 And tonight, we are going to feature Ayah Nola words, 13 Saint Lucian poets, 13, 1, 3. Now many of you fear number 13, but the director of this poetry festival is Fearless. So we have 13 Saint Lucian poets, and to make it worse, one of them, well I watch a lot of horror movies, you know, and there's always a vampire, and a vampire is always called Vlad. And one of the 13 poets here tonight is actually called Vlad. So it seems we have 12 poets and a vampire. So watch out ladies, luckily today isn't Friday the 13th. So I'd like to recognize here tonight. We have the mayor of the grocery constituency, Mr. Ekbadosian. We have the partner of Sederic Walcott with Sigrid Nama. We have people who have been people. I see people who are still people. I see husbands. I see people who hold current high positions. That is not for me to name them. Okay so let me do a quick rundown of what the Nobel Laureate Festival in Grosile has to offer still. So tonight we are here with our 13 poets. Tomorrow at 9.30 in the morning, the schools in District 1, that's Grosile area, from Cap to Shulk and beyond, they will be hosting a poetry festival. So it will begin at 9.30 in the morning right here at the same venue. And on Friday, this one is really, really big, it's a dance production choreographed by an award-winning son of the Grosile soil, Richard Ambrose, and it is dubbed One Friday Night. So while some people will be down the road enjoying the spirit of Saint Lucia, others will be in here enjoying One Friday Night. And on the 31st of January, there will be a book launch here. Mr. Sylvester Klosell has written a book on sustainable tourism and the launch will be right here. But before that on Sunday, the 29th of January, our very own Taj Weeks, he will hold the final of his song competition. And it will happen right here. And this is happening Sunday, January 29th from two in the afternoon. So everybody please turn out in large numbers to support and celebrate our two Nobel Laureates whose birthdays were yesterday. So we are here to prove that the pen is mighty indeed. So ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, I hand you over to the director of this evening's production, the award-winning, the one and only, Handel Himpelet. Thank you, Mr. Sylvester. Blessings, everyone. We're starting behind time, so we're going to move into things pretty quickly. But first off, before we go into the reason for our gathering here tonight, I want to recognize briefly that the giant tree has fallen, Ivrenad, who is a climate justice warrior, who is a community organizer of notes, who is an intellectual thinker, visionary, who was involved in so many areas of pollution, cultural life, and elsewhere in the Caribbean too, in Haiti, in Jamaica and other places. He did so, so, so much. A global citizen, and yet at the same time, really deeply rooted in library. He was, what can I say? I don't know what else to say, honestly. But I want to recognize this passing with one minute of silence. If we all stand briefly, four minutes. Okay, we go down, we gather here, and we go to Abbey. Kind of a conversation in a weird way, although you don't necessarily have to say much. A conversation between the poets and your wonderful selves. First of all, I want to make it very, very clear that the 13 poets who are here tonight are by no means a complete representation of the poetic tradition in Central Asia, not at all. There are a number of poets, plenty of them, whose work forms a substantial part of the poetic tradition here. But they're not here tonight, and their work is not represented here tonight. To do that would require a slate of events over a period of days. In fact, it would require a literary festival. And among those not being heard here tonight are some persons who have published work of their, you know, individual volumes. And there are people like Adrian O'Jay, Patricia Turnbull, who is here with us tonight, fortunately, but not performing. Adrian O'Jay, Patricia Turnbull, Ezra Simmons, Melania Daniel, Morris Downes, Alicia Velas, Morgan Delfinist, and their others. And then, in addition to those who have their own, their work published in individual volumes. Their poets who don't have individual volumes published, but they have had their work in anthologies and journals, both of Hans and Lucia and the Caribbean out in the wider world, you know? And they speak, of course, like Irving Desy, Marcian Jopier, Yasmin Odlev, Catherine Hestakawi, so on and so on. It goes on, you know? And in the case of Spoken Word, or those are published before it's being published, in the case of Spoken Word, and the Spoken Word thing is the thing I have some issues with. I don't, I'm against it. I just made a piece of it. There are other persons who have established a tradition of Spoken Word here. Ethan Fletcher, Black Crayon, Stephen Dantes, Aishine, Lisa Dublin, Kurt Merrill, Lisette. The list goes on. They have established a tradition of Spoken Word. And we'll see examples of Spoken Word here tonight. And there's a very fruitful discussion to be had about the place of Spoken Word, whatever, you know, in our tradition. So what we're going to do tonight is to draw attention, first of all, to the work that's been going on here, to establish some things about the kind of tradition that Derek Walcott had helped to consolidate here, and give some indication of how persons fit into that tradition. The idea of a poetic tradition, I mean, especially in a country which has a Nobel, you know, Nobel Prize winning poet, we suggest the image of like a river, you know, where it was tributaries flowing off it and so on, like a linear thing. I'm not so sure that that is the best representation of the tradition that we have here. Some traditions, yeah, you can point to one absolute ancestor poet and other persons following sometimes even similarities of style and so on. I'm not sure that actually really represents what we have. It feels to me as though what we have is like a kind of a coral bed, you know, a coral bed, a foundation of a coral bed that Derek created. And coming up in that coral bed, other bits of coral, other poets, you know, with their own ways, their own styles, very, very, very, very related in the choices that they make about poetic devices and the choices that they make about how they see what they want to see. But it's a coral bed and everyone is in it and is nourished by that original, that original bed, sorry, nourished by that original, let me show what the word is, that Derek has created for us. There's a way in which Derek has, and that became clear to me when I visited the Caribbean Islands, there's a way in which Derek has made the idea of being a poet such a normal thing, such a natural thing. And I think we've all benefited from this. So these poets do what poets have always done in their own ways. They explore the self and they explore the society. Explore the society, they explore the self, you know, back and forth. Vladimir Vassilian, in his lecture last week, spoke about how the inner and out of what you are inside kind of shapes to some extent what you see outside. But what you see outside impacts what you are inside and then that in turn kind of like helps to condition what you see outside. It got very, very wonderfully confusing and I think that's great, that's partly about how it's supposed to be. But the poets here tonight, their work does that. So one of the things that the poets have in common is the commitment to shaping the word, we call it craft technique, poetic construction, all kinds of ways of referring to it. And Warka was an absolute master and an avatar and really really tough about the necessity for persons to commit the craft of the word. And I think we'll be seeing persons here tonight too in their different styles, in their different ways, have committed to the craft of the word. Something else that we'll be seeing tonight too I think is the way in which a number of the various ideas and concerns and issues that they're engaged with are still continuing. It's still coming up in these poets' work, not because persons are trying to imitate certain, but because these ideas and concerns are still relevant, they've not been necessarily fully explored and plunged into and dealt with. Ideas and cultural identity and the clash of traditional values and the materialistic model of development and the richness and the beauty and yet the fragility of folk tradition threats to the environment, love of homeland, the reverential love of nature that is so much about Derek, that is here tonight too. The beauty and complexity of relationships and therefore of the self. All these themes are being shared with us here tonight. So what are we doing very briefly in between the poems is simply drawing our attention after each poet has engaged you, simply drawing our attention to sometimes various ideas and concerns have come up and sometimes trying to relate it to how all this fits back into the tradition, into this foundation choral bed that we're all part of. So we'll begin with the same foundation which is the interaction between poets and the cultural heritage that they're nourished by. And in this Derek was an amazing example. And so I'll begin with this example. My country heart, I am not home till sentencing. A voice with wood smoke and ground doves in it. A cracks like clay on a road whose tints are the dry seasons, whose quattros tighten my heart strings. The shakshaks rattle like cicadas under the fur-leaved nettles of childhood. An old fence unknown. Bene, quadrille, la comete, gracious turns until the light settles. A voice like rain on a hot road. A smell of cut grass. Its language has swung on its cedars and sweeten them anywhere ever I have gone. That makes my right-hand ishmael, my guide, the star-fingered frangidani. Our kings and queens march to a floral rain, wooden swords of the rose and the margarite, their chorus, the lances of feathered reeds, ochre cliffs and soft comers bright as drizzling banjos becoming rain. And the drizzle going back to Billy, trailing her hem like a country dancer. Shadows across the plain of your foot with her voice, small