Kamu Brathwaite

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.