Repeating Islands

The Wall Street Journal reports on the Brooklyn launch of a new book celebrating the 10^th anniversary of Jamaica’s Calabash Literary Festival. Here’s their report.

Outside, cold rain drizzled down on an unseasonably chilly night in Brooklyn. But inside Greenlight Bookstore, the atmosphere was Caribbean.

To celebrate the publication of “So Much Things to Say: Over 100 Poets from the First Ten Years of the Calabash International Literary Festival,” Greenlight presented a reading from the writers featured in the book. Editors Kwame Davis and Colin Channer hosted, with Channer, after some opening remarks, DJing the event—he played music (reggae, jazz, and pop) in between each of the poets who read.

The Calabash festival is held each year in Treasure Beach, Jamaica and features writers from across the Caribbean, as well as top writers from the U.S., Europe, Africa and other regions. All of the proceeds from the sale of the new book benefit the festival, which was founded by Channer, Dawes, and Justine Henzell. Derek Walcott, Russell Banks, Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat and other leading writers have attended the festival.

As at Calabash, Dawes said, poets were introduced alphabetically. “We find this very uncomplicated,” said Dawes, a distinguished poet in residence at the University of South Carolina. In the book, the poems are organized by size, then alphabetized–something that prompted laughs at the event when some poets couldn’t find their own work to read.

Poets who read included Meena Alexander, Amiri Baraka, Aracelis Girmay, Linda Susan Jackson, Willie Perdomo, Terese Svoboda, Everton Sylvester and Cheryl Boyce Taylor. Many but not all, of the poets who read have Jamaican connections.

Svoboda read these lines from her poem “Jamaican Idol”:

Walking backward from the sea,

scales shedding, you seek the cave

And Jackson read this from “Summer Rice”:

Gnarled fingers of grans and nans who no longer winnow, weave ancient designs into coiled baskets of pine, sweet grass, bulrush and palmetto to hold the summer yield.

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/04/26/calabashs-first-ten-years-jamaica-comes-to-brooklyn/

Photo: Colin Channer, left, and Kwame Dawes