grazing herds of horses shine from a passing cloud. I see them in broken sunlight, like singers remembering the words of a dying land. I watch the bright wires follow sessents singing, sunlight in fading rain, and the names of rivers whose bridges I used to look. So to continue this conversation that we've begun, I will call on the first person. I'm not doing biographies of people, but I will call on persons in a chronological order, except for me. I'm the youngest here, but I've got to be a biographies of people. I will call on persons in a chronological order. So first person I will call on as a person more than anyone else is a direct bridge to Derek. And that is McDonald Dixon. Thank you. Until the village, it must not change. It must not dream to alter the little pennypiece shops, smelling of oil, rice, flour, and kerosene. Waiting for a match, so the old broken down fire cart can parade down main street. For the volunteers to proclaim half in English, half Creole, let it burn, no penny blow, we got no water. All the time surrounded by sea, and progress spreading its seeds all over the little place. Go and tell the old woman, she must sell the one room wooden shack and her mother leave, or break it down to make room for glass and wall. Banks hungry for profit will lend any job with collateral to build a mall. The police will stop myself selling by the street, unless she gets a permit saying sanitized wares costing more than her sales for the whole blighted week. Profit dead, credit due, funeral same time makes me go and tell the village it must not change and stare the ghetto in the face. The hungry child looking for tough luck, looking for mentors, little boys in empty lots practicing with glock and RPGs. That's the price you pay my friend. The stupidness you start when you put us in glass case and turn us into curios and pay plain loads of visitors to come and see how we still stupid and how we still damn poor. Second point, donkey niche. Before the stars come from where they come from to shine on my little place, long before Queen's chain and litanies of laws that tell us nothing but take away the ground from under our foot. Long before canoes reached on the shore to bless this earth, possess this self with bones that form the dirt that bless the land with fruit. Man was here, we were here. We cannot withdraw when times withdraw unless red advocates its complexion no longer claiming to be the color of blood. Kalinago, African, Indian, all black mixed in one white shell. Red is the one complexion in all of us. I say this to ask where you find a right to stop me from praying on my beach. Cleaning like my ancestors with phony mourning to pull back the rain. To make bonfires at sunset, to chase sandfly that will rock me of my right to build my cabin right here on this beach. 600 years, long before Columbus, before back home, an excavator come to dig up my dreams, teeth my sand, encode my thoughts with sea water, leaving me no grounds for appeal. Man was here, we were here, and my final born beloved country. I am not for sale, not a single thought, not a pour of sand and not a grain of dirt craving for a teaspoon of margarine or the green bar from a match of nutrient, barren. Its bar poisons the hell in me. I'm not for sale, not a pinch of flesh, not a yard of wood, not a blanket past ripped from my history book, fearing I rise in some future generation to extract revenge when I remember whips and gasp. I'm not for sale, not for sacks of gold, not for a traitor's kiss or the ring on Christ's left hand, a politician's smile charms lives, but cannot weave the magic wand. See the self, feel the sun, hear the wind, its eye, its eye. They are not for sale, not one sugar mill, not this crude sulfur sift in slice of hill, not a single plume from my bald pitons, fury bone in two hemispheres propels my wrath, come like the magi bearing gifts. I am not for sale, not this mixed blood, not my stone chapel opening her doors on empty streets, not eyes searching for the truth falling from a grandmother's charcoal tongue, coaxing soil faces on investors bogus bills. I'm not for sale, not my sin in locks, not my right to surf on a palm's backside on this curved coast, God's illuminated hand. Once I dreamed of kings and fair island cities, regrets now file through the mailbox in my head. Fools will hum this tune, not knowing the song. The conch will blur across this land in verse. Mother my poems, grind my heart to dust, until expects on a creole loaf, I dazzle sin and sun with sun-touched brilliance. Thank you. There's a poet who has come out fighting, you know, if old age is supposed to like calm you down, not with it. The very, I mean all the poems are very, very combative kind of engagement with history. And it's coming from among other things, a very, very few sense of connection to the land. As he says, we were here before these people here. And that sense of our right to be here, and this is ours, and a resistance to colonizing influence, whether it be the age of one or the modern ones. That's in Derek's work as well. That's something that has continued, because it has continued, because that's what we faced with here. The language in the poem is interesting because like some of Walker's work is written in a kind of range where it can go from fairly high register, you know, very, very formal choice of words and so on, into something that is more down to idiomatic Creole English, and it can do it, you know. Seriously, it's a goal that Derek had said himself. I think from fairly early, by the time he had gone through the school of flight, he had achieved that, achieved that kind of suppleness of language that could fly high and down the one still sound natural. Again, I'm just kind of flagging how the tradition is continuing, both in terms of the ideas in it, and in terms of styles, you know, okay. So, all that said, I'd like to go down the line and bring on the next person, um, gain no biography, but there's an ongoing fascinating relationship between the next person coming and McDonald's from before, and it's a pleasure watching them in action, composite action. I'd like to call on John largely. What remain and some, we have been to the end of history and back again. We have returned from cities of perfection, come again to narrow lanes of Belmont, sat in the King's walls of Cambridge, re-entered Marshall, walked with laureates in Boston, Stockholm, Castries, Planned hills of shanties above all across, swam in Skeets Bay Parkyhouse, drunk over late night fish on Baxter's road, Bridgetown, laughed with ready stars and Kaizookings, strolled pagodas in Tokyo, temples in Kyoto, and prayed in simple pews of village churches. Love has left wrinkled skins of lowliness. Children gone to far countries has been must. Lovers distracted by diversions of age and old flames rekindling dead wood. What remains to be some main poetry of all those gone so quickly in ours? All of it, I guess, that voyage of a life, if you are brave enough to find metaphors of the metaphysical in it, in all the messy stuff, the sacred and the sacramental in certain failures, in bird call insisting, insisting, pup saying something to a goat in the yard, compa music coming up the hill, child shrieking somewhere in our house, and so on, all of it there in your present timeline, in your hearing now. Now threading that life, and it's in every two days, your very hunger for affection, for affirmation, your shifty eye, the hope of faith, of redemption, years inevitably winding in their spiral to that moment of the epilogue of your biography. So, write it down, and say it like a kaizo griot, like Stalin's shadow, sing it strong, like a chanterelle over shack-shack drums and velo, like Bob Marley still wailing from passing vans over the lost cities of yards, after poems, sounds, and sacred canticles, that him, the divine presence, in which we dance gracious quadril to the scratchy velo, mandolin, shack-shack and goat skin drum, women in the alluring mystery of their warp viet, men careful with their feet, poems so often forget the dancer of creation, laughing in the brown mud of our genesis. But I am trusted in your mercy, and sought the sacramental of my days in the archetypal scissor-tailed girl circling above sibilant surf, in Kajirina's needle-lead curtsies, before the breeze of angels wings off a hill, in elegant spider lilies under my proteins, in the trusting gaze of the chained pup, within the perfect mastery of your son, settling its tamed glass saints and evening offerings on the horizon's altar. My heart shall rejoice in your salvation, with blues and laments, like Nina Simone's of strange fruit, with Marley's ready to get up, stand up to the wicked man, with shadow and rudder waving the high mass, Patrick Centellois, Emeline Michel, Florita Marquis, and clay-voiced multitudes quiring out of their solter. Among dancers, players of instruments loud, we make psalms of our living before your throne, all of it. Permutations and combinations of joy, heartache, aging, and diurnal boredom, I will sing to the Lord yesterday, today, and tomorrow, in lines and images from your overwhelming creation, in mantras and rhythms from blues, maps, clocks of earth and galaxies, of the simplicity of God, of His holy sovereignty, in whose unity we are one diversity, of the poems, songs. I raise chantings of faith in the great ayah, with cantors of the tabernacles of the holy mystery, because He has done bountifully with Ayah and Ayah. These old people don't joke, you know. There's a number of different strands going, for this, we're not doing any kind of literary academic exploration, but still it's just swised a note of some of the stuff that's going on in there, and the poems are among the things exploring aging, aging with a sense of acceptance and balance. And that's something that became stronger and stronger in Derek's work from mid-summer onwards, by the time he got to the final regrets. It's very much there in that poem of his that has kind of a worldwide popularity, love after love, in that sense of acceptance, looking back over a long life, and you accept it with gratitude. That's what