Can it be possible to be this daft?

LINK: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8118721.stm

Thanks for sending this my way, Dave. When are we and our families mealing together?

Who is your Michael Jackson?

"I ask who is your Michael Jackson? Are you gonna wait for he or she to die before telling them that they are Great!"
~Wyclef Jean

Geoffrey Philp's "He Would Dance"

he would dance,
even when his frail body could no longer bear
the weight of all our fears

or when we questioned his allegiance
under the spotlight's unforgiving glare
he would dance
[continue there...]

Global or Local? Kwame Dawes

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Michael Jackson, RIP

LINK: http://poefrika.blogspot.com/2007/08/happy-birthday-michael-jackson.html

Groundwork's poem is here: http://groundwork.wordpress.com
Geoffrey's poem is here: http://geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com

"Dis-Leur" by Ernest Pépin

Un oiseau passe
éclair de plumes
dans le courrier du crépuscule
VA
VOLE
ET DIS-LEUR
Dis-leur que tu viens d'un pays
formé dans une poignée de main
un pays simple comme bonjour
où les nuits chantent
pour conjurer la peur des lendemains
dis-leur
que nous sommes une bouchée
répartie sur sept îles
comme les sept couleurs de la semaine
mais que jamais ne vient
le dimanche de nous-mêmes
VA
VOLE
ET DIS-LEUR
Dis-leur que les marées
ouvrent la serrure de nos mémoires
que parfois le passé souffle
pour attiser nos flammes
car un peuple qui oublie
ne connaît plus la couleur des jours
il va comme un aveugle dans la nuit du présent
dis-leur que nous passons d'île en île
sur le pont du soleil
mais qu'il n'y aura jamais assez de lumière
pour éclairer
nos morts
dis-leur que nos mots vont de créole en créole
sur les épaules de la mer
mais qu'il n'y aura jamais assez de sel
pour brûler notre langue
VA
VOLE
ET DIS-LEUR
Dis-leur qu'à force d'aimer les homes
nous avons appris à aimer l'arc-en-ciel
et surtout dis-leur
qu'il nous suffit d'avoir un pays à aimer
qu'il nous suffit d'avoir des contes à raconteur
pour ne pas avoir peur de la nuit
qu'il nous suffit d'avoir un chant d'oiseau
pour ouvrir nos ailes d'hommes libres
VA
VOLE
ET DIS-LEUR...
----------




Tell them

A bird of bright feather
dashes away in
the message of twilight
FLY
GO
& TELL THEM
Tell them you come from a country
built in a handshake
a country easy as one two three
where night sings
to keep tomorrow’s fears away
tell them
how we’re a mouthful
spread over seven islands
like the seven colours of the week,
but that the Sunday of our own days
never comes
FLY
GO
& TELL THEM
Tell them that tides
unlock our memories
and that the past sometimes blows
to excite our flames
because a people that forgets
no longer knows the colours of its days
but moves through today’s darkness like a blind-man
tell them we use the sun's bridge
to go from one island to another
but that there’ll never be enough light
to illumine
our dead
tell them our words go from créole to créole
on the shoulders of the sea
but that there’ll never be enough salt
to burn our tongue
FLY
GO
& TELL THEM
Tell them that by dint of loving people
we’ve learned to love the rainbow
and be sure to tell them
that it’s enough for us to love a country
that it’s enough for us to have stories to tell
so as not to fear the night
that to open our wings as free men
it is enough for us to have the bird’s song
FLY
GO
& TELL THEM...

© Ernest Pépin
Translated by Rethabile Masilo with the author's permission



Please visit http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ile.en.ile/paroles/pepin.html for the full bio.

Mzwandile Matiwana, RIP

Poets and Poetry lovers

It is with great sadness for South African Poetry Events to honour and mourn the passing of one of the unsung South African poets, Mzwandile Matiwana.

He is the author of 'I Lost a Poem' (Deep South Publishing) and has been published by major South African literary journals, such as Kotaz, New Coin, Timbila, Botsotso, Fidelities, donga and Carapace. His work has also been published in Sweden and the USA. He was a member of the UWA Writers Group, based in New Brighton.

He was born in 1957 [sic] in Port Elizabeth. Matiwana died on the 11th and was buried on the 12th June 2009 (42). He worked closely with people such as Mxolisi Nyezwa, Robert Berold and Mzi Mahola.

May the Soul of the deceased solid poet rest in peace.

Faya!
[source...]

Ed: Susan points out the discrepancy between the age and the date of birth. Correction: Mzwandile was born in 1967.

