Excerpt from SO MUCH THINGS TO SAY

From the “Introduction”

Imagine a night of a hundred poets reading their work to an audience of intensely engaged, responsive, and lively people—say three thousand of them. They are a loud bunch when it is time to make noise, but they are silent as congregants at prayer when the poets’ language entrances them. Imagine the reading taking place under a tent pitched on a grassy lawn that overlooks the Caribbean Sea. Imagine that this is not the north coast of Jamaica, with its cliché of white sands and coconut trees, a place glutted with cruise ship passengers and bewildered tourists; imagine instead a rugged coastline, a landscape full of the kind of character we find in the weather-beaten faces of wise old folk; imagine fishermen, farmers, ordinary workers, schoolchildren, and traveling people moving around as if they have been in this place forever and as if they all belong. Imagine the sun setting, imagine the scent of curried goat and frying fi sh wafting through the air; imagine the heat, imagine the cool tongue of wind off the sea; imagine a stage like an ancient shrine with a podium artfully pieced together with bamboo, strips of still-green wood, leaves, twine, and shells. Imagine one hundred poets, some whose names you know and some you have never heard of, stepping onto the stage, opening their mouths and hearts, and singing out poems of great variety, complexity, beauty, and passion. At once you are in a timeless place in which the spoken word represents an incantatory ritual that creates and affi rms community, and yet you are in a deeply modern world where people are contending with wars, computers, airplanes, and the rapid nature of communication—people from all over the globe are connected in this moment and strangers rapidly become familiar, almost friends in an instant. Imagine laughter and tears, imagine sighs of familiarity and\ moans of pain, imagine tragedies enacted in the words that move through the shelter of the tent; imagine a poem like a fist, or a sharply painful open palm, or the tender caress of fingers, or the firm grasp of a handshake. Imagine stories dropping like seeds into the ground and growing rapidly and wildly all around you.

This is what a poetry reading at the Calabash International Literary Festival is like, and this event has welcomed a wide range of poets over ten years, who, when listed together, represent at least one reckoning of the place of contemporary poetry in 2010. Poets from across the world, some with awards in their satchels, some with fancy imprints under their names, others with the pure joy of seeing their work in a published book, still others with just their words to share; all of them gathering as if to speak for the first time; all of them stepping to the mic and sharing their work with power and grace. Usually, by Sunday evening, the festival which starts on a Friday night is over for the year. It will take another eleven months of planning, inviting, and reimagining the festival to bring it to life again. In this new anthology, however, In this new anthology, however, readers get a taste of what the festival offers year after year, and it does so in two ways: It features poets who have read at Calabash, some seventy-five of them, over nine years. It also features the work of up-and-coming Jamaican poets who are fellows of the Calabash Writer’s Workshops that take place in Jamaica year-round.