Commentaries - October 2017

When poems travel

Trans-. The prefix means “across,” “beyond,” “through.” It appears at the beginning of words that signify motion and change: “transportation,” “tranformation,” and of course “translation.” In 1830 Goethe captured just one kind of motion and change brought about by translation when he remarked to Johann Peter Eckermann: “I do not like to read my Faust any more in German, but in this French translation all seems again fresh, new, and spirited” (trans. John Oxenford).

David Dabydeen on Coolitude

A Coolitude interview

David Dabydeen from Peepal Tree.

Critic, writer, and novelist David Dabydeen was born in 1955 in Berbice, Guyana, moving to England with his parents in 1969. He read English at Cambridge University, gained a doctorate at University College London in 1982, and was awarded a research fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford. David Dabydeen is Director of the Centre for Caribbean Studies and Professor at the Centre for British Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. He is also Guyana’s Ambassador-at-Large and a member of UNESCO’s Executive Board.

Call for papers: Extreme Texts

Jacket2 is seeking short scholarly articles, essays, belletristic documents, creative responses, and ephemera concerned with “Extreme Texts.” This call welcomes writing on, about, and as “Extremity” in its multifarious meanings and implications, from the material to the ideological, from the word’s connotations as “catastrophe” or “limit event” to its denotation as “the farthest point” something can go.

Herman Beavers, the tundra of yes

A review of 'Obsidian Blues'

Herman Beavers reading from 'Obsidian Blues' at the Kelly Writers House, September 2017

Obsidian Blues, to quote Herman Beavers quoting Ralph Angel, is itself “a still life and a way to get home again.” The poems in this powerful collection often present still lives of stilled lives. The speaker can see “Apples. / The way the light / betrays them” in a poem,“Obsidian Blues 43,” about a guitarist whose stringy wail (“strings judding like a systolic ghost swaggering”) sings a song of variation that reqpeatedly requires renaming. One such tentative title is “Still Life with Guitar and Heartstrike”; another is “Landscape with Skull and Banjo.”