Green

Yes, I've gone green. If you think that the election in Iran wasn't free and fair, or that there was swindling and fraud, and if you can, say something green on your blog, or turn it green temporarily, in solidarity with the masses doing the streets in Tehran, demanding freedoms. And dying. Here's what you could do, one or more of these:

1. Write a poem about Iran and post it
2. Write a poem about the colour green and post it
3. Discuss what's going on in Iran at the moment in a post
4. Discuss the importance of not having theocracies (tsk tsk tsk!)
5. Post someone else's poem about Iran/the colour green/theocracies/etc
6. Turn your blog green -- shocking green, ha ha!
7. Share the present post with blogger friends
8. Read this article: http://mg.co.za

Other Voices:
1. http://stoneymoss.org/2009/06/18/color-as-colors
2. http://geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com/2009/06/green-for-human-rights-in-iran.html
3. http://coloronline.blogspot.com/2009/06/poetry-friday-freedom.html
4. http://www.blacklooks.org/2009/06/in_solidarity_with_the_green_people_of_iran_.html
5. http://oniammemory.blogspot.com/2009/06/shut-door-of-violence-in-iran.html
6. http://slamup.blogspot.com/2009/06/victory-poem.html
7. Your voice

American sentence: "sundown"

At the end of the day, the world pulls a blanket over its wan eye.

Pam Mordecai on not being reckful

I will express my disappointment with Ruth Padel. She too reckless, man! She wouldn’t make Professor of Poetry at Updown Elementary, and it have nothing to do with her poems.

It’s because she don’t have the smarts, and poets ought to have smarts.

As I’ve already said, I share Ms Padel’s distaste for teachers who choose, as objects of their lechery, young lasses whom they teach, and that includes Caribbean writers who happen to be Nobel Laureates. There are, by the way, three of them – Caribbean writers who are laureates, that is.

BUT

If she thought the St Lucian poet oughtn’t to have the post because he represented a danger to vulnerable young women, or because he fell far below the high moral standards of that ancient institution of learning, or because she was concerned to lift the bar, inaugurating a new era of probity and rectitude at Oxford, she should have refused to be a candidate in the race, and then she should have...
[continue there...]

[Don't miss Pam's blog...]

America's indigenous art form

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If you don’t know where you come from...

We were teenagers, older teens.

On Saturday morning, we’d go down to Victoria Pier, named after the Queen whose Day we celebrate as I type, so that I just found myself ducking fireworks that seemed dangerously close to this window! The Pier and the famous Myrtle Bank Hotel were casualties of a government redevelopment initiative in the 1960s. It was at the bottom of King Street in downtown Kingston, and so right on Kingston Harbour, and there you could hear Sugar Belly (born William Walker, but known to no one by that name) playing mento music with his rhumba band.

Mento is traditional Jamaican country music though purists may argue whether there is a line between the two. Certainly it is the music out of which reggae came by way of ska and rock steady. Its style is sometimes described as "shuffle and one-drop." The instruments used for mento are various but included in the beginning a banjo, guitar, bamboo sax, bongo drums, shakers, a variety of percussion instruments, and a rhumba box. Also known by many other names including marimbula. mbira or kalimba, the rhumba box is a thumb piano made from a wooden box with a large hole cut in front over which are placed tuned metal tines that are plucked to produce the sound.
[continue there...]

Malika Ndlovu (Invisible Earthquake)

Event: Malika Ndlovu presents Invisible Earthquake "at the Cape Town Book Fair"
What: Recital
Host: Invisible Earthquake - a woman's journal through stillbirth
Start Time: 15 June at 14:00
End Time: 15 June at 14:45
Where: Cape Town Book Fair

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Are Latinos racist?

Are Latinos in denial about deep-rooted racism in their communities? That’s one of the hard-hitting questions raised by 'Négritude,' an exhibit focused on the work of this hemisphere’s black artists.

Puerto Ricans, for example, overwhelmingly report to the U.S. Census that they’re white (81% said so in 2000), says Papo Colo, a well-known artist from the island and one of the show’s curators.

He laughs at the absurdity of this statistic for an island with a history of slavery and race-mixing. Puerto Ricans, he adds, use words like 'negro' and 'negrita' affectionately, but tend to ignore black Latino identity — or consider it a cultural backwater.
[continue there...]

African artists find their voice in blogs

As more Africans come to realize the power of blogging as a tool for expression on a global scale, the number of bloggers has increased and so has the themes in focus.

In that number of growing blogs, a lot of African artists have also joined in with a huge increase noted in poetry blogs as well as emerging photography and visual arts blogs.

We review some of them.
[continue there...]

Philp reads from "Who's Your Daddy?"

