More Fiya , livre ebook

Canongate Books

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

141 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

In this blistering anthology, poet, editor and DJ Kayo Chingonyi brings together a selection of exceptional Black British poets. This is his dream mixtape featuring a cross-generational span of current poets extending and inhabiting the spirits of the ancestors. Following in the tread of Lemn Sissay's The Fire People, More Fiya aims to lodge in the mind of its readers for a lifetime, radiating to touch the lives of many. Including work from: Jason Allen-Paisant, Raymond Antrobus, Janette Ayachi, Dean Atta, Malika Booker, Eric Ngalle Charles, Dzifa Benson, Inua Ellams, Samatar Elmi, Khadijah Ibrahiim, Keith Jarrett, Anthony Joseph, Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa, Vanessa Kisuule, Rachel Long, Adam Lowe, Nick Makoha, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Momtaza Mehri, Bridget Minamore, Selina Nwulu, Gboyega Odubanjo, Louisa Adjoa Parker, Roger Robinson, Denise Saul, Kim Squirrell, Warsan Shire, Rommi Smith, Yomi Sode, Degna Stone, Keisha Thompson, Kandace Siobhan Walker, Warda Yassin, Belinda Zhawi

Informations

Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	19 mai 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781838855314
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0680€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2022 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2022 by Canongate Books
Introduction copyright © Kayo Chingonyi, 2022 All poems © the individual poets, 2022, aside from those listed here
The right of the editor and contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83885 530 7 eISBN 978 1 83885 531 4
For those who come after, in love and fellowship
Contents
Kayo Chingonyi
Introduction
Jason Allen-Paisant
Maple Grove
Learning Birdsong
Tree Dreaming
Raymond Antrobus
The Acceptance
And That
For Cousin John
Dean Atta
No Ascension
Signet
Two Black Boys in Paradise
Janette Ayachi
The Lovers
QuickFire, Slow Burning
Worshipping Grief
Dzifa Benson
For the Love of Hendrik de Jongh, Drummer from Batavia
Ms Hipson, the tall Dutchwoman, dreams of dancing with a man tall enough to make her feel delicate
Ms Sidonia married twice and retired a wealthy woman
Malika Booker
Points of this Reckoning
Discordant Mourning
Golden Grove
Eric Ngalle Charles
Mboa Mi: ‘My Country’
Heroes
A Song for Freedom
Inua Ellams
The Vanishing
Of Howling Wolves
A Boy / Twice
Samatar Elmi
[Etymologies]
The Fear
Coda
Khadijah Ibrahiim
Herman Avenue Hand-Cart Woman
Bath Prescription 1
Bush Craft Prescription
Keith Jarrett
My mother sings of how she got her education
Scalp
Nor the Arrow That Flies in the Day
Anthony Joseph
Naming
Wire, God of Wallerfield
House Party, Mt Lambert, 1978
Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa
Bitch Ghazal
Hurricanes Also Taught Us How to Be Sophisticated When Things Get Messy
Slow Whine
Vanessa Kisuule
Auntiehood
Blessings
On Freezing A Dead Son
Rachel Long
Your Daddy Ain’t Rich
As If
Adam Lowe
Desire
Aftermath
Once We Were Wolves
Nick Makoha
An Essay on Man
Pythagoras Theorem
The Long Duration of a Split Second
Karen McCarthy Woolf
from Unsafe
Momtaza Mehri
A Comparative History of Fire
hooyos
Even on Canvas, Oilfields Burn
Bridget Minamore
Golden Shovel for My People
Catching Joke
Sestina for Kara Walker
Selina Nwulu
A History of Banning
Mango Tree
When the Party Is Over
Gboyega Odubanjo
Dip
Arrangements
Man
Louisa Adjoa Parker
There are moments I forget
You’re
Housewarming
Roger Robinson
Gold
Aba Shanti Soundsystem
Denise Saul
The Room Between Us
Instructions For Yellow
The Viewing
Kim Squirrell
Walking Home from School
Healing
I Want to Write a Poem About Togetherness
Warsan Shire
Backwards
Midnight in the Foreign Food Aisle
Rommi Smith
from Palette for a Portrait of Little Richard
Yomi Ṣode
On Fatherhood: Proximity to Death
[Insert Name]’s Mother: A Ghazal
On Fatherhood: Envy
Degna Stone
over
Another Tongue
How to Unpick the Lies?
Keisha Thompson
Some Have Beaten Suffering
The Concrete Square off Tib Street in May
Number 2020
Kandace Siobhan Walker
Art Pop
Eye Contact
Sugar, Sugar, Honey, Honey
Warda Yassin
Swift
Treetop Hotel
Miss Yassin
Belinda Zhawi
Tchaikovsky’s January
Runyengetero
This Body Wants What It Wants
Contributors
Acknowledgements
Permission Acknowledgements
Introduction
W HEN I WAS SEVENTEEN , I joined a workshop group run by the writer development agency Spread the Word and the live literature production company Apples and Snakes. The purpose of these fortnightly workshops was to foment poetic practice and encourage kinship between writers. There was the sense of an open syllabus inclusive not just of the practices of versification but also the matter of being in the world and flourishing in a context unfit for black people to flourish (as human beings let alone literary artists). Community (one’s commitment to and indivisibility from it) was the guiding ethos.
