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 cliche 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 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 . . . 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 the setting and mood of the greatest little festival in the greatest little village in the greatest little country in the world, and this anthology is what the festival would look like were all 100 poets who have read at Calabash over the years to come together on a late-May weekend to read. So Much Things to Say is a unique gathering of a group of poets who represent at least one reckoning of the place of contemporary poetry in 2010.

Contributors include Robert Pinsky, Derek Walcott, Elizabeth Alexander, Amiri Baraka, Martin Espada, Terrance Hayes, Valzyna Mort, Sonia Sanchez, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Patricia Smith, Natasha Trethewey, Staceyann Chin, and 88 others.

Author: Colin Channer, Kwame Dawes
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Akashic Books, Ltd.
Published: 07/01/2010
Pages: 275
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9781936070077


Review Citation(s):
Multicultural Review 12/01/2010 pg. 54

About the Author
Kwame Dawes was born in Ghana and raised in Jamaica. He is the author of many books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, criticism, and drama. His debut novel, She's Gone (Akashic), won the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. He is Distinguished Poet in Residence at the University of South Carolina where he directs the SC Poetry Initiative.

Colin Channer is the founder and artistic director of the Calabash International Literary Festival Trust. He was born in Jamaica, but has lived in the United States since his late teens. Known primarily as a novelist, he is the Newhouse Visiting Professor in Creative Writing at Wellesley College near Boston, Massachusetts.