By Meta DuEwa Jones, PhD

Letter #1: An Introduction^[i]

Dear _______________
In this space, in this time, I am a writer, a researcher, a scholar engaged in black study, guiding us through Erica Hunt’s poetics and prose.

Let’s journey together, on this word-train: “Where I am the Sunday / company / glad to be a passenger.”^[ii]

A life-long journaler, Erica Hunt’s practice spans more than a half-century.^[iii] A graduate of San Francisco State University and Bennington College, where she earned a Master of Fine Arts, Hunt’s creative endeavors include poetry, essays, editing, inter-artistic collaboration, and literary and cultural theory. Her renovative poetics evinces radical practices in Black avant-garde traditions.^[iv] Hunt has worked as a philanthropic foundation leader, a community activist, a juror for literary prizes, and a thought leader.

Across the country, she has been awarded distinguished fellowships from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Djerassi Foundation, among others; and she has taught at several universities, including Duke, Wesleyan, Temple, and Brown. Hunt has nourished, and been nurtured by, a range of intellectuals, creatives, and activists engaged in literary and cultural organizations, feminist art communities, and writing institutes such as the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University, Cave Canem, and the Kelly Writer’s House at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been a consistent collaborator with Black visual artists such as Allison Saar, creative intellectuals such as Saidiya Hartman, fellow poetic innovators such as Harryette Mullen, and composers and performers such as JJJJJerome Ellis.

Hunthas authored seven books: Local History, Arcade, Piece Logic, Time Slips Right Before Your Eyes, A Day and Its Approximates, Veronica: A Suite in X Parts, and Jump the Clock.^[v] A wide range of contemporary journals, prestigious literary magazines and anthologies have also featured her work, including: BOMB, Boundary 2, FENCE, Hambone, The Los Angeles Review of Books; In the American Tree, Gathering Ground, and Seeding the Future.

Through dissonant sounds, arch allusions, and deliberate use of silence, Hunt’s poetry strategically tightropes “the verge of legibility.”^[vi]  Her “oppositional writing” practice incorporates “unrecognizable speech” patterns to counter discursive domination through mainstream literary cultures co-optation of insurgent aesthetics.^[vii] This aesthetics of dissidence advances disparate forms of “black avant gardism”^[viii] and continues the innovative liberatory praxis of many writers of the Black Arts Movement. With poet Dawn Lundy Martin, Hunt’s visionary assemblage in Letters to the Future: Black Women / Radical Writing, buttressed the visibility and indelible impact of female and genderqueer artists. She platforms artists “committed to a radical practice of literary work, necessary alchemists in the word.”^[ix] Likewise, she works to “set boundaries anew” by “estranging familiar forms” like the “letter and diary.”^[x]

Let’s reset the boundaries for critical essays on Erica Hunt.^[xi]

To assay her treasure in word-wealth, I think with, and write in, the letter mode. I follow an African American literary and cultural tradition of letter-writing.^[xii] This epistolary form reflects creative style as intellectual practice. My formal cue comes from Hunt’s career; her prose poetic epistles transform the relationship between intimacy, erudition, and the public sphere.

Yours, truly in public,
—M.

* * *

Postcard #1: An Invitation
Dear Public One:

I write to you, by the blacklight of poet June Jordan: these
letters are things that I do in the dark—and the dawn—
reaching for you.^[xiii] In some form, these letters are love
poems—but not in a sentimental mood.^[xiv] My invitation: Do
your thing, or ya thang! I’d love to read from you once
you’ve read Lauren K. Alleyne’s interview and Hunt’s work:^[xv]
How do you engage Hunt’s (epistolary) practice?  What do
you encounter in your own letter-writing journey?       

                                                                                 Reaching
                                                                                 for you,    

                                                                                 —M.

* * *

Letter #2 Against Flatness: An Encounter

Dear E:
It’s been decades since I first encountered your work. I met your writing-mind—and you—the poet-philosopher in-the-flesh at nearly the same time.

From a region in my place memory, I still see the table-top lectern where you placed the cream and carmine jacket for your newest book (at the time): Arcade.^[xvi] You were the “Black woman at the podium . . .” bringing “a treasury of rhetorical wealth;” rewriting “ a radically different text for female empowerment.^[xvii]” Once upon a time, the slanted podium you spoke from lived as a tree. Oak? Mahogany? I can’t see the grain, but I remember the wood, stained. I remember grasping the thick sides of the slick square before introducing you for a campus reading.