Robbie is doing. And again, like Nixon's work here, Robbie's good choices, his kind of vocabulary choices, structures allow for a movement of very grand language, grand imagery, and into something that's more counter-worth and basic, and to move in and out of that. That's part of our tradition. It's part of our tradition as Caribbean people, actually. But we've seen it there in poetry. Something that's been borne on me more and more over the years is that for a while now, Robbie has been using music motifs, he's been referring to music, he's been referring to styles of music, you know, country music, traditional folk, urban music, reggae, calypso and so on, he's been doing that and reaching beyond that. And not just within the Anglophone Caribbean, but within the Francophone Caribbean as well, he mentions particular artists like Emeline Michel and so on, and four plays like Seth Lusso, which has that dual heritage, that perspective that he has, and that looking out on music, it makes sense coming from a place like here, that he has a perspective. He uses the image of music, of folk dance, new folk dress, to praise the divine presence. Robert is a deeply religious poet, but that praise, that deeply religious praise, is brought over to us in our own cultural car, so to speak. He uses imagery of dance, of dancing before, or of coming in a procession of folk dances that we don't find a lack of it, going up and dancing before a ride. And there's a deep reference for nature that goes on in his work as well. And that, there's something interesting that's happening here because Derek too had a deep reference for nature, deep, deep, deep spiritual. Robert's reference for nature goes, his expression of it goes more directly to Christian religious imagery, you know, that's not where Derek is coming from directly, but that sense of a divine presence in the manifestations of nature in rivers and trees and so on and so on. It's there in both of them, so that's yet another stream that's continuing, that's more, that same kind of coral that's growing in Robert's work. By the time we came to the end of the world species, it kind of like zooms out almost from the cultural thing and the landscape of a particular country, it kind of zooms out into something like almost like cosmic and the language is more overtly biblical. I don't know that there is another poet in our tradition who is doing quite what he does. There are indications of it, strands of it in different persons, but in his work it takes a poet like Robert to say something like, after poems sounds, after poetry sounds, and to say that with a complete conviction with a straightforward truthfulness, you have to be embedded in a certain kind of life and set of values, but you'd say that with absolute belief. So yeah it's, I love our tradition, it's got so much good running. Thanks Robbie. I'd like to call on someone else who is doing really really interesting work, he's a classmate of mine, I said I'm not doing biography and I'm glad he's always written, but it's later in his life that that book has begun to come out and begun to see what kind of bits of coral that means he's bringing up from the coral that, I call on George Carter. My first poem this evening, ladies and gentlemen, Missy Medan, is titled, If I Had Thought. If I had thought you would have gone so imperceptibly, so almost without my knowing, I might have listened to your fluted love, the two twelves in the orange grove more intently. I would have dipped more easily in your island's trees, savoring the cool ripple of your fingers on my skin. I would have slept late into an afternoon to wake to the batter and squawking of Akron's mating in a sand of blue man groves, oblivious of this progress thing about to happen. I would have painted immortally children bathing, swathed in clear rain, coming down over La Torciere. But now the sun dips into an evening, red with the dust of the trees, and I note that we have traded the soft tenor up to 12, the pure pleasure of raising on a child's skin for this time. Moving now, nods to the cadence of the spawning caesars of virgin fish, or the stilted probing of one blue heron in a river ebbing, measures the intractable clatter of Komatsu. A small crab, ferreted from the tidal slush, protests the bird's beaking. The futility of her placars matched only by her ignorance. She hasn't heard of the river's dying, her demise, their imminence, but lemals away were aptly named for hardly hearing or hardly listening, like those who loudly proclaim new paradigms that rise beyond the trees, until one does not hear from cubical perches. The totals complete, the silence of cedars no longer speeding, tractors backfill wetlands to fulfill other dreams. Our sleep late to wake to a nightmare that does not end, man grows falling, the high rising arrogance of condominiums machines keep coming, and time shares none of our dreams. Y'en chanson tous elle, alors des chansons de l'amour restez tranquille d'aumouin s'il a peine l'homme à Dieu qu'aille dissipé, si douler à notre Dieu qu'aille disparaît, moi d'aigui à vous deux marcher ou pas d'aigui parler, ou d'aigui simplement restez tranquille, etimiers patimiers, ou bien venir réaliser que moi qu'a garé à sou et moi qu'a souhaité ou en la vie qu'aille déouler à la fin, à dans la fin et avec la joie. Parce que tu est-ce là où capoter notre Dieu, c'est pas un chat qui absolument légère, ou bien on croit qu'il est été doué pour s'y porter, et il n'est pas obligé pour chaher ou ni méritait-il en or comme un or pour protéger. And now, English translation, two songs of love, stay calm, Y'en one. If the hurt in your eyes will dissipate, if the pain in your heart will ever nest, I would wish, dear one, you would not speak, you would simply be still, and little by little you may come to understand that I am watching over you, and I am wishing you a life to ultimately unfold peacefully and with joy, because the sadness you carry within is not a burden that is light by any means, or across that's easy to bear my love, and there is no need to carry it. You need the overarching wings of an angel to shield you, to protect you. And now, ladies and gentlemen, this piece is called Lines at Kazambah. Lines at Kazambah, do it in this clear eyed light. Now that you know that your back's against imponderable walls, do it in the day-breaking light of these times, because you can no longer retreat on the rocks. Do it where the water washes the shore that assuages your feet, where the sacred offerings of ancestors lie, and the ground exudes this asos, who we are, whom they have denied that we be just do it, and reclaim this space, or else the night falls unapologetically, the haze so mystifyingly comforting now, becomes a shroud, a nightmare impossible to run from, because you'll live so soon, as in a child's bad dream, an inundating fear of unexplainable motionlessness. Do it in the soft lumière of this dawn, where we remove the past while our shoes reverence, and let memory return. Do it like so much more than a prayer. A whispering above the roar of breakers is a whimper, a rolling over, a surrender of our story. These bones must be more than fossils, these living shards, more than an ancient potter's fingers on the past. Do it while the clays still wet in our hands, or there will be nothing for the children, only a smudged memory of Holocaust. Thank you. Because tonight goes on, you will find that there'll be more and more raging, lamenting, cursing about what passes for the government there. So many other poets are seized with a rage, and a sort of desecration of nature that happens. So much of it is unnecessary, so much of it is in the name of something called progress that needs to be questioned. So, and again, that's their experience in there as well. In relation to the Queer poem, something very, very intriguing and fine is happening there, because there's a kind of stereotype of Queer in the society that the language is good for jokes, for vigorous exchange, for aggressive lashing outs, and for very active and engaging descriptions of things. Yeah, it's true, it's good for that. But we seldom think of it as an associated first with a softness, and an intimacy, an intimacy that's not necessarily associated with sexual relationship, because that's another thing. And I think this poet has deliberately set himself against the stereotype of Queer. Very, very deliberately. And he's created, or he's set himself to creating poetry that shows the other side, the softer side, more intimate, you know, the interior side of it. And to do so, he's reaching for vocabulary that you don't really have very much anymore. He's reaching for the vocabulary of his grandparents and the people of that generation. I would like to dissipate, but you know, I mean, you'll figure from English, I'd dissipate. But you're really, I don't know where I would hear anybody, even out in the rural area, say I would like to dissipate. It would be very, very rare. But he's reaching for that kind of vocabulary, because that kind of vocabulary has qualities that he's looking for to create the texture of language that he wants. What's interesting too is that he's writing in that kind of Queer. When I listen to the rhythms that are going on in the poem, the kind of rhythms that will sit very, very easily in a free verse in English love poem. Even one that's sort of fairly muted. So there's an interesting kind of hybrid going on here, where the language and certain rare qualities in language are kind of being brought to light and poetry is being created with it. But it's being created in rhythms that are associated with another language. It's a very interesting hybrid. Later on in tonight's Slater Poets, you'll hear a Queer poem that is in the rhythm of Queer. Because Queer is a kind of rhythm, every language is a kind of rhythm. This is deliberately not trying to do that. It's going for a hybrid. And it's pointing, I think, to the possibility in the poetic tradition. Because once you start to blend and mix different elements, then the tradition starts to expand on your amazing things. So Nuka, we may see you are shy, may say, George. The