This sat in stark contrast to the machinations of the literary establishment at that time which I can best illustrate with an anecdote. At this early stage of my public writing life, I met the editor of a venerated poetry journal who made it clear, without having seen anything I’d written, that mine was not the kind of work they published in the pages of their magazine. I didn’t send poems to that magazine until a guest editor, a Black British guest editor, invited me to do so more than ten years later. There were clear divisions in the poetry ecosystem across boundaries of race, class, and most definitely gender. The brightest stars in that literary firmament were a crop of mostly straight, mostly white, men writing in a mainstream post-war lyric tradition which foregrounded a certain kind of poetic excellence over and above others. To flourish in this world, so the received wisdom ran, meant adopting, and adapting to, a poetic voice which might best be classified by the word ‘craft’; the operative word in a recent essay by Rebecca Watts which indulges essentialist terms for measuring literary excellence. The arguments put forth in the piece, which I won’t rehash here at length, rang with an implicit call to simpler times in which ‘poetry was an artform’. * Part of this ossified idea of poetic craft – work showing the expenditure of skill and expertise – hinges on a stable image of the poet as professional ; another word freighted with unspoken value. The problem with this is that it is a model of writing practice based on exclusivity, reinscribing ideas of scarcity. If we read poetry in this light, then there are finite resources of excellence open only to those poets who work hardest. But on whose terms is this hard work quantified?
The community into which I was allowed to step as a beginning poet existed mostly in the live performance arena, rather than in print publication. So, my early practice as a poet involved getting together enough poems to form a set that I might perform live at an open mic night with a view to being booked to perform a longer set at an established event series. The publication, the making public, I was working towards was a site-specific form of publication, a communal form. This is an origin story so ubiquitous among Black British Poets as to seem contrived. And it was. If you overwhelmingly consign Black British Poets to the live arena, as indeed was the norm between the 70s and late 90s in the UK, then it becomes possible to say that there is an essential difference between these poets and those who seemed to occupy the prime real estate in poetry, the avenues of prestige. Indeed, this is exactly what the mostly white, mostly male editorati said to defend themselves from charges of institutional unconscious bias against Black British Poets. These poets were simply not good enough to be publishable, or their writing worked best in the live context, there was no audience for this kind of poetry. In short, the message was the same as that which I received from the venerated editor at seventeen: though we will not look at them, your poems do not interest us . The fault was always said to be the poets’. We black poets have, for a long time, known otherwise. Anyone who hasn’t been licking the underside of a rock buried in the sand will grasp the importance of Black British aesthetics to the continued life and dynamism of British Poetry as a whole. For my part, though I’m known for my published work, relationships fostered on the live scene are the foundational interrogative and aesthetic relations my work inhabits to this day, and if they have enlivened my poetics, I wonder what they have done for the countless poets who share a trajectory like mine.
For such poets, visibility in the world of publication was the stuff of speculative fiction. Before we had the abundance of poetry collections by Black British Poets that seems now, at long last, to be in the offing, the poetry anthology was our principal space of possibility as published poets. I am thinking here of such anthologies as Bittersweet , Kin , IC3 , A Storm Between Fingers , and, of course, The Fire People . I first read The Fire People when I was nineteen or twenty. The poems that were being held up as exemplary (in the syllabus of my university degree and in the pages of poetry magazines) did not speak, or look, like me. Here at last was a poetics of skin; of the barbershop; nightclub; the corner; the family dinner table; church; the foci of my life outside white institutions. These were poems in which my life had value because it could stand in for the lives of others. Such anthologies saved me, in several senses of the word, beginning a restlessness and indignation that is the essential thread of my work as a writer, editor, and scholar alike.
We live in a cultural landscape that regards visibility alone as a sign of change. If more black poets are getting published, receiving institutional largesse, editing, performing and otherwise taking up space, this must mean the work is almost done. I contend that the work these landmark volumes set out is merely in its infancy. The radicalism in these volumes was to show black life as normal rather than as a deviation from the norm of whiteness. These anthologies, in other words, complicate the idea of a stable audience for poetry by extending the poetic notion of what it’s like to be in the world and, as well, what it is like to be in the world in a black skin. While our poetry has been denigrated as revelling in identity politics, we know this critique for the dog-whistle it is. Our lives can stand in for the lives of others because our lives are equally valuable. I’m reminded, here, of Michael Che’s sta