Arcade’s jacket design featured your name, and your collaborator, the sculptor and printmaker, Alison Saar’s name, too. The words:
“POEMS” and “WOODCUTS”
in bold, at the bottom, in two ecru rectangles. The rectangles’ edges were serrated. Each bolt resembled a strip of paper or unbleached linen; the beige blocks contrasted the surrounding geometric tiles.^[xviii] And I remember a pun about Alison’s artwork: weren’t the book’s pages made of cut, pulped, wood? I thought, but did not ask, this question. It seemed too clever by half. 

Now, as I type this letter in bytes, I remember my first encounter with Arcade . . . .
The touch of vellum parchment.
The thrill of cerebral play.
The feel of my index finger pressing on words from your verse, tracing Alison’s lines.
Tactile reading.
Your poem, “First Words,” curtailed behind—peeking through—Alison’s drawing. ^[xix]
Her printmaking and your wordmaking process, together, “fighting flatness.” ^[xx] 
Breaking and bending and baring and blurring boundaries, below . . . 

See how Alison carves a thick curtain, encircled by color and light? See the curved figure, in full fetal position?

I see a world; I see a womb; I see a red moon.

See how the dark lines of your poem hover between translucence and opacity?

“We have this in common: art and life, children, daughters named Maddy,”^[xxi] you and Alison wrote. Your collaboration renovates the visual-verbal architecture of Black maternal aesthetics.^[xxii]

I read a few words from your “First Words;” you reference:
what’s under stones or understates
the tension of what’s concealed
and what’s shown.

Your riff on “words that return in the face / the face of the familiar” and your penchant for parataxis repeats phrases presenting a surface feel of the familiar. Your deft syntactical shifts from noun and verb catch my eye and ear.

You shadow box with syntax.

“The past tense of read is read,” you wrote.^[xxiii] I read Arcade, presently, and what hovers in my ear-mind? Your assertion in the essay “Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde”:
“The world is in the text and the text is in the world.”^[xxiv]

I echo your chiasmus with my own:
The womb is in the text and the text is in the womb.

The carved lines of Alison’s woodcuts create a harbor, a word-womb in wine red, eggshell, and burnt umber. Tricolor enchantment.

Arcade transforms apperceptive possibility. I call this a form of black alchemy.^[xxv]

P.S. Do you see what I see?
—M.

* * *

Letter #2B Introduced: Another Story

Dear E:
You said “[s]tories . . . are repeated to someone who wasn’t involved, to get your side of the story told.” ^[xxvi] Well, this story involves you. My side of this story “tells and forgets.”^[xxvii]

Not one, but two of my professors introduced me to you during my first year in graduate school. ^[xxviii]

‘Introduced’ is not quite the right verb.

In “Personal” you wrote: “grammar—a cause.”^[xxix] Your continual creative parsing of grammar prods more precision.^[xxx] “Tailored,” a denominal verb, better suits the occasion that shaped our first encounter. Two university garments, teaching and mentoring, shaped my enduring engagement with your work.

I don’t remember which came first: reading your widely influential essay, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” in a grad theory seminar, or, being invited to introduce you at a reading. Memory’s mechanics fray the seams; the time slips.

You ask, “[h]ow does she keep the stories apart, from falling into one another?” ^[xxxi]

I do remember exiting through the side doors of Margaret Jacks Hall, then walking straight across the Quad to the beige and red-tiled building (ironically) called Green Library on Stanford’s campus. I researched the history of Kelsey Street Press, the feminist, experimental-arts press that published Arcade. I scoured the stacks to locate, and read—any, and—everything I could find written by and about you. I scanned the grayish blur on the microfilm—or was it microfiche?— machine so I could access an archived news-page from an early book review from the Village Voice Literary Supplement.

The reviewer began their engaged encounter with Local History by asking: 
“What might draw a reader into an author’s first book?”

The question, was, of course, rhetorical. The answer was:
“Hunt’s opening line was enough to do the trick:
‘I was thinking that if the ceiling were mirrored we would have to watch what we say
about how we feel.’
Local History holds enough cleverly built dislocations to catch . . . readers
unaware and force them to go back over that sentence to see if it meant to say
what it said.”^[xxxii] (13, VLS).