next poet for the column, I think the less that I say about it, the better. I'd like to call on... Can I do two pieces? Island poem. This island is struggling to write itself into a poem that cannot be erased. Waves are speaking themselves onto beaches, urging the sand to keep the lines still scribbled on spaces left in front of deck chairs. Inland, sunlight and shadow are printing cries of fleeing birds onto brown pages of the ground. Bear, after bulldozers, rubbed out the italic writing of Acacias, the punctuation marks of cactus, the narrowed eyes of spirit-inviterate men, squinted almost shut from scrutinizing watermarks on dollar bills. I've never read what Earth wrote here. This island, 238 pages of illuminated manuscript, was written in a language they have never learned. Foreigners do it. What they hope for is erasure, bare, bland sheets of golf courses, roads that strike through verses of mangrove, raise the birdless vegetation, no scrawl of a creature anywhere. Did you write them out in the snow? Joe, so reply. Thus, rising men look over the eyes of the blind. Between the shadow and the light, they find their subtleties. For a creature, sunset always is a sign. Day and night, good and evil, end to time. They come of separate and be their own realities. Life is a rightful consequence though slow decline. And so the stare upon its death bed, knowing all divine things to be dire, sunny, right angels' melodies. For a creature, sunset always is a sign. Life is a right name unto the stuff, though slow decline. On its death bed, he was, as he moved towards his death, first spontaneously composing hymns and singing hymns as if anything was his death. We love it in there. A lot of approach has come out, has been coming at us so far, with a couple of exceptions. So in our day, it's taken on big things. That's a necessary part of the tradition. But you also want to point to your goals in, in, in, in, in to me, in to me personally, in to me. Small ways of developing the basis. This next point is an absolute result of a purpose called JNK. For Fergus. When Fergus was dying, I had this fantasy that when some people die, they ought to leave spaces like holes in the air where they used to be. Walking around quite normally, we stumble on these places. And choke and gasp and vacuum till the realization, oh, this is where he was. We need true memories, not just vague traces. But well before he died, I'd feel a soul deep irritation when he would try to drift and they would shake him, trying to bring a little more life from him. I wanted him to go with peaceful celebration. I touched his body after they roped it in a sheet, so quarters could swing it casually onto a barrel. He was not in it, though we felt him there in the room. On Castry's street later, I wanted to sing, feeling his sudden joyous presence everywhere. From Fergus on his death, amazed, he sent a living blessing to me through the air. This one is called the Lecture Lady. She says, assuming all of us Mayanians, as well as Anglicans, that those of us who were in church on suddenly August 23rd and not at home, nearly shut doors, taking down the pictures, will remember that the psalm was 46. Therefore we will not fear. Though earth be moved and mountains toppled and depths of sea, the Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our stronghold. If you would find something to comfort from, you need to make your own community. Huddled in your room closet, hiding from mounting winds, with lush and rain, your death so good. If you would have a fragment to clutch salvation from, you shouldn't be in a church. Some poem could then visit you, fly into your heart like a rosary to hold. Come where you always do not succeed in keeping nature out. See, here and there, small leaves of fossil themselves into man-made stone. Yet you have to make your own. Knowing it will be blown down, broken, overgrown, still you have to make your own. Ace of spades, the others worked outside me. I, tucked in myself, was trying to die. I did not want to eat or drink, be stuck with eyes, walk, or think. They tried to talk. I don't hear a weird vocalising, quacking, queer. I turned away, I faced the wall, I did not want the world at all. And there he lay, my lovely death, so gently waiting, breathed my breath. I felt his own upon my face, such tenderness, such loving grace. Time to go with you, this time. This is a villanelle for Daniel. I knew that love was always laced with dread, but never felt it stronger or more clearly until the day you curled up in my head. They brought you in, your little mummy head, but you dearly, that love was always laced with dread. I knelt with terror at your very bed. Almost convinced you would stop breathing, queerly. That was the day you curled up in my head. The mean and bitter things my mother said, taught me how frightening love is, very, very. I've always seen that love was laced with dread. Can I hurt anyone? I cried, and then I had to face it very clearly upon the day you curled up in my head. I loved you more than life itself, because my joy is just to love you, really. I knew that love was always laced with dread. I knew that love was always laced with dread. Our places, the Asian acceptance, I don't know, so it's all like that. Like where we suspect it, how one gets to that place and then comes out and writes about it at the time. I can't imagine how it is against that place. All mothers feel that that's the place that you can easily bruise. Love is your future, it's the place where you can actually bruise, you know that. I'm getting talktight now, but I'm just saying that this aspect of poetry where you need a crucial part of the tradition, part of what helps a lot to do that kind of exploration is poetic form, poetic craft. If you have a craft, a technique and so on, to hold you, to brace you while you're doing that, there's less risk of you going off the rails. This poet is a gentle and fierce fanatic about poetic craft, whether it be in standard traditional forms or in free verses and so on, it's very, very particular about the craft aspect of poetry. It's another echo of Derrick. The next poet I'm going to bring on is Phenomenon. I don't know of a president, I am really truly, I don't know of any antecedents, any followers of him. I'll just bring him on, Rassai. I'm going to tune an unheard tune. An imaginative song plays somewhere and only the pain hears. It then gets up and sees across the paper floor, guided by the hand of the writer, its only partner. Gracefully leaping, jumping, turning like a ballerina, from letter after letter into word, word after word, stitched into sentence. Sentence after sentence into paragraph, paragraph after paragraph. Still, ceaselessly dancing to that unheard tune to that imaginative song across the paper floor, encouraged by its partner, the writer. When the pain stop is dancing, as tired as can be, he lays down, relax. What did Jeff did? And what did Jeff do? First, he used to call, let me your skin, a drum, everything. He gave me solution culture, a drum, everything. He gave me Africa, the solution culture life. Listen to the voice of the drum, the drum, the drum, the drum, the drum. Listen to the voice of the drum, the drum, the drum, the drum, the drum. The spirit is to me that courage you, rasaparayu, they call you. James Compton, tea les diyoto. Amnitious laborda tea les piyantobu. James Compton, tea les piyantobu. Tandos et raschia chuti les piyantobu. Maka zia viti les piyantobu. Maka nexti les piyantobu. Maka nuva cinti les piyantobu. Rasbo a mali te les piyantobu. Hey Mr. Tree, let me your skin, cause I want to be a job, to be everything. He gave me African culture life. Hey Mr. Goal, let me your skin, cause I want to be a job. Hey Mr. Man, let me your hands, cause I want to be a job, to be everything. He gave me African culture life. Listen to the voice of the job, the job, the job. That first piece, no drum, no chimes, no chorus for the audience, just a voice. Painting pictures, creating images. And any rhythms that happen just because they're following the movement of his thought. Don't get me wrong, I love the other work as well. Kind of rassizing that the public more often sees, like the second one. But I really love that first one. I really love that image of the paper, as a papery floor that the pen dances on. It's a starting image. Modern one poets, in The Call of the Night, a couple of them, take a quick look at the relationship between the writer and the process of writing. I like the way this one is done, so give me a task. The other one is classic rassa actually. There's something I want to say, because I said when I was introducing that, there's not a precedent, there's no follow-ups. Because you see, I've come across, all of us have come across different concerts and so on. You may come across a poet who, with a particular poem, may be working with a drum, whether he or she is the one playing it or the person is the one playing it. You come across that. The closest that there is to a sort of ancestor, and yet still not exactly so, is that he shall pass in his days of working with Lapocapuit. And I hail fish, and I hail that group and what they did. But even that is not quite the same thing, because fish would have been working with drummers working behind them, drummers playing with them, and sometimes voices. And that's one thing, it's wonderful. That dialogue, that duo of rassa is the only drum. It's the two of them. They're already coming up on the stage. It's the two of them. It's a conversation happening between the two of them. I don't know of anyone here who did that before him. I don't know if anyone here is doing it after him, but I hope that there will be other persons coming up, because it is an aspect of our poetic tradition that is very, very singular. You know, really, really singular. And I hope it can catch on more. It takes particular skills to do that kind of thing, but that dialogue goes against the ESU, but whatever it is that drove him to go into that particular form, I hope that spirit can catch on, and other voices take it up too. I hope that work can be recorded sensitively, and