August 2023
Editor's note:
Growing up in New York, the Empire State, the hubris of New York was a given. But over time, parochialism made less and less sense. It was an unnecessary, unjustified barrier. Besides, if we were so superior, why were we so miserable? Reading the eleven pages of the 1929 book, Caribbean Winter, the source material for Joel Harris’s erasure, evokes memories of the superiority I wore like a badge, like an impenetrable shield. The cancer of hubris is bad enough; the insidious nature of white supremacy, insidious to the privileged, obvious to the oppressed, reigns in this nearly hundred-year-old sourcebook. And it gets worse. In that same time frame, the horrors of the pseudo-science of Eugenics, justifying man’s ways to whom(?) had been codified into law. This also erupts into Caribbean Winter. From all this, Joel Harris expertly extracted one hundred and thirty-nine words to craft his erasure poem, “Paradise.” SoFloPoJo is honored to publish Joel’s work. -m.m.o'm.
Growing up in New York, the Empire State, the hubris of New York was a given. But over time, parochialism made less and less sense. It was an unnecessary, unjustified barrier. Besides, if we were so superior, why were we so miserable? Reading the eleven pages of the 1929 book, Caribbean Winter, the source material for Joel Harris’s erasure, evokes memories of the superiority I wore like a badge, like an impenetrable shield. The cancer of hubris is bad enough; the insidious nature of white supremacy, insidious to the privileged, obvious to the oppressed, reigns in this nearly hundred-year-old sourcebook. And it gets worse. In that same time frame, the horrors of the pseudo-science of Eugenics, justifying man’s ways to whom(?) had been codified into law. This also erupts into Caribbean Winter. From all this, Joel Harris expertly extracted one hundred and thirty-nine words to craft his erasure poem, “Paradise.” SoFloPoJo is honored to publish Joel’s work. -m.m.o'm.
|
Joel Harris
Paradise & Haibun for Port of Spain |
|
|
|
|
Paradise
the Caribbean wind / a woman / heaving herself up out of / a rain of fire and rock /
mountain and shore / nature has / rained down from the sky / Sugar / slopes down
to the sea / in the mist / Just picture / nature / awake / a steaming / cup of coffee /
a small garden / more or less naked, dressed / in / a godsend / a domain so alien /
they have been blessed with / rivers teaming with / fish, beneath their clement
southern sun / soil with their antlike labor / a tiny republic of / bamboo, cascading
waterfalls, cool mists hanging low / What a paradise / swarming all over / my cabin
door / full of sensuality and joie / de vivre / morning of leaden skies / molten heat /
the hysterical sea / a / low, raging swell / a necklace of mountainous islands / clad /
in a / coat of green fur / I’m struck by / the luxuriant / nature in the / Tropics
the Caribbean wind / a woman / heaving herself up out of / a rain of fire and rock /
mountain and shore / nature has / rained down from the sky / Sugar / slopes down
to the sea / in the mist / Just picture / nature / awake / a steaming / cup of coffee /
a small garden / more or less naked, dressed / in / a godsend / a domain so alien /
they have been blessed with / rivers teaming with / fish, beneath their clement
southern sun / soil with their antlike labor / a tiny republic of / bamboo, cascading
waterfalls, cool mists hanging low / What a paradise / swarming all over / my cabin
door / full of sensuality and joie / de vivre / morning of leaden skies / molten heat /
the hysterical sea / a / low, raging swell / a necklace of mountainous islands / clad /
in a / coat of green fur / I’m struck by / the luxuriant / nature in the / Tropics
Author's note: This is an erasure poem. Source material: Morand, Paul. Caribbean Winter (originally published in 1929)
Translated by Mary Gallagher. Signal Books, 2018. 50-60. Print.
Author's note: This is an erasure poem. Source material: Morand, Paul. Caribbean Winter (originally published in 1929)
Translated by Mary Gallagher. Signal Books, 2018. 50-60. Print.
Haibun for Port of Spain
On any given day this citadel announces itself with the raucous boom of dub
music, inchoate gravelly voices carpet-bombing my ears with spoken word
poetry from the streets, the raw kind, the kind that solicits bobbing heads,
gnawing migraine headaches from the sheer excess. This is downtown:
glistening towers, crawling taxi stands and floating libraries of pirate DVDs
making a mockery of Garvey’s self-reliance. The city is an island within an
island; concentric circles of Caribbean congeniality. Of course, every now
and then I sense the stench of stale urine hanging in the air like a case of a
bad hangover. I see islands of mucked up drifters swaddled in crumpled
cardboard splayed out in a kind of postcolonial languor. The eyesore of firm
stale buns: cracked soles blackened with grime left unwashed for who knows
how long. And no one dare blinks an eye… On the way to Charlotte Street
headless mannequins line store windows like low-end prostitutes advertizing
one day sales for the interested pedestrian. I can tell I am in the vicinity of
Charlotte Street because the place is a bee hive buzzing with fruit stalls,
clothing and handbags, interspersed with honking car horns. Yes, islands of
fresh produce abound; islands of the self-employed; islands of sweet-talking
Trinis hustling for the shuffled dollar that passes from hand to hand in an
algorithm called exchange and interchange.
The streets are alive.
I glide in its orange tang,
citrus to the tongue.
On any given day this citadel announces itself with the raucous boom of dub
music, inchoate gravelly voices carpet-bombing my ears with spoken word
poetry from the streets, the raw kind, the kind that solicits bobbing heads,
gnawing migraine headaches from the sheer excess. This is downtown:
glistening towers, crawling taxi stands and floating libraries of pirate DVDs
making a mockery of Garvey’s self-reliance. The city is an island within an
island; concentric circles of Caribbean congeniality. Of course, every now
and then I sense the stench of stale urine hanging in the air like a case of a
bad hangover. I see islands of mucked up drifters swaddled in crumpled
cardboard splayed out in a kind of postcolonial languor. The eyesore of firm
stale buns: cracked soles blackened with grime left unwashed for who knows
how long. And no one dare blinks an eye… On the way to Charlotte Street
headless mannequins line store windows like low-end prostitutes advertizing
one day sales for the interested pedestrian. I can tell I am in the vicinity of
Charlotte Street because the place is a bee hive buzzing with fruit stalls,
clothing and handbags, interspersed with honking car horns. Yes, islands of
fresh produce abound; islands of the self-employed; islands of sweet-talking
Trinis hustling for the shuffled dollar that passes from hand to hand in an
algorithm called exchange and interchange.
The streets are alive.
I glide in its orange tang,
citrus to the tongue.
Joel Harris is a Trinidadian poet. A 2020 shortlistee at Into The Void's Poetry Prize, his poems are forthcoming in Bayou Magazine, petrichor and have been published in Poetry London's Spring 2023 issue, JMWW, TIMBER Journal, Cream City Review, The Malahat Review, Door Is A Jar, Heavy Feather Review, PRISM International, Berkeley Poetry Review and Anthropocene. He has edited and contributed to The Alpha Barrier of North South Dialogue and The Twilight of America's Omnipresence. He's a member of U.K.'s Poetry Society.