The epistolary, like a book review, is a form of encounter. When the epistle, to use an old-fashioned, clerical term, is enclosed in—or as—an essay, a poem, or a book—as many of your letters have been—the dialogic encounter between writer-and-reader is drawn out across time. The possibility for direct response is deflected into other modes like reviews.

The reviewer’s question emphasizes authorial time, the order of your story. Your first book.

My questions follow a sequence, too: Do you read reviews of your work? Do you ever shift the terms of the encounter by writing a letter to your reviewer?

Until I can read your side of the story, 
—M.

* * *

Letter #4: Marking Time: Between Enclosure and Boundlessness

Dear E:
When you said, “every statement of poetics bears the mark of its time,”^[xxxiii] you included your own. Likewise, when you wrote “every artistic practice is imprinted with its particular tensions of audience, time, and place,” you wrote in a public space.^[xxxiv] 

Place: a Boston Review forum. Time: Spring, 2015. Audience: “known and unknown readers”^[xxxv]

The attention to “race” and “the poetic avant-garde” are the forum’s foci.^[xxxvi] But the stylistic innovations of your work—aesthetic strategies that include “fragmented voice, disjunctive logic, and paratactic lines”—are not bound by race, language-centered writing or time.

From Local History (1994) to Jump the Clock (2020), your poetic method addresses the reader—and (fictional) recipients—through the forms of enclosure^[xxxvii]the epistolary provides. Letters to the Future includes both visual art created in-and-as a letter form, as well as written letters by you and others, from conceptual artist Adrian Piper’s 2013 “Imagine” postcard, to your correspondence with playwright Adrienne Kennedy. I marveled at how you and Dawn choreographed a call and response to cohere each artist’s unique aesthetic expressivity. Your editorial and epistolary practices engage Black aesthetic practices, plural. ^[xxxviii]  E., the friend~ship you and D. share operates as a verb: it breathes air into the sails of Letters; it buoys all 453 pages; it anchors the book’s radical artistic journey.

You said your poetry is “a rehearsal space.” The Black feminist sense of Caribbean rehearsal is evident in your staging of the epistolary as a site for expressive experimentalism. ^[xxxix] Letters is replete with multiple prologues, forewords, introductions, afterwords and closing words. Within these curtailed forms, you create a sense of aesthetic boundlessness.

But (say) what about “the mark of its time”?

Letters to the Future took protracted time, labor, and yes, love. The need for relation and connection was great, and grave. You observed “the time of this collection, 2015-2017, was marked by an inflection in the world’s deteriorating economic and political relations.”^[xl]  You invested three years to curate and cohere creative community. Letters anticipated the particular tensions of Pandemic Time, it Jump[ed] the Clock. You struck that clock at the janus hour when you reflected that 2020 “will be marked as a portal or an abyss or both.”^[xli]

P.S. What made you shift from an anticipatory temporal mode in Letters to the Future to a “poetics of the present” in Jump the Clock?”^[xlii]

                  marking time until your future reply,  
—M.

* * *

Letter #5: Notes on Notes: The Temporal, The Oppositional & The Ordinary

Dear E:
Did you receive my letter last month? A few weeks ago, I watched the livestream of your conversation with Saidiya Hartman and JJJJJerome Ellis.^[xliii] For some time now, I’ve been mulling over your talk, “Language in the Ruins,” and your rehearsal of temporality as a poetic, political and philosophical practice. You commended Saidiya’s “way of reading the past” as a survival practice, a strategic “present tool.”

It was poetic heaven, or at the very least, a haven, to hear you delineate Gwendolyn Brooks’ sonnet, “my dreams, my works must wait till after hell.” (Forgive the sentimentalism of my pun). Your renovative attention to Brooks’ gendered poetics of time in off-rhyme pairs such as “incomplete” and “wait” was spot-on. Your reading of lines like “I am very hungry. I am incomplete” and “No man can give me any word but Wait.” brought Brooks’ lyric to bear on our contemporary moment. ^[xliv]  

“We wait, we wait, are told wait,” you lamented.

“We hold our breaths. I can’t breathe,” you added to this refrain. “How can we wait?”

You work through the wound of “waiting;” you turn the key on “its temporal lock.”^[xlv]
Thank you for opening the door to “hope” despite justice delayed, justice denied.
Your critique of the politics of “patience” tends towards what the scholar Julius Fleming coined as Afro-presentism.

