What's it Take [by Richard Garcia]

When we moved to Charleston SC from Los Angeles, I wondered, what does it take to be a poet around here? We made the rounds of local poetry readings and I was a little surprised. In the first five or so readings we attended, the poet would read their poems—good ones—and than pick up an instrument and proceed to sing their songs. The first was Paul Allen. He is one hell of a poet. He has one poem, a Southern gothic childhood reminiscence, “The Man with the Hardest Belly,” from his book American Crawl, that is classic.

He also writes folksy country-western songs and plays guitar. He sounds pretty good, and I’ve heard that when he has a band behind him he is even better. The Poetry Society of South Carolina has its readings in a church. One night a poet was reading and accompanying his songs on a dulcimer. He happened to strum a couple of notes of Amazing Grace, and quite unself-consciously, the entire audience started to sing. Then there was Tom House, who also read his poems and then sang his songs. He has that ‘high lonesome’ Appallachian twang that gives you the shivers. He sang one rather spooky satire, "I’m in Love with Susan Smith.”

Next we have Kurt Lamkin. Kurt went to West Africa to study kora with the griots.

He recites and sings, and partly improvises, his poems while playing an amplified kora. He is a master performance artist in the African bardic tradition.

And of course there is Kwame Dawes, who sometimes breaks into song during a reading, or has a stage full of musicians jamming to his poetry. And why not—he was the lead singer of a world-class reggae band.

Incidentally, Kwame has a beautiful inaugural poem. When I first read it, it seemed rather prosy, until I realized I was reading a chain of sonnets. I think the public poem is hard to write, hard to strike that balance between a work of art and public rhetoric or pronouncement—but Kwame did it—speaking of music, listen to his poem.

Sometimes I wish I could see a festival of all these singer-poets. I imagine it under the oaks, on a warm summer night in June, here in Charleston.

Comments

[Molly Gaudry]

Hi Richard,

I'm glad you're guest blogging. I think you should organize that festival. It would be great.

Molly

[Rick Bursky]

Richard

Looking forward to a week of your poetic thoughts here on Best American Poetry!

Rick

[Judith Terzi]

"Sometimes I wish I could see a festival of all these singer-poets. I imagine it under the oaks, on a warm summer night in June, here in Charleston."

Definitely the start of a prose poem, Richard! Bring a little of So. Carolina to L.A the next time you're in town.I'd love to read with a kora playing.

[Eric Nelson]

I'm teaching a summer school class called Flash Prose -- prose poem, short short fiction, brief nonfiction -- so your first post was especially interesting to me. My students and I began the summer term trying to draw distinctions between the three genres, which we could do in very broad strokes, especially if we focused our definition of prose poem on its French symbolist/surrealist beginnings and subsequent absurdist/fabulist development. But making distinctions got more difficult when we read more realistic prose poems, less realistic fiction, and more "creative" nonfiction. At this point -- a few days from the end of the term -- we've pretty much abandoned trying to categorize short prose pieces and focus on what makes the pieces effective writing -- the language, music, tension, insight. This is a new course and I wasn't sure how it would work out, but it's been fun and I'm looking forward to teaching it again next summer. By the way, we read a few Ricahrd Garcia prose poems, including "The Moon" and "In the Year 1946."

[rg]

Willows Wept Review is an online journal that has an interesting take on prose/poem. Their submission page has links to stories that illustrate what they have in mind. Sort of fabulist/lyrical prose.

http://willowsweptreview.blogspot.com/2008/09/submission-guidelines.html

There is a new prose poem anthology, An Introduction to the Prose Poem- Brian Clements & Jamey Dunham, that has a very wide approach to the genre. There is some good stuff in it, and introductions about each mode of prose poem.

rg

[Karen Greenbaum-Maya]

What a good face and fine-tuned mind Kwame Dawes has, and how I would have liked to have heard him read this poem at the Inauguration.