for it to spread out, for it to go online, and to be there in the airwaves more, and then to be able to spread the tradition more. So, yeah, blessings, yeah, blessings. The, yeah, and just very, sort of the ideas in the poem, particularly in the second one. Cultural heritage is something that zips in and out throughout the Named Poets' work. IGF Rastafarian is focusing on one aspect of the cultural heritage, the African one, very valid, very necessary, and it's wonderful that it's bringing it full of glory to our faces, like this, something that we need to grapple with and seek to understand. Okay, next person that I'm going to call on is such a fascinating poet. She even has two names, you know. I don't even know if I should reveal her the name, but yeah, I think she works for the CIA or something. But anyway, publicly in her published work, which has begun to find its way out there, she's Virginia Archer, to ask me why. But I know her Jean Medrick, and we call her Jean. That kind of like spoils in me, okay. All right, my first piece is called, let me get my proper glasses on, Sunday morning with my father. The woollen carpet of the 70s living room, the sideboard tight against the wall, and record player, the 45s in crisp sleeves, stacked high. My father standing middle of the room, ironing board, cradling work shirts and steam. He says, dance for me, Jeannie. Puts on Elvis, Brenda Lee, Shirley Bassey, Ray Charles, all the notes hanging on the Sunday air. And there, his hands outstretched, I stand on his feet as he teaches me intricacies of foxtrot, waltz and jive. My little feet picked up by his, as we whirl around through the sunlight of the large bay windows. Until we both smell burning, the irons imprint now a reminder of our dance. And we laugh, music was there too when my grandmother died. Her darkened flat filled with bottles and records. Pick one, Jeannie, he said. A song to carry a memory, the Jamaican scar baseline heavy with the islands they had both left behind. I carry that reminder in the beat of every lyric I've ever met since. I have stood on stages, the worn wooden boards, carrying the scuff marks of dances new. Lacomet, quadril, widow va, shakshak and taboo beating out rhythms my feet followed as if born to them. My father's feet always somehow under mine like a song of Sunday morning. My second piece is called, Lost luggage is always beaten up by the time you find it again. Lost. Some spare change that the couch swallowed and one gray sock that disappeared between the wash and rinse cycles. Lost. My glasses every 30 minutes that evaporate from the desk and end up on the bathroom counter. Lost. The feel of your thigh under my palm as we drove in the dark. The stars bigger than I've ever seen them because love makes everything larger until it leaves. Found. Pieces of my heart. There's a lot of duct tape and it stutters on some days when it feels cold but it beats. Lost. One dream of home. Found. A way to cling to love. Poetry, stories of corny Netflix princesses by side of the bed. Lost. Love. I want to see you and my rose-colored glasses keep fogging up and I have no more change for the bus and my palms have never felt colder and I don't know when there will be star-filled skies and poetry where you stay. Thank you. We've got to stop doing that. I don't want to say these women poets because that's not really as straightforward as that. Women poets later on in the program they're doing different things but it's fascinating to me that both of the sets of poems that have taken us inside to the soft places, to the vulnerable places, to relationships and so on have been women poets. Jean's a fascinating poet. I like her take on cultural heritage in that first poem. A number of poems deal with cultural heritage in one way or another and in a very nuanced way. Someone like Russ Eisley has his viewpoint very clearly worked out and settled in him as a source of absolute conviction and he's speaking from that. Jean is also working through issues of cultural heritage, her position is more nuanced in a sense like Derek's is a more nuanced position where do we start in relation to all these different elements that have come to make the Caribbean and our ancestors via family and otherwise where do we start in relation to them? A poetry goes into things like that. No simple conclusions but fascinating exploring happening in there. She's she's also really really wonderful on form. She's relentless curious about exploring forms in poetry. She has a kind of a slight humor like in the title of that second one about lost luggage as always or whatever it is and you found it. You can throw in these titles and say and then you need to kind of dwell in the poem a little bit before you see how the title fits in. Again all I will say is the more different aspects facets, differences that they are in the poetic tradition. Once it's well done then the better the tradition is, the richer the more varied it is, the more it appeals to so many different kinds of persons and perspectives and so on. I give thanks for what Jean has brought for us. The next poet that I want to bring on I'll just say his name and then comment afterwards. I don't have to call him a young man he's in his 14 so whatever man. Alvin Asmelius. My grandfather told good stories. He read them from the volume of leaves on the forest floor or seen them in the letters of light on the hanging forest canopy. We always sat in awe like river stones listening to the continual bubble of running water. We will look at him with hands on his face like wrinkles on a tree trunk as our blood warmed under burning glowing wood fire. We watched his tongue curl and the boom was always peeking through the darkness with two fireflies of eyes and the Jogager was always making sounds under the siloed trees. At these times the moon smiled in mockery and the flashing stars were ghosts feeding our fair but we loved these stories though the night was sleepless cause the creatures stayed up till daylight flaring and cabling in the woods. The vendor always whispers a song about life crafted along with Karen Amish in the shadow of ships of loading its cargo of tourists buy one get one nothings for free morning the hem of traffic sound of unpacking before the hectic display in the works of fingers bent in toil pieces of the island buy one get one nothings for free sons held in mother's carry daughters sowing in a hurry dresses hanging in the sea breeze the bright fabric of days decades buy one get one nothings for free grain clouds that threaten gray hairs that stitch time before it is forgotten laced with smiles that open opportunities from madras paths that beg us to remember buy one get one nothings for free buy one sell one nothings for free on packing little tokens of community booths brushed with festive colors painting a theme that tropical is not always easy that toil is not always sweaty buy one get one nothings for free poverty line if you see me below the poverty line I hang on to it but then rich folks walking on it like a tight row piercing me fingers with their spell like stilettos I don't understand how I still hanging on but I must even if at times my hands are too busy to mine children to cook what's left in harbored scabbard to feed them mouths that wide open all day at night crying daddy we hungry be below the poverty line I hang on to it but then poor folks way be down with their put down low in the line with false hopes but how but I'm still hanging on you see me be below the poverty line I'm sure you see me politician master of focus focus you better focus be below the poverty line and meet my situation with a reasonable solution undevelopment first came axes and chainsaws on dressing of one canopy after another buckles and bulldozers reshaped her mouths belching black smoke above nude grounds then high up in the sky in silent salient protest a citizen cuts signed contracts jet lines blueprints colorful necktides sub-food perception SUVs idling AC cooling fossil fuel burnout popular sprites for progress a nation's neglect of the nature of pecuniary priorities this is disappear introduction fossilized in folklore paraded in pantomime monetized memorabilia souvenirs for tourists a chain of islands on a blue chiffon dress worn for dinner parties fertility dominating delegates the frigate migrated no more paradise in parody dilapidated buildings stand a monument to failed schemes weathered by the wind a willing shelter the forests we threw out crawls back in maybe somewhere there's a poet who likes tourism I don't know I haven't come across any of these kinds of tourism I haven't come across any of them yet but hey there's always hope yeah big one maybe I don't know but I don't need to go into detail we can see where the work picks up the echoes that in other poets I mean McDonald began the night on that note and it's picked up here the trivialization of our culture trivialization class monetization of our culture the destruction of nature the dubious schemes and so on kind of a paradise that is always in the distance and failing it's all there what's interesting for me one thing that's interesting for me when back to poetic tradition is certainly that these two of the poems the language of all is like an event of poverty line the language of it is very much the language of the persons who are suffering from this so you feel the perspective from which those kind of feelings come because it's very close to the language in which a vendor itself would speak and so on so that's even when the language gets more majestic like in on development the images themselves are so clear, so photographically clear that they make the impact you know I like the grand pa poem at the beginning and I was trying to post a lot why do I like it and you know what it's because it's so much from a child's point of view you can see some adults looking back but it's so easy and happens so often that when adults look back at a child and so on there's a thing oh god it's gone there's a nostalgia a weakness and a lament and a dirge and that kind of thing and I find this one doesn't really really do that, there may be a little