Your focus on the political function of parts of speech in Brooks reflects your investment in examining “the politics of poetic form”^[xlvi] in your widely influential essay, “Notes for Oppositional Poetics.” “Notes” elucidates the strategies for “oppositional writing” in two novels: Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi.^[xlvii] E, at first, I wondered why your excellent explication of novels was published in a collection theorizing poetics. But your essay indicates that distinct conceptions of genres, like grammar, are politically and discursively constructed. I first learned from your “Notes” to think critically about the atemporal structure of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.  You indexed the “extremely violent conditions” that Black mothers endured within “slave society” as marked by Sethe’s disavowal of “official historical time. ”^[xlviii]  And violence, specifically the “submerged, disconnected and violent character of contemporary life,” compelled you to change your essay’s original title.^[xlix] You replaced “Possibility” with “Notes.” 

Possibility connotes promise; Notes suggests preservation.

Possibility points to the future; Notes records, and becomes a record of, the past.

I think, here and now, of Cristina Sharpe’s newest book, Ordinary Notes.^[l]  Cristina’s distilled, condensed writing on quotidian encounters with antiblack violence and misogynoir indict and unsettle. Have you read it, yet E? What do you think of it, how may you think with it?

In possibility,
—M.

* * *

Letter #8 Touching: On Legibility

Dear E:
Even if “Correspondence Theory” didn’t hint, I would still feel called to respond; desire to engage your theory and practice; your avant-garde practice as theory.

Not too much time, say, around A Day And Its Approximates^[li] after reading your poem, “Reader we were meant to meet,” I caught a snag in the net of your writing-mind. 

You have often invoked the strategic power of illegibility in formal innovation, especially for oppressed communities. Imagine my surprise when I arrived at these lines: “Reader, you were meant to be legible / even in the failure to communicate.” ^[lii]  The slippage—between the intention, or the capacity, to be clearly understood, and the inevitable disconnect—piques. The (un)decipherable code beckons and vexes.

I am touched by the tactile in your poem~theory, too. You declared:
Touch, reader, we were meant to touch
to exchange definitions and feed the pulse of
language. I promise if you step in [ . . . ]^[liii]
I step outside of the poem to step into the poem’s promise: the subjunctive “if.” “Were meant to” can also mean “but have not yet;” it can also mean “we might not.”

Does this yearning to connect, this reaching towards the reader, animate your letters?  
Does the proximal play with proximity, and distance, in your letters delight or rattle?
Does the epistolary make a promise it (knows it) can’t keep? 

feeling the pulse of (your) language,
                                             —M. 

* * *

Letter #13: How We Get Free: Don’t Skip. Jump! Fly!

Dear E.
You titled your new and selected poems, Jump The Clock. “Jump” is an imperative; “clock” serves as a noun.  Let’s make a jump cut, a chiasmic shift.

Let’s clock the jump.

A recent review suggests your phrase could signify “jumping out of clock-time altogether—out of mechanized, monetized time. . . ”^[liv]

• Does your call to “jump” urge readers to quickly move beyond time’s frame or time frames?
• Does your “jump” diddle with the line from the nursery rhyme: “the cow jumps over the moon”?
• Does your pun on the cliché “time flies” seek freedom through propulsive flight?

I realize the answer could be “yes” to one, all, or none of these questions.

We connect, and disconnect, across temporal movements and their measurements. Your work indexes the (im)possibility of accurately taking time’s true temperature—even as the impulse to measure, to mark, time’s passage endures. Time blindsides sight. The day shifts from slip to jump. Your poem, “Octavio Paz’ Calendar,” where the phrase, “to jump the clock” appears, underscores this.  Your reference to the celestial world, the world of “the sun,” slips into a mathematical one, a world of (dual) calculation. You wrote:
the sun pours into pools of heat
the same sun you round up to 584 days
I tab at 365 and change not keeping score.^[lv]

We correspond on differential planes and zones of time.
Jumping involves kinetic movement; to jump the clock is to seek flight.

Let’s make
a jump cut.

* * *

E., have you read Toni Cade Bambara’s short story, the Education of a Storyteller?
Jump the Clock provides a theory of time, space, and flight. So, too, does “Education.”

