So Much Things to Say: 100 Poets from the First Ten Years of the Calabash International Literary Festival

by Colin Channer, Colin Channer (Editor)

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

Imagine a night of a hundred poets reading their work to an audience of intensely engaged, responsive, and lively people. Imagine the reading taking place under a tent pitched on a grassy lawn that overlooks the Caribbean Sea. Imagine the sun setting, imagine the scent of curried goat and fried fish 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 such variety, complexity, beauty, and passion.

This is what a poetry reading at the Calabash International Literary Festival is like, and this new anthology provides readers a taste of what this festival offers year after year.

Edited by Kwame Dawes and Colin Channer, two of the founders of the festival, this is an exciting example of Calabash's commitment to create a festival that is diverse, inspirational, earthy, and daring each May. This anthology is at once a celebration of ten years of a remarkable literary event as it is a gesture of love to seek ways to continue to fund and support this festival for the future. All profits from this publication will go toward the running of the festival, which remains free and open to the public.

Genres: Poetry

275 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2010

Reviews

[Nicholas Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent anthology of poetry, full of diversity in style and form. 'Excellent' because it features some of the best poets and poems to come in contact with the Calabash Literary Festival held at what became known as Calabash Bay along the beautiful shoreline of rural Jamaica. As a contributor to the anthology and a fellow of the trust, I have literally been to the festival to witness the merger of music, poetry and nature as the sight and sound of the sea clash with the human voices and instruments on the stage close by.

The diversity includes the layout and content of the book. The book is creatively sectioned in three parts in accordance with the size of the poems. Interestingly, the shorter poems are appropriately and witily called "tikki tikki", a Jamaican word for small. A neat move from the Jamaican editors, Kwame Dawes and Colin Channer, who are themselves famous writers on the North American literary scene.

Another aspect of the diversity of the text is the nationality and notoriety of the poets involved. There are poets not only from Jamaica and the Caribbean, but also from the USA, the UK and other places. As said before, the book includes poets associated with the festival in some way, whether through fellowship as I am, or invitation, as with some of the more known names.

This is another beauty of the book: it is organized not by theme or notoriety of the names but by length of the poems, as said before. This allows every contribution its own merit as emerging poet and famous poet often appear next to each other. The sections are also organized alphabetically. This allows a relatively new voice, like myself, to appear right after more famous names like Elizabeth Alexander and Chris Abani(section 2). Other known names are: Derek Walcott, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Edward Baugh, Mervyn Morris, Meena Alexander, Martin Espada and many more. Some of the newer names are: Christian Campbell, Kei Miller, Ishion Hutchinson, Ann Margaret Lim, Millicent Graham and Tanya Shirley-all awarded and recognized with more than one book out on the international poetry scene.

This anthology is indeed wonderful. Creatively selected and organized as a celebration of the ten-year anniversary of the Calabash Literary Festival, it allows emerging poets to be featured with famous poets while showcasing the talents that have been associated with this festival dubbed "a mini Woodstock by the sea". As is often a reality of the ethnicity of the Caribbean, this work is a diverse mixture of various 'races' of modern 'colored' poetry.

[kylajaclyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is divided into four sections: small, medium, large, and extra-large, each referring to the length of the poems in said chapter. Sadly, I did not enjoy any poem in the "extra-large" chapter. Most teachers that I have had for creative writing and poetry workshop all preach the benefits of brevity. Indeed, a skilled poet can say more with less. We were required to read most of this book for my Poetry Workshop class. My teacher, Tim Seibles, a National Book Award finalist for 2012, has one poem in this anthology called "The Last Poem About Race." I know I won't sound objective since he is my teacher, but his poem was one of the better ones in this collection. Besides the "Extra-Large" section, I also disliked many of the dialect poems - since the festival that this book is compiled from takes place in Jamaica, there are quite a few poems in Jamaican dialect. Those were not my cup of tea. But for all the poems I did not like, there were at least five that I did. "Dogma" was fantastic, as well as Natasha Trethewey's "Vespertina Cognito." Those are the ones I remember off the top of my head, but plenty more stood out as exceptional. If you are a writer (of poetry or anything else) than you need to be reading. This poetry collection is not a bad place to start or continue your journey.