hint of it in the background but basically it's a child telling what this thing was like and I find that's a wonderful balance to the poems which are also necessary too is lamenting the loss of tradition and so on it's a little bit of a child's voice so yeah okay so we're moving on and I think we're more than halfway through our conversation there tonight this poet is fascinating in all kinds of ways so let me just let the man do his thing I've been watching him for years now prisoner parent through bars of dreadlock stung land in front of his face he feels like a prisoner locked out by society from all opportunities for daring to show his affinity to his African race it's as if he's only allowed to be dark in skin tone but not in ethnicity you see while others uplift their nations by pushing their children farther our people are only consumed with winning souls for the old colonial god ostracizing those who won't admit to the god of the former slave master as if they would spoil the children if he didn't abuse them at the rod and so he had been put out on the street by his own mother seeing a monster another son who still loves her he's family too with all the help and disposal to offer calling tough love the torment the sea twin that he suffers he gets called to interviews only to be told that there are no vacancies his qualifications won't help him land a job turning up their noses they fear to see him for who he truly is and that's a better person than any societal snuff now he's a genius for which they will long but will never get to know he's drawn with a revolution on an island prison locked behind bars but not of black metal but of unbending men whose minds are as narrow and whose hearts are as hard and cold as any bars of iron are buried through the barred window of a prison cell at a full moon which seems much of a cataract in the eye of justice blinded from seeing the inequity in arresting our youth whose cell Herb sending them to jail for simply possessing a couple's stress he feels like a political prisoner caught in imperialism's ideological war one who won't renounce his culture and bow to an interdiverse cross so faces persecution under the guise of an unfortunate anti-drug law and freedom teams from this prison will only come after a heavy cause as these are the very dictates of the God in whom we trust he cannot understand why his own people hate him so much nor can he see any justification for all of their disgust but this sadly is what our social conditioning hasn't done to us society denies itself by denying him from making his contribution possibilities have only might have been while he tries not to give in to the demon the cataract of their discrimination is constantly invoking inside of him by affirming that every time they discriminate or otherwise try to be a little off in the remnant of consent it is they who have committed a crime and behind that pinwheel of Mormon it is they not we who are the prisoners trapped within the very narrow confines of their small minds I looked at the poem on the page and it's a peculiar kind of feelings because in one sense the feeling like there's a poem that has like a rant in it you know a raging and so on and yet not quite there's a kind of a dispassionate stepping back a kind of a cool kind of critiquing of the system and what it does to the young person particularly young rastafarians and that comes over in the delivery it's like somewhere halfway between a sermon that's holding itself tight and somewhere between that and an examination of the system it's somewhere between those two and even in the form of it when I looked at it closely I realised there's there's work going on there in a rhyme there's a rhyme scheme that's going on there there the actual rhythmic consistencies that are happening in there and at the same time it's verging towards like spoken word form it's somewhere in between the two you know so I find it an absolutely fascinating piece to really the type of delivery to kind of captures the kind of hybrid nature of it so hey, more different types of work that you have and more favourite traditions that's I want to call on someone who's going to take us into and out of queer territory and into a narrative that is just too too too common I'll say this now and through the veins blood rushes as maybe the blood of the young gushies then peters out saki-bibi-la someone asks a lot while someone else dials the number of a neighbour higher up the road as they anticipate this heartening tragic news soon perhaps a siren will be heard in the distance saki-bibi-la someone asks a lot and they want happening with the youth where and how how do they fix this ah, say mama jodia they have nothing else to do nothing better to do to pass the time boom boom boom the modern music on the other side pounding earthquakeing heart wrenching gunshots ringing out each day as the life of another young soul dreams an underutilised brain a surgeon perhaps perhaps an undiscovered talent perhaps an unfulfilled musician or an artist of sorts remember Ronnie Walter the youth is dying at their own hands as is the culture pailing yesterday alive vibrant alive hopeful alive life in the distance by sailing shop the solo group continues the chanting as shakshak man leans forward then he bends back so the shakshak in his hands the music in his veins the culture in his soul the energy in his body rocked the crowd and Estefan on the banjo and Charlie there with his violin and Simonette beating down the back of a table like the devil after he and Cessame the shuttle bellows while the crowd echoes all the while Sikwin in the centre whining she wastes like it have no tomorrow the music hitting she wastes like a tope fast fast so then slow and when the music hits she again boils Sikwin whining soul the rhythm in she heaps the power in she feed bear on the packed rain star earth she kick a dust through her hands in the air then put them back to the back of she wastes and her eyes bright so like the stars of there with a fire in them like the flames of the pot under out of the place sorry under the pot of dumpling and la cheque cha and the red beans doing a dance in there with all of the local seasonings and the large group of Sikwin bouncing like the crowd now gathered around her and look how her bangles they jiggling they dancing they chanting making sick music like the shut well Cessame like she wastes lines on the chain around she neck pounding on her chest like simonet on the table tapping that goat skin like when your mother give you a good licking cause you were listening and now the music in Sikwin wastes line take you on your right foot start to tap on the floor too and then you lost your shoe the connection to the bear earth sending ripples through you and the life of the earth making your blood rush making your waist time start to revolve like the earth it spin and it spin and it spin and overtaken by the music without and within you in the center too solo dancer joined the line how it stretch so and it bend so and it bend so and it bend until it close and it make a circle within a larger circle as shack shack man bend so and he deep so and Charlie he trust so and the rest of mama I like I that folklore band they sweaty crowd they rock the crowd they move the crowd and the vibrations of the waistline and the drumming of feet carry a message back home to settle quivering hearts and it pass way back behind last year and when it hit waters it make the ocean waves ripple so like your waistline and it travel the waters all the way back to Africa and it tell the story of how our culture not dead and the boom boom boom that you fear the boom boom boom that you hear tonight is only tip and the boys bursting bamboo while it's only turbo and say send the shut well she's singing so well and the rest of the crew having a good time too and sequence to there in the center and there with her together like the leaves of the mango long tree dancing to the music of the cool breeze you think is that the dancing too but you never did know is the music they feeling so why the hell she calls remnants of a dying culture I don't know because they don't feel like that you know it don't it doesn't it's you feel you feel a culture working its way back up and bursting through poem has so much energy and it moves between Korean English and between Korean English and Korean moves in and out between it so you know so seamlessly and such energy so much natural rhythms going on there I wish I understood why she called it that I don't know maybe she's being ironic but yeah I give thanks for that we're three more poets poets coming in to talk to us just kind of what you alluded to that because night is long so without any kind of long preamble and all closely people everyone kind of like the next name of the person but it's sort of just not solution soil but so so you know the form you have to fill out when you're traveling and you they ask if you have anything to declare and all of you here lie and say you have anything you don't have anything in your bag this poem is if you had to tell the truth declaration description of articles mango long sweet mango Julie mango tiffy a hard flap biscuit called Laba Bad name after Barbedas bold that the old women used to make in their home and an old time sweet call comfort Sambo one for my grandfather Samuel Lucian you know you would never think was the same Sambo who didn't go no secondary school who had to carry the stink of fishing a basket on his head walking from grocery to castries the same Sambo who lived for the war but reached too late who eat his foreign and fishing a civilized fight between knife and fork and etiquette on his plate peeling the skin from his avocado pear the same Sambo who part his hard hair like a red sea disagreeing with prophecy who spread salvation like a table cloth over his soul yes the same Sambo to the same eucharistic minister justice of the peace who would have known the way he carries the way he have the presence of a country blown the boys still slamming their dominoes outside of brother's place Basil who used to be a sweet boy in his day starring in