To make a short story shorter, Bambara begins with a black girlchild, Peaches, in conversation with her Grandma Dorothy. She learns how our African ancestors did the thing that needed to be done. How rest was won. Not despite, but to spite the arresting chain-hold by those European (sea) captains of captivity during that murderous Middle Passage.

Some of us did not die, June Jordan reminds us.^[lvi] None of us willingly chose to take the “voyage through death / to life upon these shores” that Robert Hayden chronicled.^[lvii]

Some of us skipped the shore. Nah, we didn’t skip. This weren’t no skippity-zippity, “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” Song of the South, Disney-movie version; romancing slavery; serving our subjugation on a prettified plantation platter.

Bambara’s narrator tells of “that terrible time when we were kidnapped, herded in ships, and brought here in chains as enslaved labor [ . . . .] when the boat brought the Africans from the big ships to the shore . . .”^[lviii]

Some of us walked.

The order of the story goes:
“[T]hose Africans stepped out onto the land, took a look around, and with deep-sight vison saw what the European further had in store for them, whereupon they turned right around and walked all the way home, all the way home to the motherland.”^[lix]

Some of us flew.

Another side of the story goes:
“And there on the deck, we looked to shore, and saw what was further in store and we flew away to Guinea.”^[lx]

Some of us jumped!
out of the boat                         into the plane of wet              across the plane of air

Later, we learned to tell these storied lessons in liberation.
“Of course we know how to walk on the water, of course we know how to fly,” Grandma Dorothy tells Peaches. ^[lxi]

Your storied lesson on liberation appears in the Author’s Note in Jump the Clock. You said your poems “were and are a rehearsal space for emancipated knowing, thinking and feeling; the open space of hope. . .”^[lxii]

I, your reader, respond here—rehearse in the open space beside you:
jumping through the open       surrendering to the air             not succumbing to the sea
your emancipated knowing:   how we get free

    taking flight

—M.

* * *

---

^[i] I dedicate this epistolary essay, in memoriam, to Althea Tait, an influential writer, professor and scholar of Black feminist literature, children’s literature and poetry and poetics. Althea: “pink-think” theorist of Magenta! Althea, come from spirit-strong faith, family and friendship. Althea, who made writer family breaking bread with we Wintergreen Women Writers Collective. Althea’s sudden passing changed the arc of these letters towards time-slippage.

^[ii] Erica Hunt and Alison Saar. “First Words,” Arcade, (Berkeley: Kelsey Street Press, 1996.) p. 9.

^[iii] Hunt frames her introduction into poetic practice through journaling, “for more than 52 years . . . since I was a girl. . . and writing poems much of the time.” (Hunt 00:12:15-12:38). Hunt, Erica. Furious Flower Facebook Live Reading Series Presents Erica Hunt, YouTube, uploaded by Furious Flower Poetry Center, 4 Oct. 2021, https://youtu.be/mG7w1lRcUtQ?si=EJyeZGKaT-VGpOWH&t=730.

^[iv] I see Hunt working within a Black avant-garde tradition whose formal innovation includes an investment in historical forebears, identified as “contemporary renovative poetics.” Jones, Meta DuEwa, “The String of Grace: Renovating New Rhythms in the Present-Future of Black Poetry and Music,” Furious Flower: Seeding The Future of African American Poetry, Edited by Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2020, pp. 213-230.

^[v] Hunt, Erica. Local History, New York: Roof Books, 1994; Arcade, with Alison Saar, Berkeley: Kelsey Street Press, 1996, Piece Logic, Durham: Carolina Wren Press, 2002; Time Slips Right Before Your Eyes, New York: Belladona Press, 2006 (Reissue 2015);  A Day and Its Approximates, Tucson: Chax Press, 2013; Veronica: A Suite in X Parts, Chicago: Selva Oscura Press, 2019; and Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems, New York: Nightboat Books, 2020.

^[vi] “Erica Hunt,” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/erica-hunt.

^[vii] “Erica Hunt,” “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, Edited by Charles Bernstein, New York: Roof Books, 1990, 197, p. 203-204.

^[viii]“Black avant-gardism” is a theoretical concept coined by the scholar Keith Leonard. Unpublished manuscript, See synopsis of this project. “Abstract,” ACLS Fellow Grantees;

^[ix]Hunt, “Introduction: Angle, Defy Gravity, Land Unpredictably,” Letters to the Future: Black Women / Radical Writing, Edited by Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin, Tucson: Kore Press, 2018. p. 15.

