When I was in first form at Jamaica College, nearly every boy in 1 Murray drooled and doodled while Lorna Goodison tried to teach us color, value, and texture. Lorna taught us art for about two or three years, and then, she left. The next time I saw her was when she was invited by our drama teacher, Dennis Scott, to talk with our literary club. Lorna talked passionately about art, Rastafari, and music. Afterwards, she gave us a writing exercise to compose a reggae song. We toyed with the idea for some time and she offered a few suggestions. At the end of the exercise, Dennis asked her to read a poem. Miss Goodison was also a poet?

The following article is part of a multimedia presentation to young, minority writers at the University of Miami on July 27, 2007. 10. It’s All About You. “You have to be someone.” ~ Bob Marley Whether you have chosen the word or the word has chosen you, the vocation of writing is about creating a self, and this will mean cultivating a set of values that will guide your work. And I mean YOUR work and YOUR values.

Don Drummond was a musical genius. A founding member of the Skatalites, Drummond was an accomplished composer/arranger and jazz trombonist. Unfortunately, his life became a tragic cliché--the solitary artist falling in love with an unavailable woman. In this case, the unavailable woman was an exotic dancer and singer named Anita "Margarita" Mahfood. Drummond suspected that she was cheating on him and he killed her. At his trial, he was declared mentally unfit and was interned at the Belle Vue Asylum where, as the story goes, he was not allowed to play his trombone and this led to his suicide. Such is the life of legends and many Jamaican writers have fallen for the lure of the Don Drummond's story.

"But I rejoice because Clifton reminds me always of why writing poetry is important and why it is good to believe this. She has taken many blows to her body through sickness and to her heart through the deaths of so many of those close to her, and yet she has managed to remain resilient, engaged and wonderfully ebullient through it all. Her poetry is a gift to us; that is the good news. But for me, that audience I had with her, and the opportunity to watch her embody the poet’s art, will remain with me for a really long time." Kwame Dawes' very moving and eloquent meditation on James Dickey, Lucille Clifton, and the power and grace of poetry. For more, follow this link over to the Poetry Foundation's blog: Lucille Clifton

In the poem, “Uncle Time,” Scott employs poetic elements once thought only to apply to “traditional” poems written in Standard English. One of the interesting facets of the poem is the way Scott plays against the popular notions of “Father Time” and his use of use of imagery, personification and myth (Anancy/Eshu ) to strip away the cozy, paternal descriptions. Time becomes a terror. Scott’s also undercuts the avuncular image of time that is created at the beginning of the poem, “long, lazy years on de wet san' /an' shake de coconut tree dem/ quiet-like wid 'im sea-win' laughter,” with “but Lawd, me Uncle cruel.” Scott's visual and tactile imagery is drawn from the Jamaican/Caribbean landscape, so the poem not only sounds Jamaican, but is grounded in the corpus of the Jamaican experience. As Hanna and many other critics have noted, underneath the surfaces of Scott’s poems which sometimes seem deceptively simple, there is always “'the threat of violence and anarchy'.” However, as Scott demonstrated in his later collections, what emerges from this violence is a pattern, a dream yet unrealized by either the actors or creators.

Excerpt from an interview @ Global Voices: Over the last year and a half, Geoffrey’s blog has become an important meeting place for Caribbean writers and readers. He posts samples of his own work, short literary essays and meditations, interviews with other writers, news about upcoming literary events, and regular birthday celebrations for major Caribbean authors (most recently, Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite). I chatted with Geoffrey recently about his blog and Caribbean literary blogs in general. Here is an edited version of that conversation. NL: Has the blog pushed your writing in different directions stylistically, or in subject matter? GP: The focus of my blog is pretty narrow: to promote my work and the work of Caribbean and South Florida writers. Now, I started off writing as a poet, and I’ve learned not everything can or should be a poem. As I’ve often said to my students in my creative writing workshops, a poem is that bok! of when the ball meets the bat and it shakes you up. A short story is about bottom of the ninth, the bases are loaded, both teams are tied, and the pitcher begins his motion. A novel is the whole shebang–what Henry James called the “loose, baggy, monster.” A blog comes closest to the feel of a novel–it can be anything. This is why I’ve given myself such strict limits about what my blog should be and what it shouldn’t be. By setting such narrow parameters, my writing doesn’t end up all over the place and I know exactly what my subject matter will be. For more of the interview, head over to Global Voices.

Dear Kamau, Opal and I wanted to give you something for your birthday, so we decided to do something that we hope you will like. I have done a podcast of one of your earliest poems from the Caedemon (did I spell it right?) recordings--one of the poems that I liked from the first time I heard it, you know the one. Yes, Francina. And Opal has livicated a poem for your birthday. We have done this tribute because in your poems and life, you have given us an example of how a life should be lived--on its own terms. You have always written how you felt the poem could only be written, and you have taken a lot of criticism over the years for doing that. But where are the critics now? You are still creating, new vibrant poems and you are still leading the way for us. Give thanks, Kamau.

According to Greek mythology, the Muses were the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, which is another way of saying that our relationship with the infinite is conditioned by memory and that poetry and history are forms of memory. And memory, despite the objectivists is never neutral. For example, how should the years of slavery and British colonialism be remembered? As a long nightmare of dehumanizing shame or as Derek Walcott has said, "I feel no shame in having endured the colonial experience…It was cruel, but it created our literature" ("Meanings" 50)? In Dennis Scott's aptly named "Epitaph," the speaker examines the difficulty of writing about historical events by using the language of composition to describe the physical and emotional effects of slavery.

"My small library,” as my wife likes to call it, has many books that I was forced to read in graduate school and that I’ll never read again, books that I’ve read once or twice and will probably read again, and a few that I read over and over again. Michael Hettich’s latest collection, Many Loves, is becoming one of those books that I am reading over and over again. From the opening poem, “Housekeeping,” to the closing “Joy,” Hettich’s evocative language draws us into the mystery of the commonplace.

And there is always her playful humor. For even when she's vamping on the D(ead) W(hite) M(en) of the canon, "A thing of beauty is a boy forever," her sense of the fantastic hovers over every line so that the real becomes woven into dream, into fairy tale, myth, and re-enters the body as poetry that is grounded in the body, "an ear lobe, toe, small tender ankle" ("Making Love to a Cannibal").