the country and western dances used to be a carpenter he say with the best wood in the whole island now sits limp and old slamming dominoes hard on the table with three of his partners wearing their crumpled fedoras push back on their heads Basil has had enough woman in his day has drowned his liver in rum and good company has lived all the life he ever cared to live now he has built a long line of dominoes holding the last one in his hand suspended over the board knowing that on either end of that long white road with its small black dots like a map of all the funerals he has attended it is his turn to play that no matter what any of his partners do they cannot stop him no matter how much his children mother's quarrel tonight a man don't go home until he ready this one is dedicated to my grandfather's brother people from grossing below us bravely alright uncle bravely still comes like he used to do on Sundays calling us his brothers grand children uncle looking from underneath those barbed wire eyebrows that still prohibit his eyes comes again to the step of Sambo's well respected house he doesn't ask for money or for rum he does not even stick his tongue to the side of his mouth like he used to the way that made people call him willow he just comes like the time when he went out to sea and didn't return when everybody thought he had drowned walking through his own absence wanting nothing more than to lift things to feel again the heaviness of life then let go to follow up and down in memory like a cupped heart of a fishing boat beating on the sea circle coming with songs like pink girls are pinkie do pink girls are juke sir ay ay ay ya juke sir oy oy oy ya juke sir and boys wine with girls boy whining with boy and sister Jess with her panty high up in her waist hearing the noise come out in the door of the classroom to watch to see what is the cause of all them little laughter all that snickering like rat feet running in the rafters all that happily ever after after lunchtime and she see a circle and it growing bigger and bigger with children more and more children and Patsy in the middle of the belly of that beast in the belly of the beast of that circle like a navel and she getting on slack and they singing my mother sent me to school to learn my ABC the teacher called me damn fool I call her damn fool back and Patsy goes straight in front of Sheldon and she whine and she whine down to the bottom of sister Jess's morality low low and sister Jess seeing all that contact of flesh put her eyes to the sky not her head back down to reality that she gone in the class when she come down the stairs she spot Patsy with her waist flickering like a stark ass in darkness and give her seven lashes sticking her ass what up just like that Patsy crush up her face like a homework paper and start bawling the place down she throw herself on the ground and sister Jess still hot in her head with her parachute panty didn't yet come back down to earth she are even here she are even here Patsy sucking her teeth chups in loud like nobody business sister Jess was tired and she couldn't believe that little thing that get her tired so but then days and months passing and the circle of her belly her belly getting rounder and she feeling something getting on inside her and like her panty couldn't even cover her navel again the priests and them start to watch her and she bow her head cause she had no and before the circle of her belly could grow she go to her old doctor in the clean white secret of his office and she put her end to all that jambili jambili jukesa in her belly to take out the ring game in there and just so just so sister Jess touchy circle back into her square thank you when you see in her Creole English operating comfortably with that kind of level of imagery you realize the possibilities for it are endless as it should be cause language is language no matter what no matter what the more you put pressure and stress on the language and you come into the poet instinct the more the language respond to you and start to give you things that you never believe would have happened so that is a part of Derek's tradition as well so I go back to the school of flight and things later down when I went into that wonderful one is the way he says it about the light in the world that is a part of the choral bed and it's wonderful to see this particular type of choral that that flag brought it so flourishing and coming in it made the future look bright you know it's wonderful I want to bring in someone from Monropo and we're going back into the Creole language not only that back into the Creole language one last look before we start to before we start to wind things down so cut a long story short Liz Fesal we're watching this before we're watching this before for a while and the Creole poem that she that she's going to do I was doing some workshop stuff and so on in England some couple of years ago and one workshop that I was in was a workshop I already did a translation of work from so I've chosen that the Creole poem that she's going to do gave a basic translation of it working from the basic translation that I did and I spoke about the Creole culture that the poem came from etc and persons who were coming up with their own versions their own English words you know and they come up with their own versions of the kind of core translation that I did and it's a fascinating stuff happening but what it's telling me is that again language is language and once the language is operating at a certain level then it's well it's worthy it can stand up anywhere so let's my first piece is entitled what I am to poetry poetry you are nothing without me without my nonsensical feelings wrapped in the panic clutch with my fist splashing onto the sheet the mimicking ink that spills out my lyrics the thoughts snatched from my cerebrum and the sculpted masterpiece crafted with intense concentration you are nothing without me there is nowhere in this world you'd be if you hadn't slipped your hands up my mind stress as we echoed a soft silhouettes of thoughts and clear in distant corners of the horizon putting down the rhythm of how good it felt when you were loved to me penetrating my thoughts and gyrating inside me my brain filled with words from the high of cocaine implanted and rooted in the blood flowing through my veins becoming addictively insane of poetry you have no idea what you've done to me and while you brainwashed me till I made sense of every standard as they came all over this blank piece of paper it was me carving poetic librettos to a language you and I decipher if it wasn't for the creative thoughts perfected by perfecting you the emotional connection acquired of some complexity seeping through the effortless efforts of this lyrical intervention that you're susceptible to there would be no you there would be no metaphorical finesse to connect my rhythmical sonnets there would be no rhythm in rhymes released as I deliver my poetic bliss there would be no endless echoing of words in the depths of my mind as they flow fruitfully, vivaciously there would be no you without me no me combining delicious ingredients of thoughts eloquently no me expressing expressions jotting emotions incessantly no poetry no turning life to color with intellectual excellence fainted on canvas with the evidence of my presence reflecting the words I utter so poetry poetry you need to accept the inevitable escapade of our destiny that our souls are founded and we cannot function separately poetry you will remain part of me but you are and will always be nothing without me okay so my next piece is a choreo piece it is entitled l'emoimo a silkity a моo nous notrerons nous nous nous tous nos nous nous nous nous nous MM nous nous nous nous nous nous nous nous nous jik mun ki pate konek mwe kai vini, vini asam, pote tut sayoni, mme konglo laivie kawule jik tan iwiwe amush leme, tut hele niku fini, mme konsolei kabwile le siel tun eble apue o simen lapli, tut lapen kai di scowet, tut mal kai jeui, le mwemo i kai passe, mme laivie niku potsini. I think even if you don't understand kweol, sometimes I listen to stuff in other languages too and sometimes it doesn't matter to me that I don't understand what they're saying, it's just the flow and the feelings and so on of it, you know and what I was saying about the deliberate choice that George Goddard made to write a certain type of kweol that is also happening in this, you know. We are bilingual society and poetic tradition has to be unapologetically bilingual, you know. So I'm really, it's a knockout, it's wonderful to see persons taking on the creative task of writing creatively at a good level in the other language that we possess. Before I go to the last point, I need to do something that I meant to do early on after Robert's sharing with you and it is this, we're seeing, we're getting spread before a sense of the width and the variety and the richness and so on of the poetic tradition specifically in Saint Lucia, that poetic tradition is part of a wider literary tradition and this is a good time and place I meant to do earlier to draw attention to the immense work on documenting Saint Lucia writers, Saint Lucia literature, which has been done by John Rochley. There are two bibliographies of Saint Lucia literature covering poetry, prose fiction and prose non-fiction and drama that persons can, you know, you can search these to identify many other Saint Lucia writers, you know. The second bibliography is titled, very simply, Saint Lucia's writing and Saint Lucia's writers and writing and French is a national treasure, it really is. There's another book that he drives me as his person tends to do, he's co-editing with him, Saint Lucia literature and theatre and that's a very, very useful collection of reviews covering more than 50 years of literature and theatre in Saint Lucia and looking at that, you can begin to get a sense of the growth and development in Saint Lucia literature and in theatre, who were the persons, what were the trends, that kind of thing. So, you know, big respect to Robert for doing that kind of work. The anthology is too like