne De-Silva Johnson’s love-letters to the amazing work of Anis Mojgani and Noah Eli Gordon.
Of Mojgani - whom I was lucky enough to have met very briefly last year at the Calabash literary festival at Treasure Beach, Jamaica, where he had read - De-Silva remarks:
Mojgani leaves me in love. Because he...
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Draconian Switch, Issue 20!
DS 20, ably designed by the excellent Kriston Chen, is out now. Edited by Mariel Brown and published by Richard Rawlins, this issue features fiction from Sharon Millar, art by Sheena Rose, Ewan Avery, Kriston and much more! Am also pleased to be included in this 20th issue via a review of Trinidad artist Steve Ouditt’s latest show at Medulla Gallery (special thanks to Kriston for his...
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“Yet by my broken bones
I tell new weather.”
– Paul Muldoon, ‘Wind and Tree’
March 2013
19 posts
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“I myself am the world.”
– R. Wagner, Tristan Und Isolde
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“They are becoming paintings -”
– Kendel Hippolyte, ‘Windows’
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“When this slight disagreement was over, they were thick again, and as busy as...”
– Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
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“There was nobody. Her words faded. So a rocket fades.”
– Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
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“We are the unintentional kings of lost puppies.”
– Gary Sloboda, ‘Eaten Out of House and Home’
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Poem in Exit Strata : Print! Volume no. 2
Not in my mind, but in the sea
Not in the sea, but in my body
Upon my spine, through lung and heart
Your spotted sails fly out my mouth…
‘Confirmed Report of a Single Lionfish Spotted at Tobago’, one of my poems, has been included in the awesome journal Exit Strata, which is edited by a New York-based collective including Lynne DeSilva-Johnson, Benjamin Wiessner...
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Poem in '100 Poems From Trinidad & Tobago'
I am honoured to be included in a new anthology of Trinidad and Tobago poets, edited by Ian Dieffenthaller and Anson Gonzalez, called 100 Poems from Trinidad & Tobago.
[[MORE]]
The book features ‘Carr Street’, one of the poems in my sequence of poems based on streets of Port-of-Spain, currently entitled, All Streets Lead to the Sea. Some of the poems in this sequence have been...
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“There was no house now, no brewery, no building whatever left, but the wall of...”
– Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
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'To live from one word to the next'
The idea is to provide enough tension to create the moment. For the reader to live from one word to the next. In crescendos and decrescendos. Think rhythm, melody and harmony. Musicality is a typographic designer’s signature. With space, one conducts an orchestra of visual elements.
In a profound and fascinating blog post at his cool site Notsirk, the Trini designer Kriston Chen talks...
“The wind rustled through the cane. Overhead, the sun burned like a furnace.”
– Sam Selvon, ‘Cane is Bitter’
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'The Tourist' at Notsirk
‘The Tourist’ a collaboration with the graphic designer Kriston Chen for Draconian Switch 19, was featured at his great website, Notsirk. CHECK out the website here.
February 2013
6 posts
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“To each his character, to each character his mask.”
– Aimé Césaire, The Tempest
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An e-chapbook at 'The Drunken Boat'
INQUEST AS TO DEATH
Perhaps I should start where he was free
His robot eyes at our feet.
Love them, like him, my kiss on flat chest
Seduction an inquest as to death,
Silver, not apple white, the faultless carriage
On roads so asphalt they’d never hold
All that slips from these plush seats
Is carnage. Perhaps touching should be free.
Am delighted to have an e-chapbook, From the Undiscovered...
