Commentaries - September 2017

Rochelle Owens: From “Solarpoetics” (continued) 12-15

[Writes Owens of her new masterwork: “In the order of the letters of the alphabet I am making use in these poems of a system of mental relations which by the act of writing becomes the poem, a cosmic meditation.”]

[Writes Owens of her new masterwork: “In the order of the letters of the alphabet I am making use in these poems of a system of mental relations which by the act of writing becomes the poem, a cosmic meditation.”]

 

Vulnerable Flesh Eater

 

12

Coolitude: Theoretical underpinnings

The term Coolitude is derived from “coolie,” a word originating in Tamil that means “laborer” with the implication that the labor provided is physical in nature. The British started taking Indians into their colonies in 1838, a trade that lasted until 1917, created to provide labor needed in sugar plantations after slavery was abolished. Its roots are in labor and works to reclaim an identity that acknowledges histories of labor and the British labor trade in the colonies. This type of movement that faces Asia from spaces where overseas Indians live counters common wisdom that holds that fictions of “race” create identity.

 

kuli nam dharaya

Natalwa me ai ke

bhajan karo bhaya

hath me cambu

kandh me kudari

pardesita ghare jai

 

They’ve given you the name “coolie”

A century after the end of Indian indenture

An introduction to the scope of this project

Indentured Laborers 1897, Trinidad

This year marks a century since the system that displaced over three million South Asians ended. From 1838–1917, the British, after slavery was abolished, transported 341,600 indentured laborers from India to British Guiana. Worldwide they displaced 3.5 million Indians who they recruited to work sugar plantations in the Caribbean, South Africa, Réunion, Ile de Maurice, Fiji, and South America.

Some of the migrants, the girmitiyas, the kantrákis, the coolies, chose to sail across the seas into a life of new adventure.

Augusto de Campos wins 2017 Janus Pannonius Grand Prize for Poetry

Brazilian poet Augusto de Campos is this year’s winner of the Janus Pannonius Grand Prize for Poetry, according to an announcment from the Hungarian Pen Club announcet. The decision was announced during the Quasimodo Poetry Competition of Balatonfüred, Hungary, on Friday, September 8, 2017. Here is the press release: 

Peter Minter: 'Everything is Speaking,' a new poem with author's note & biography

PETER MINTER is an Australian poet, poetry editor, and writer on poetry and poetics. His books include the award-winning Empty Texas and blue grass, and his poetry has been widely published and translated internationally, most recently in his book In the Serious Light of Nothing (Chinese University Press Hong Kong, 2013). He was a founding editor of Cordite poetry magazine, coedited the pioneering anthologies Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets and the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, and has been the poetry editor for leading Australian journals Meanjin and Overland. He shares Aboriginal, Scottish, and English ancestry, and teaches Indigenous Studies, Australian Literature, and Creative Writing at the University of Sydney.

I go to sleep near the infants

breathing bodies, a small herd of nature

in layers of animation, the unknown

unfolding identical powers

delivered through a gateway of hearts

at body temperature. In a nest

of sleeping birds, you’re the bird

you’re the baby, I can hear you dreaming