Saint Lucia poems and art of Saint Lucia, that includes work from Derek Walcott, it's a very, very good comprehensive collection and the other collections too, that he's been involved in directly or indirectly. A number of these works are available at the Cultural Development Foundation and I urge you to start harassing them, to let them know that you know everything and you want copies of them, thank you very much. Okay, it's time to bring on the last part, so again I'll just let them all speak for itself and then just say one or two things briefly to wind up. This is a poem about growing up with black skin. No, not brown skin, not fair skin, not the lightness belonging to a Shabin, I'm talking dark, rich, melanated, glistening skin that ignited itself in the sun that in spite of me trying to inspire myself to overcome, I could not expunge myself loathing for it, this is not a poem about self-love, this is a poem about the psychological displacement, self-hatred, which started in school with me witnessing kids with skin the same color as mine, get shredded by bullying whilst I stood by and did nothing out of terror of being identified as even uglier than I had already thought that I was, I had already been taught that I was, I did nothing. This is a poem about that time in third form that that girl looked me dead in the eyes as I walked past her, she said to me with the familiar conviction of a Pentecostal pastor, you, you look like a neg, retarded donkey and I was merely walking to class. Do you see this is not a poem about growing up black, this is a poem about growing up with black skin, which is a different thing. This is a different thing for me, it was everything as a kid, it was insecurity and insanity, all at once it was me quickly getting used to being the dark, ugly duckling in every friend. It was those same friends being terrified to look like me, it was my obsession with overpriced lightning creams. It was me giving up an entire tennis scholarship because spots would mean sun and sun would mean rays and rays would mean me risking all blackness. This is a poem about some serious pain, this is a poem about an immense amount of shame because I was immediately disqualified from unspoken beauty contests. Every time I entered a room, everyone else was always light enough to reflect what I could only glisten, listen. This is a poem about years of yearning to take a blade to my skin and scrape away. This is a poem about saving up to go to America because mommy once told me that in the winter my darkness could fade. This is a poem about rage at God because out of all pallets of pain, why would he choose for me this shade? This is also a poem about change, about growth and introspection and interrogation and rejection of colonial inductionation. Gazing into the television at my favorite characters, white boys with wavy blonde hair, white girls with straight brunette hair asking where am I? Where am I? Who am I? Why am I not represented on this screen, on this stage, in this space, holding the TV, looking in, shaking it, asking who am I? This is a poem about listening to my baby sister. Beautiful Carissa is her name. It means grace. Listening to her talk about the same bullying experiences, seeing similar familiar pain, staining her adorable precious little face. This is a poem about me deciding then that this, this grace is enough. I will not stand for this any longer. My baby sister does not deserve to feel any inferior because of a skin color. Colorism is sick. This is a poem about revolt and it took my little sister, yes, it did, looking up at me from a glorious dark skinned face. For me to begin posting my pictures and whatever shade, the sun, the camera, the lens in your eyes decides to capture it. Capture this. Take out your phones and capture this because this is a poem that I never thought that I could perform. This is a poem about me reclaiming my Carissa, my grace. This is a poem about dark skinned, hashtag melanin, hashtag nubian queen, not being a mistake or a fad or a trend. This is a poem about a little dark skinned girl, now a larger dark skinned girl whose confidence is on the mend. This is a poem about dismantling the canonical ideology perpetuated in colonial history. That darkness is synonymous with bad things and that goodness can only be packaged in light. I am good. I am dark and I am good. I am dark and there is lightness in me, not but and. And there is darkness in me too. And lightness and darkness can all coexist. They do. I am living proof. This is a poem about a very personal emancipation story, obviously, but one that belongs to many dark skinned folks. This is a poem for black skinned babies, black skinned infants, black skinned young ladies. You are beautiful and you are loved. Like I said, this is a poem about growing up with black skin. But this is also a poem about self-love. This is a poem about me finally feeling free to fall in love with the sun. For 20 years or so there has been a series of controlled explosions in the poetic tradition here. And those controlled explosions referred to as spoken word. Problematic term, I say a lot of discussions on this happen about it, but this is not a forum for it. All I want to say is that we heard one of those controlled explosions and it was a big one. When young people tell you that something is da bom, they are talking about something like this. It's interesting to see that what is being explored is an identity question or a race of belonging. It's interesting why, because Derek Walcott from early on had to deal with that same thing of race, of belonging. And he worked through to his own answers which took him into this hugely important, significant idea of Caribbean civilization. Khadija's path, as far as I can judge, is a different one she's beaten from her vantage point, her experience. But the thing is that the issue is still here, still here, still happened to be dealt with. It's a private issue and it's a very public issue as well. I don't know what else to say about it than that. I'm glad for the bravery and the poetic craft and everything else that went into exploring it as we saw it happen there tonight. The piece makes me want to shout a big thank you and a big up to the younger generation because it makes the future a bit brighter. We've come to the outer edges of this coral bed of poetry and we've gotten, I hope, a sense of how rich, how varied, how beautiful, how dynamic, how constantly evolving this coral bed of poetry is. It's an amazing tradition that we have here. It really is. For an island of 238 square miles, it's incredible. It really is. I want to thank the organizers, the movers and the shakers, known and unknown in all their various capacities on the village council, on the events committee, special mention of Bialya Francois who inspired and slave drove when necessary persons to make all this happen. And I want to thank you, all the family poets, and I want to thank you because finally, even though some poets will tell you that, family poets don't write for themselves. They write to share. And I'm glad that you're here to share and that you're receiving it in such a generous, warm spirit that I can feel. So, thank you. So, as we prepare to leave, I want to call on two of our ancestors to continue to help us grow this tradition in whatever ways we can, whether it's as appreciative audiences, as persons who are going to try to find the work in the books at CDF, and many of the earliest books talk about whether us as poets and other writers to keep working on our craft and working on our inner and outer exploration I want to call on those two ancestors to help us to do this. And I say that interaction of Derrick and his cultural heritage, which was symbolized in Cessen, but that interaction of him is part of Gift and Craft and the creative heritage that he came from, which he was never shamed of. That's the ground from which we grew up. So, Derrick and Cessen welcomed us into this event, into this occasion, into this head and heart space. And I'm going to call on Derrick and Cessen now to take us home. Thank you very much. For me today, I have forgotten what I was born to do. Zaman, see amannis by the Christ, see births of what love is here. Come back to me by language, come back to me. See so, see the burn, the wet leather rink of the hill down. Evening opens as a text of fireflies in the mountains. The black nights, the landings, the hard clouds, cool in water. This is important water. Important? Important? Water is important. Also, very important. The red rust drunk. The evening, deep as coffee. The morning, powerful. Important coffee. The day is shut, all day in the sun. Many anti-Sulia teach a death today. The first rose is yellow on the ground. Guys from Gauguin, the Pamara guys, the earth purple. The ochre rose, still waiting in the sun from my shadow. Oh, so you is Walker. You is Brandi Branda. You is Alecson. And the small marigolds with their poor sense-hates. And the important corporal in the country's region. Ambitatio, looking towards the thick green slopes of cocoa. The sun that melts in asphalt at noon. The woman in the shade of the breadfruit bent over the leaf of vallum. The loafer was vallum with the sugar, the rosewood. What a feeling of another. The tanker still rubs in the lagoon and rosewood. And around what corner was uttered a single yellow leaf from the frangipane. A tough bark reticent. The wind flowers delivers hard lilies, pungent, recalling Martina or Eunice Lucila, who comes down the steps with the cool side flow as spring water eases over shards of rock in some green funny hole by the road in the mountains. A smile like the whole country. A smell of red-brown wood. For ombuds, a reefing, for oms, southerns, with other generations, all of us will be down in the steps. There is no justification. On to the 13th goal. All right. Oh, Martina's, Lucila's. I'm a wild golden apple that will burst with love for you and your men. Those I've never told enough with my young boys are as crazy with the country. Generations born. Generations born. Where is the non-sensitivity? Say now and this is the end. To the same end.