^[x] “Erica Hunt,” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/erica-hunt; Harryette Mullen, “Description,” Blurb, Local History, https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/0937804533/Local-History.aspx

^[xi] For excellent scholarship on Erica Hunt, see: Kinnahan, Linda, “Bodies written off”: Economies of Race and Gender in the Visual/Verbal Collaborative Clash of Erica Hunt’s and Alison Saar’s Arcade,” We Who Love To Be Astonished : Experimental Women’s Writing And Performance Poetics, Edited by Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002; Cummings, Allison, “Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. 26a; 3-36; Schultz, Kathy Lou. “Rock and a Hard Place: Erica Hunt and the Poetics of African-American Post-modernity.” How2 1.5 (2001): n. page. Web 21 Sept. 2015. Book-length treatments have trended in the direction of emphasizing the connections between Hunt’s challenges to standardized language practices and conceptualization of political functions of grammatical orders in relationship to Black Arts / Black Aesthetics movement(s) and their relationship to experiments and innovation in (oft unacknowledged) parallels and tributaries with other avant-garde practices. See, Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2011, pp. 9-12, 14 and 85; Anthony Reed, Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2016, pp. 1-2, 100, 106.

^[xii] Examples of black epistolary practice in poetry, fiction and non-fiction, and scholarship abound. Some of the most well-known literary letters include: James Baldwin,  Letter to My Nephew, The Progressive,  1 Dec, 1962, Alice Walker, The Color Purple, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2015;  Letters by Hunt’s contemporaries in formally innovative, renovative poetics include Nathaniel Mackey, Volume #1, From A Broken Bottle, Traces of Perfume Still Emanate: Bedouin Hornbook; Lexington, University of Kentucky Press, 1987; Barbara Henning, Looking Up Harryette Mullen: Interviews on Sleeping with the Dictionary and Other Works, New York: Belladonna, 2011, Evie Shockley, The New Black, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2012. Recent theological scholarship in black study, and blackqueer studies, comprised in serial letters scholarship see Ashon Crawley, The Lonely Letters, Duke University Press, 2020.

^[xiii] Jordan, June “These Poems,” Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan, Foreword by Adrienne Rich, Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2007. p. 3.

^[xiv] I’m inspired by Damaris B. Hill’s address, where she writes “the legacy of these women’s lives chase me like a strong wind. This book is a love letter to women. . .” “Preface,” A Bound Woman Is A Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019, xviii.

^[xv] I’m serious about this letter-play. Email a response letter to: metadj@email.unc.edu. Please put the name Erica Hunt in the subject header of your email.

^[xvi] Hunt and Saar, Arcade, Berkeley, Kelsey Street Press, 1996.

^[xvii] Hortense Spillers, “Mamas’ Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Black, White and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2003, pp. 203, 229. I was introduced to Spillers’ thinking, and her in person, by Professor Sharon Holland during that same semester. Spillers was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

^[xviii] The book was designed by Poulson/Gluck.

^[xix] Hunt and Saar, “First Words,” Arcade, p. 3.

^[xx] Saar states she’s “always been interested in pushing those boundaries to combat the medium’s [printmaking’s] inherent flatness.” p. 95.  Saar, Alison. “Fighting Flatness,” Mirror, Mirror: The Prints of Alison Saar: From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, New York, Printed in Italy, Distributed by D.A.P. See for an excellent review of Saar’s aesthetic practice, see Cristina Sharpe, “Alison Saar, the Alchemist” Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe, Pomona, Benton Museum of Art, 2021.

^[xxi] Hunt and Saar, “Collaborative Statement,” Arcade, p. 53.

^[xxii] Jennifer Nash’s Birthing Black Mothers, Durham, Duke University Press, pp. 103-31.

^[xxiii] Hunt, “City,” Jump the Clock, p. 20.

^[xxiv] Hunt, “Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde,” 10 Mar., 2015, Boston Review, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/erica-hunt-forum-response-race-avant-garde/

^[xxv] These letters are excerpted from a chapter from my current unpublished book manuscript, “Black Alchemy.”

^[xxvi] Hunt, “Chapter 5: Going Home,” The Time Slips Right Before the Eyes, New York: Belladonna, 2006, p. 17.

