I taught a little Kamu Brathwaite in my intro to poetry class today. Mostly we listened to to Kamu Brathwaite on Leonard Schwartz's Cross Cultural Poetics.
I was especially fascinated in hearing words as percussive.
Some notes from listening:
- god created the islands with a stone skip.
- "it" as percussive
- find vocabulary IN one another
- received language is sterile and speaks in abstractions. We need a transformation of received language
- poetry as a net
- trigger out the pentameter
- nation language as spirit possession
- language a nation
- American poetry and the use of the pause
- translation from American versus translation from English
- fragmented at the moment of creation. Wholeness is not a recovery project
- transgress the sedate rhythm
- word is action and discovery simultaneously
We going to discuss Aime Cesaire for Friday's class and Negritude. Jerome Rothenberg's Poems for the Millennium is one of a kind. I am learning a lot from teaching with it.