CALABASH DISPATCH--FRIDAY NIGHT

On Friday night, the air is cool off the sea.  The breaths of wind against the microphone begin to suggest distant thunder.  A woman sitting beside me says, “Rain…”  I sit with my legs stretched out beyond the shelter of the large tent. I am in the front row of a sea of neatly organized white plastic chairs that stretch over a lush lawn.  I sense in every coolness droplets of rain.  But it does not rain.  The tent is now filling with people.  Calabashers, each of them, casual as a Sunday picnic, smiling, lounging around, waiting for things to begin.  This is how things feel before the opening readers for the 2009 Calabash Festival. I have asked Carleen Samuels who has been with the festival since the beginning, to make sure that all the readers are in place.  I have gathered together all the books by these three women poets, and I have a sheave of notes about the authors and announcements for the audience in my hand.  I am wearing my calabash uniform—a beautifully designed t-shirt of full red, with this years symbol—a peace sign made up of the multiple human forms holding hands and suggesting community.  It is good to be here.  I greet the audience, and the greet me back.  Calabash has began.

The first readers on Friday night were three poets from the Caribbean.  Three women at different stages of their career.  We organize our reading order alphabetically, and sometimes this creates fascinating patterns, that can all eventually be said to have some method.  Tonight was a case in point.  Millicent Graham, the youngest poet and the one with a brand new debut collection of poetry, The Damp in Things, read first.  She was followed by Esther Phillips who has published two collections of poetry including the recently published book, The Gatherers of Stones. The third poet to read was Velma Pollard, who has published several books of poetry and fiction, and she too read from a new collection, Leaving Traces.  The three parts share the same publisher, Peepal Tree Press, a Leeds based press that has, for the past twenty five years been publishing Caribbean literature steadily. Indeed, it is now safe to say that the bulk of all new publication of Caribbean writers comes out of Peepal Tree Press, a remarkable and necessary achievement.

There is something engaging about poets who understand the importance of audience as they read their work.  Ask most people and they will tell you that they really don’t see the point of going to a poetry reading.  If they are inclined to take in poetry, they will say, “I will just read it myself.”  Yet in the hands of a good reader of poetry, the experience is almost always a wonderful revelation.

Millicent Graham has a disarming nervousness about herself—she speaks of being deeply grateful to be on the Calabash stage, and then, as if to invoke strength from the familiar, she proceeds to speak of her mother as an inspiration for her poems, as a commentator about the poems, as a presence in the whole business of her being at Calabash—until one has the sense that her mothers in on stage with her.  Tellingly, most of the poems are not about her mother, but most of the poems benefit from the intimacy and familiarity created by her invocation of her mother.  Graham is a careful poet—her lines are tersely constructed, and she has resisted any efforts by well-meaning teachers and mentors to siphon from her verse the sometimes elliptical and surreal bent of imagination that she has.  The effect is a distinctive and quite post modern Caribbean voice, which, after the long developed mastery of the narrative that we see in much of Caribbean poetry, is exciting.  Yet for all such poems, the ones that arrest us when she reads are those that allow for the startle of a rightly set image, like the sun in this poem, “I Am”.:

I am that face fading
from my grandmother’s mirror—
the colour she never cared for.

I am the curve set straight
by a guava switch, the proof
that love can make you flinch.

I kiss your palms, though its leaf
is violet on my cheek and the sun
is swelling inside my jaw.

Esther Phillips remarked that she was in a peculiar and dangerous position that night, sandwiched between two Jamaicans.  In the Caribbean, this means something.  In the eastern Caribbean, where Barbados is, Jamaicans are as known as any clichéd understanding of a people might be known.  Much of the myth that surrounds Jamaicans is not entirely unfounded—aggression, toughness, drama, and an inordinate pride in country and self.  Barbadians counter this with self-deprecation and a subtly constructed propensity to order—it allows for surprise and the satisfaction of transgression.  Jamaicans, alas, are expected to transgress always.  Phillips reads with a bold clear voice—her wit is gentle and affecting.  Her poetry is rich with a sense of place, but mostly with a sense of relationship.  Yet what is most memorable about her poems is that which draws sighs and then grand laughter from the audience—it is her capacity to tell a splendid story, and her deft use of language:

A flock of egrets trailed
a silent grace across a pearl-grey sky,
burst the clouds and broke
the quiet morning chant
into discord.

This is from her poem “Contraries I”.  Her biggest laugh comes from a cuttingly honest reflection on absentee fatherhood, and the absurdities of male/ female relationships—mostly poems about the absurdities of men.

Velma Pollard and Esther Phillips could be said to look alike.  Both are tall, slim black women with low cropped graying hair-dos; they walk with athletic sway, at home in their skins.  Pollard’s reading was anchored by an extended poem that reflects on the terrorist attacks in the US some years ago.  Pollard’s thoughts are not entirely those of lament, but include the bolder sounds of irony and prophecy. For her, the tragic implications of deaths by violence have little to do with patriotism and jingoism.  That the mere suggestion of some kind of comeuppance in the attack makes me look around almost  instinctively, tells me more about the fact that I have been living in the US for a long time, and that I have been somehow affected by the equations of American power that presume different standards of humanity for Americans than for people around the world.  Of course, the largely Jamaican audience understands the ironies of American power and arrogance, in as much as they appreciate that when we speak of half a million civilians dying in Iraq, we are talking about human beings, people with children, with dreams, with fears, with faith, people like any of us.  The Manichean notions that have permeated American society about the rest of the world are, simply put, decidedly American.

Pollard, of course, reads poems of love, of memory and loss, poems filled with music and poems that at times are brilliantly insightful.  In a poem published in 2001 in a book she titled, The Best Philosophers I Know Can’t Read or Write, there is a gem of a poem that I read during my introduction of her, titled “Old Age”:

Our assets
like our limbs
shrink

the house
becomes apartment
becomes room

time shrinks us
to the tomb

The poem is dedicated to Mervyn Morris, a Jamaican poet best known for his tightly constructed poems of wit and manners, poems, nonetheless, that remain deeply rooted in the Jamaican psyche and language.

These are three poets that Americans are not likely to encounter in the usual places.  And yet they are poets working with skill and power.  In many ways, one of the pleasures of a festival like Calabash, and the many poetry festivals that exist around the world, is the chance to met poets that are not on the very limited circle of readings and publication that exists where we are from.

By the time the reading is over, the tent is full.  It has become something of a cliché now at Calabash, but it is a cliché borne out of reality.  This is the biggest Friday night of the festival’s history.  The audience has arrived in large numbers, and they remain as welcoming and embracing as they have ever been.

The constant mantra as I walk through the crowds is of how good it is to be here, and how good it is that the festival is still happening.

We do not take a break.  Edwidge Danticatt and Junot Diaz are already sitting in the front row of the tent waiting to read.  Theirs is billed as a reading of prose, but it takes no time for us to realize that these writers are nothing if not poets.