Kwame Dawes Talks Calabash 10
www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20100509/ent/ent4.html

Calabash: Jamaica Comes to Brooklyn (Wall Street Journal blog)
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/04/26/calabashs-first-ten-years-jamaica-comes-to-brooklyn/

AS A LITTLE ASIDE:
"This year's winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry is Rae Armantrout for her book, "Versed."

The Pulitzer board called the collection, which also won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award, "striking for its wit and linguistic inventiveness, offering poems that are often little thought-bombs detonating in the mind long after the first reading."

Here's a poem from the book:

Scumble

What if I were turned on by seemingly innocent words
such as "scumble," pinky," or extrapolate?"

What if I maneuvered conversation in the hope that
others would pronounce these words?

Perhaps the excitement would come from the way the
other person touched them lightly and carelessly with
his tongue.

What if "of" were such a hot button?

"Scumble of bushes."

What if there were a hidden pleasure
in calling one thing
by another's name?

Ms Armantrout describes an aspect of her poetry thus:

...It's about a sort of erotics of language, I suppose, the real pleasure that you can take in language that is almost sexual or at least sensual, and also about the way we like to -- we like metaphor, we like to replace one thing with another. We like to talk about one thing in terms of another. What if there were a hidden pleasure in calling one thing by another's name?

Here is another of her poems...It was written after a bout she was having with cancer..." it takes material from the Egyptian book of the Dead. It's a prose poem...

"On your Way."

On your way to The sea of Reeds you will meet the Soul Devouring Demon.
You've heard it all before and you believe it. Why not? Why would they lie?
You must wear the beetle amulet to avoid being consumed. But it's also true that you can't really know until it's actually happening.
So you have a sort of knowledge, which even if later confirmed in each detail, is still not real knowledge.
He will weigh your heart and, if it's too heavy, you'll be swallowed up. What is this extra element that is mingled in when you arrive at the ordained spot?

Source & Video Interview with Rae Armantrout
www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/entertainment/poetry/

Video Interview (Youtube) with Kwame Dawes
www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_aV3DZJ75A

Kwame Dawes: Tips for Making the Local ...Global
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ReoVB-s4SI&feature=related

Kwame Dawes Interview: The Art of Collaboration:
www.nyu.edu/calabash/vol5no1/0501115.pdf

Feels like Calabash begin ah-redy, nuh?

Resource: Poetry Foundation
www.poetryfoundation.org/

Calabash Poets...Observer Article

www.jamaicaobserver.com/entertainment/Calabash-2010-is-on-and-the-poets-are-comi ng_7651411