^[xxvii] Hunt, “The Time Slips Before Right Before Your Eyes,” The Time Slips, p.12.

^[xxviii] Gratitude to Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University, and, in memoriam, the late Professor Diane Wood Middlebrook, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University.

^[xxix] Hunt, “Personal,” Arcade, p. 35.

^[xxx] Hunt, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” pp. 197-212.

^[xxxi] Hunt, “Chapter 2: Back-Home,” The Time Slips, p. 14.

^[xxxii] Review of Erica Hunt, Local History, Voice Literary Supplement, Village Voice, Apr. 1994. p. 13. 

^[xxxiii] Hunt, “Statement of Poetics,” Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, Edited by Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020, pp. 337-38.

^[xxxiv] Hunt, “Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde,” n.p.

^[xxxv] Harryette Mullen, “Imagining the Unimagined Reader: Writing to the Unborn and Including the Excluded,” The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. P. 3. Mullen and Hunt share what poet and critic Julian Sphar observes is an “attention to reading . . . rooted in the intersection between language writing’s pursuit of wild reading and autonomy—and identity-centered poetries’ concerns with community building and alliance.” Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001, p. 115.

^[xxxvi] Hunt, “Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde,” n.p.

^[xxxvii] Meta DuEwa, Jones, “Reframing Exposure: Natasha Trethewey’s Forms Of Enclosure,” ELH: English Literary History, Vol. 82, No. 2, Summer 2015, p. 411.

^[xxxviii] Evie Shockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2011, p. 9.

^[xxxix] Hunt, “Author’s Note & Acknowledgements,” Jump the Clock, p. 194.; Tanya Shields, Bodies and Bones: Feminist Rehearsals and Imagining Caribbean Belonging, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014.

^[xl] Hunt, “Introduction: Angle, Defy Gravity, Land Unpredictably,” p. 15.

^[xli] Hunt, “Author’s Note,” p. 193.

^[xlii] Hunt, Author’s Note,” p. 193.

^[xliii] “JJJJJerome Ellis, Saidiya Hartman, and Erica Hunt, CAAPP, Streamed live on Sep 29, 2020. YouTube.  https://www.youtube.com/live/2bSu_ysGzVQ?si=qUti2tBbUnLf32I0

^[xliv] Gwendolyn Brooks, “Gay Chaps at the Bar: ‘my dreams, my works must wait till after hell’”, Selected Poems of Gwendolyn Brooks, New York: Harper Perennial, 2006, p. 23; Hunt, “Language in the Ruins: (Hunt: 00:53:53:-53:47) https://www.youtube.com/live/2bSu_ysGzVQ?si=qUti2tBbUnLf32I0

^[xlv] Hunt, “Looking for Language in the Ruins,” (Hunt: 00:53:53:-53:47) https://www.youtube.com/live/2bSu_ysGzVQ?si=qUti2tBbUnLf32I0

^[xlvi] Hunt, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” pp. 197-212.

^[xlvii] Hunt, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics” pp. 197, 208-12.

^[xlviii] Hunt, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics” pp. 197-204.

^[xlix] Hunt, “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” pp. 197-200.

^[l] Cristina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes, New York: FSG, 2023.

^[li] Hunt, A Day And It’s Approximates, CHAX Press, 2013; Jump The Clock, 109.

^[lii] Hunt, “Reader we were meant to meet,” Jump The Clock, 109.

^[liii] Hunt, “Reader” 109.

^[liv] Ben Lerner, Review. Jump The Clock. 25 Feb.  2021. The New York Review of Books. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/02/25/erica-hunt-past-imperfect/

^[lv] Hunt, “Octavio Paz’ Calendar, Jump The Clock, p. 117.

^[lvi] Jordan, June, Some Of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays, New York: Civitas Books, 2003.

^[lvii] Hayden, Robert, “Middle Passage,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43076/middle-passage

^[lviii] Toni Cade Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller,” Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays and Conversations, Edited by Toni Morrison, New York: Pantheon, 1996, p. 253.

^[lix] Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller,” p. 253.

^[lix] Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller,” p. 254.

^[lx] Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller,” pp. 253-254.

^[lxi] Bambara, “The Education of a Storyteller,” pp. 255.

^[lxii] Hunt, “Author’s Note & Acknowledgements,” Jump the Clock, p. 194.

