Speak from Here to There - Tapa blanda

For six months during 2015, two poets known for their capacity to create lyric responses to the complex realities around them, yet poets fully inscribed in both a western literary tradition and other longer traditions that have been marginalized, exchanged poems that were in constant dialogue even as they remained wholly defined and shaped by the details of their own private and public lives. Kwame Dawes’ base was flat prairieland of Lincoln, Nebraska, a mid-American landscape in which he, a black man, felt at once alien and curiously committed to the challenges of finding ?home”; and John Kinsella’s base was in the wide open violently beautiful landscape of western Australia, his home ground, thick with memory and heavy with the language of ecological change, political ineptitude and artistic defiance. E-mail was the bridge. These two poets found themselves in the middle of the swirl of political and social upheavals in their spheres?Dawes contemplating race in the crucible of police killings of black bodies in the US, and Kinsella carrying the weight of contemplating and challenging the injustice of the theft of indigenous land and country in Australia and the terrible treatment of refugees and immigrants in that country. These poems reflect the very different worlds that have shaped these writers, and in the wonderful way that poetry can chart the unpredictable journey towards friendship. They also reflect commonalities: love of family, regret, cricket, art, politics, music, and travel. Indeed, there is much in these poems that provides us with a remarkable accounting of what can occupy and frighten and delight two thinking and creative men who have devoted a great deal of energy and time into making poems in the day to day unfolding of our world. The pleasure that is seeded into the poems is apparent?in poem after poem one senses just how each is hungry and anxious to hear from the other and to then treat the surprises and revelations that arrive as triggers for his own lyric?introspective, risky, complex and formally considered and beautiful. The respect and admiration that these two poets have for each other is apparent in the poems?in the echoes, in the ways in which they stretch one another, and in the ease of language?a kind of poetic honesty that comes from authority, assurance, and curiosity. This was an accidental pairing?an email exchange between an editor and a poet that blossomed into a dare of sorts, and then into a project that came under the brilliant scrutiny of two prolific artists writing at the height of their poetic strength. Speak from Here to There reminds us of the ways that poetry can offer comfort and solace to the poet and how, at the same time, it can supply the ignition for a peculiar creative frenzy that enriches us all.

Kwame Dawes is the author of over thirty books, and is widely recognized as one the Caribbean’s leading writers. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and a Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. His latest book from Peepal Tree Press is Wheels, his sixteenth book of poems. Born in Ghana in 1962, Kwame Dawes moved to Jamaica in 1971 and spent most of his childhood and early adult life in Jamaica. He is a writer of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays. As a poet, he is profoundly influenced by the rhythms and textures of that lush place, citing in an interview his ?spiritual, intellectual, and emotional engagement with reggae music.” Indeed, his book Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius remains the most authoritative study of the lyrics of Bob Marley. Of his seventeen collections of poetry, his most recent titles include Duppy Conqueror(Copper Canyon, 2013); Back of Mount Peace 2009); Hope's Hospice; Wisteria, finalist for the Patterson Memorial Prize; Impossible Flying;(2007); and Gomer's Song;(2007). Progeny of Air (Peepal Tree, 1994) was the winner of the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection in the UK. Other poetry collections includeResisting the Anomie;(Goose Lane, 1995); Prophets;(Peepal Tree, 1995); Jacko Jacobus, (Peepal Tree, 1996); and Requiem;, (Peepal Tree, 1996), a suite of poems inspired by the illustrations of African American artist, Tom Feelings in his landmark book, Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo; Shook Foil; Peepal Tree, 1998), a collection of reggae-inspired poems. His book, Midland, was awarded the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize by the Ohio University Press (2001). Dawes was a winner of a Pushcart Prize for the best American poetry of 2001 for his long poem, "Inheritance." The poem was later selected as part of the anthology celebrating thirty years of Pushcart Prize winners. He has published two novels: Bivouac (2009) and She's Gone (2007), winner of the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Best First Novel. In 2007 he released A Far Cry From Plymouth Rock: A Personal Narrative. His essays have appeared in numerous journals and periodicals including Bomb Magazine, The London Review of Books, Granta, Essence, World Literature Today, The Washington Post, USA Today, and Double Take Magazine. For several years Dawes was a regular columnist on poetry for the State Newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina. Dawes is also the editor of many anthologies including: Seeking: Poetry and Prose Inspired by the Art of Jonathan Green(University of South Carolina Press, forthcoming, 2013) Twenty: South Carolina Poetry Fellows (Hub City, 2006); So Much Things to Say: 100 Calabash Poets (Akashic Books, 2010; Jubilation: 50 Poets Celebrating Jamaican Independence (Peepal Tree, 2012), Wheel and Come Again: An Anthology of Reggae Poems (Peepal Tree/ Gooselane Editions 2005); The Chemistry of Color (Stepping Stone Press, 2008) A Bloom of Stones: A Tri-Lingual Anthology of Haitian Poems After the Earthquake (Peepal Tree Press, 2012) Hold Me to an Island: Caribbean Place (Peepal Tree 2012): An Anthology of Writing, Home is Where: An Anthology of African American Poetry from the Carolinas (Hub City, 2011), and Red: Contemporary Black Poetry (Peepal Tree Press, 2010). In 2009, Dawes won an Emmy for LiveHopeLove.com, an interactive site based on Kwame Dawes's Pulitzer Center project, HOPE: Living and loving with AIDS in Jamaica. It has won other accolades including a People's Voice Webby Award, and was the inspiration for the music/spoken word performance Wisteria & HOPE which premiered at the National Black Theatre Festival in North Carolina. In 2011, Dawes reported on HIV AIDS after the earthquake in Haiti and his poems, blogs, articles, and documentary work were a key part of the post-earthquake Haiti reporting by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting that won the National Press Club Joan Friedenberg Award for Online Journalism. Voices of Haiti was released in Ju