Tampa & the Republican National Convention



Hickson Park, Tampa



The Republican National Convention (RNC) is in town: Tampa. If you live in this city, or any city that hosts a major national, or international event, there are mixed feelings. For a little time, however brief, your city is in the spotlight. You want it to look well. Some 50,000 to 70,000 visitors will descend on your city for a week. There are all sorts of concerns. There will be protests. There were will be traffic tie-ups. There will be speeches and presences—potentially the next president of one of, if not, the most important nations in the world—people who will go on to make a mark globally. And then there is the presence of a hurricane. School is cancelled. Work goes on: business as usual. Dark clouds hover: Rain and wind and flooding. Will you not see this city as we see it, as we love it, as we would have you love it?

A special place for many is the Hickson Park, on the Hillsborough River across from the University of Tampa, perhaps, the finest legacy of the last Mayor, Pam Iorio. A slice of Tampa in the following poem, recently published in South Asian Ensemble (Toronto).

HICKSON PARK: TAMPA ON THE RIVER


I want to take you
where white lights
glow on deleafed winter
oaks like icicles,
where the dark river
floats a rubber slipper
inland – away from the bay
invading our souls,
where water erupts
under spotlights
like our love once
I want to take you
where laughter fills the night.




The Hillsborough River and spires of the University of Tampa, acorss from Hickson Park

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South Asian Ensemble

In a time when the Internet has changed how we do things, when people are in love with a love of the latest digital gadgetry—tablets, i-pads, kindles, spindles, whatever—when “everyone is a publisher” on the web, it is delightful to see the rise of a print journal. Not any print journal, but a literary print journal, South Asian Ensemble: A Canadian Quarterly of Arts, Literature and Culture.

South Asian Ensemble, already into its fourth volume—a double issue Spring/Summer 2012, is very fine and eclectic journal. I am reading both this issue and the previous double issue (Autumn 2011/Winter 2012). The mix of pieces from writers with a South Asian connection from the sub-continent, Canada, the USA and writers of Indian origin by way of the Caribbean and South America is fascinating: the cutting edge poetry of Viswanauth Prasad Tiwari in a fine translation from the Hindi, to an essay on the Roma in two novels, to a brilliant essay in the current issue on poetics by Ajmer Rode, “Poetry and the Sacred.”

The Vedic poets, or the rishis as they were called, did not work out their poems laboriously, that is how the belief goes. They actually ‘saw’ complete poems or had darshana of them and simply transcribed them. That is why they were regarded as seers…their minds were not prisoners of long literary traditions (as the poet Haribhajan Singh notes). Every time they sat down to write, their minds were ready to experience afresh, their spirits free to cherish the new.

South Asian Ensemble is edited by Gurdev Chauhan in Toronto and co-edited by Rajesh Sharma in Patiala (India). The journal website: http://www.southasianensemble.com/. Both Chauhan (a writer and poet) and Sharma (Professor of English at Punjab University) are to be highly commended for putting together and editing this fine journal. 

Beyond Sangre Grande: Caribbean Writing Today

Beyond Sangre Grande: Caribbean Writing Today
An Anthology of Caribbean Literature Edited by Cyril Dabydeen
www.tsarbooks.com

Caribbean literature has always been exciting and diverse, including over the past decades some of the world’s most highly regarded writers. Beyond Sangre Grande brings together a contemporary selection in English from some of the key writers living in Canada, the US, and the UK, as well as various countries of the Caribbean. Reflecting a changing world, and admitting diverse cultural influences and generational differences, these writers maintain a distinct Caribbean-ness in their acute historical awareness and in the cadences and rhythms of their language and include:

OPAL PALMER ADISA • EDWARD BAUGH • KAMAU BRATHWAITE • MARINA BUDHOS CHRISTIAN CAMPBELL • WILLI CHEN • AUSTIN CLARKE • MERLE COLLINS • MADELINE COOPSAMMY • CYRIL DABYDEEN • DAVID DABYDEEN • FRED D’AGUIAR • RAYWAT DEONANDAN • BERNADETTE DYER • ZEE EDGELL • RAMABAI ESPINET • BRENDA FLANAGAN • HORACE GODDARD • ANSON GONZALEZ • LORNA GOODISON • KARL GORDON • CLAIRE HARRIS • NALO HOPKINSON • PETER JAILALL • ANTHONY KELLMAN VLADIMIR LUCIEN • JOY MAHABIR • LEELAWATTI MANOO-RAHMING • IAN MCDONALD MARK MCWATT • PAMELA MORDECAI • N OJI MZILIKAZI • ELIZABETH NUNEZ • ELLY NYLAND • SASENARINE PERSAUD • GEOFF PHILPS • VELMA POLLARD • JENNIFER RAHIM SAM SELVON • OLIVE SENIOR • H NIGEL THOMAS • DEREK WALCOTT • MARK JASON WELCH

UNCLOSED ENTRANCES: Selected Poems

Unclosed Entrances: Selected Poems is one of the latest publications in the Guyana Classics Library. Peter Nazareth of the University of Iowa, in his fifteen-page introductory essay underlines the value of this volume to the literature of Guyana and to the literature of the Americas. In exploring Yogic Realism in this book, the poet’s term for his aesthetics, Nazareth hints at the contrasts and similarities with the magical realist writers of South America such as: Wilson Harris. The poetry in this volume spans more than two decades. Selections come from Demerary Telepathy, Between the Dash and the Comma, The Wintering Kundalini, A Surf of Sparrows’ Songs, The Hungry Sailor, A Writer Like You and In a Boston Night.

The Guyana Classics Library was launched in 2010 with the republication of Sir Walter Raleigh’s The Discoverie of Guiana, which was first published in 1595. The Classics Library is a collaboration of the University of Warwick (Caribbean Studies Centre) and the Government of Guyana and is published at the Caribbean Press (Warwick & Georgetown)

Tampa Launch of Lantana Strangling Ixora

New Tampa Regional Library - November 5, 2011. Reading from Lantana Strangling Ixora

There is no Metaphor for Murder

From The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka

34. ATTACKS FROM THE AIR

This was not what the Vedantists
Had in mind when they flew
Into the skies, their Sanskrit scribes
And engineers recording to scale
Replicas Germans created before
And during The War. Before those
Wrights. This was not what the Wrights
Contemplated before Kitty Hawk.
There is no metaphor for murder.


35.

The casualties at Gettysburg are unsecret.
They were combatants. Not a civilian father
Having his first coffee break of the morning.
Somebody’s mother is somebody’s daughter
Just looking up from the morning numbers.
Smoke. Last words on a cell phone.
Today you ride a bike. You live in Toronto.
Today you ride a bike. You live in Tampa.
Today you always take the stairs.
How many bombs in Vietnam, or Japan?
One in Hiroshima. Just one in Nagasaki.
The count? You will never be popular.
Why is one more sacred that 3,000, than
40,000 Tamils disappeared in two weeks.
There is no metaphor for murder.

from The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka

from The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka

31. Le Repentir

There, with queen palms roaring
They walled you in. Tombs and septic
Tanks look alike. Worms feast in both.
Who gyrates in graveyards? Jumbies
And poets. Both celebrate satanic verses.

©Sasenarine Persaud