[Geoffrey] Philp reads from and discusses Who's Your Daddy?, his collection of short stories about people living in Miami and Jamaica and their issues of sexuality, prejudice, troubled childhoods and the uncanny.

[source...]

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Phillippa interview

1 - What image pops into mind when you hear or see the word Africa?

The veld, and the smell of the bush, a village, that kind of thing. I’m very romantic although most of my writing is about urban areas. My roots are in a countrified version of reality, that’s where I feel safe and quiet. Some townships have the same kind of feeling, in a way parts of Mamelodi feel very rural somehow.

2 - What makes you African?

I was born here and I create my identity around Africa. I can’t take it for granted - my adopted mother tongue is English so I can’t even live in the landscape of language like everyone around me. I like to go there too but I have to drive, and the road is seriously bumpy as I “dumela” my way home.

3 - What is your greatest hope for Africa?

That it starts to make the needs of children and old people the centre of its endeavours and the focus of its most intense thought and the recipient of most of the resources.

4 - What hurts you most about Africa?

That we destroy our children because children symbolize the future. Children also don’t lie, so it’s a problem when we silence those who are telling the truth.
[continue there...]

untitled

Jayne Cortez's "Talking about New Orleans"

Talking about New Orleans
about deforestation & the flood of vodun paraphernalia
the Congo line losing its Congo
the funeral bands losing their funding
the killer winds humming intertribal warfare hums into
two storm-surges
touching down tonguing the ground
three thousand times in a circle of grief
four thousand times on a levee of lips
five thousand times between a fema of fangs
everything fiendish, fetid, funky, swollen, overheated
and splashed with blood & guts & drops of urinated gin
[continue there...]

Poéfrika interview with Julius Chingono

1. How did you get into writing poetry? Did any one thing push you over the edge?

no
----------

2. Do you work on just one poem at a time, or do you work on several at the same time?

several
----------

3. Poets spend a lot of time perfecting their craft, and then perfecting each piece. How do you balance this with family life and with little income (compared with the input)?

I work daily. I do not know how long it takes me to complete a poem.
---------

4. These are difficult times, and they say laughter is the best medicine. What makes you laugh?

Because I am part of the society I write about.
----------

5. Is there a particular goal you seek when you write? Awake others? Entertain them? Tell the truth? What?

Tell the truth
----------

6. How do you know when a poem is ‘finished’, and do you stop work on it then and there?

It is difficult to convince myself that a poem is complete.
----------

7. You are to encourage poetry students to write a poem. Please come up with a "writing prompt" out of your own experience, or out of something else, using anything that invades your mind right now. Very short and simple.

Put pen to paper and write whatever comes to your mind.
----------

8. What writers, living or not, have influenced you the most?

Pablo Neruda, Charles Mungoshi, Oswald Mtshali
----------

9. How do you write? Drink coffee, wine? Listen to music? Type, scribble? What atmosphere do you feel out of place not writing in?

There is no place I feel I cannot write
----------

10. Here's an on-going poem. Please add to it.

They stood before me that night
With clenched fists and blown pupils,
Shadowed by leafless branches of a cotton tree,
The moon as bright as the moon and no metaphor

For which image can serve? What simile
Makes sense enough? The ghosts that guard
The tree nod yes, though I’ve not said a thing.
One shade uncurls and crooks a bony finger, calling me.

The voices rise up like be-headed trees
I stumble forward fear at my heels
How did this night arrive and where is wisdom’s heed
"Gone my child is your clothes -- face now this thing."

So strip off your nudity, and learn to be naked.
Release your fears as branches drop leaves
And let yourself see.
The man with an axe stands by
About to chop your ego,
Stand well away.

_______________
Zimbabwean poet, Julius Chingono, has been published in magazines and anthologies in Zimbabwe and elsewhere. Recently, he was detained briefly for reading one of his poems to a public. You can read some of his work at Poetry International.

Come to Me, His Blood

Come to me, his blood,
so I may cup you,
be reservoir and ladle, both—
clean, store, and stir.
Then serve you back to him.

Come to me, his blood, ill,
so I may warm, sieve, and funnel
you back to him; his cheeks ruddy
again, his head in my lap.
The wind is up! and sails our boat

across Farm Pond, our friends
on shore waving us to picnic time—
a hammock-nap, a swim—
all four of us, all well.
Not dozens of summers ago,

but now, this final Sunday in July,
come to me his blood, don't rush
onto a lawn or street, don't seep—
but if you do leave him, if spilt,
you who cannot slow or thicken,

redirect yourself—you must—come to me
and I will bring you back to him.


Martha Rhodes
New England Review
Volume 29, Number 1 / 2008

Copyright © 2008 by Middlebury College Publications
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.