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Read more in this issue: Interview | Poems | Writing Prompt

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Meta DuEwa Jones is a creative scholar, and Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She authored The Muse Is Music (Illinois, 2011), which was awarded honorable mention for the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize. Jones’s current monograph in progress, “Black Alchemy,” is a hybrid genre work of poetry, theory, and memoir that both explores–and participates in–collaborations between poets, writers of autobiography/memoir, and visual artists.  How do Black Diasporic creatives attend to the legacy of slavery and global migration and its impact on notions of community, kinship and freedom? “Black Alchemy” seeks to answer that question through research, autobiographical vignettes and close-analysis that considers the points of origin and affiliation of diverse contemporary artists who travel along waterways and byways, trains and trails in sites such as Eritrea, Ghana, Jamaica, South Africa and the United States.  Jones’s creative scholarship, focused on African-American poetry and inter-arts, has been published in diverse venues. Jones’s research and writing has been supported by fellowships from the National Humanities Center; the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University; the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University; the Rockefeller, Woodrow Wilson, and Mellon Foundations; the Stanford Humanities Center; and the Carter G. Woodson Institute.

 

By Ronald Cummings, PhD

I brought you to see where we   
started from, the undeniable beauty,   
the eyes that still smile and remind you   
this is who they were.   

-Mervyn Taylor, “The Years” 

The lines above appear in the final stanza of Mervyn Taylor’s poem “The Years.” We might read them as a statement of poetic purpose, a reflection on the possibility of poems to take us on journeys. Taylor’s phrase “where we / started from” is notably about the dynamics of time and place and both of these inform his poetic mappings as journeys (8). Taylor has also talked about his poems as shaped by a sense of “rediscovery.”¹ Here the notion of “rediscovery” runs counter to that infamous tale of colonial “discovery” or what the writer and philosopher Sylvia Wynter in her essay “1492: A New World View” has called the “first poetics of the Propter Nos” of 1492 that sought to define the Caribbean, to parcel territories and borders, and to govern the ways in which the region and its peoples might be named and known (20). According to Wynter, “that world-fateful day in October 1492” inaugurated “representation systems and categorical models” (49, 41) that have continued to structure terms of imagining and narration. In the poem “The Mountains Warned Us of Your Coming,” Taylor invokes “the rumbling, the new ships heard” as another way of referencing that violence of colonial military encounter (9). By contrast, Taylor’s “rediscovery” articulates the Caribbean in terms of multiplicity and an unfolding sense of astonishment and unknowing. He remains attuned to the surprise of the Caribbean as it might be revealed in the folds of different years² or on a corner of Pacific Avenue in Brooklyn or “in the hills above the Bay Area” (67).³ Taylor (re)articulates the Caribbean as a question. He ends the poem “The Years” with the inviting query, “Would you / like to hear all their stories?” (8).  

Taylor’s notion of “rediscovery” is both a philosophy of poetry and a rumination on the experience of reading and writing. In the blog “Mervyn Taylor: A Strong sense of home, of rediscovery,” he asserts:  

I believe the poem is an act of discovery, begun anew each time.  
My aspiration is to present poems that are revelatory, that may bring  
about a further understanding of the life we live. 

Taylor’s poems then might be read in invitational terms and also as epistemologies of Caribbean re-encounter.⁴ Readers are asked to grapple and engage with the repeating and restructured materialities of Caribbean culture and experience as they are evidenced in the everyday. These are poems as vignettes in the long history of time. We see Taylor’s concern with time, history, and place in his titling of the sections of his most recent book The Last Train (Broadstone Books 2023). The first of the three sections of the volume, for instance, is titled “Where we began” while the last is titled “What became of us.” Speaking specifically about the poems that appear in this volume, Taylor has noted that: 

The poems I’m writing now have a strong sense of home, of rediscovery. Having lived abroad for more than fifty years, with brief periods of return to Trinidad, I am finding surprises, like turning a corner to come into full view of the foothills that surround Belmont, looking up to see bright, yellow poui in full bloom. Or the surprising cries of children playing in the lane where I live, a sound strangely absent for years. Like my own childhood come back to visit. (Taylor, 2021) 

Rather than engaging grand narratives of history, Taylor’s sense of place and time is filtered through an attention to everyday life, its cyclical shifts and returns. It is little wonder therefore that his work attends to how Caribbean people keep time: births, deaths, market, rainfall, floods, the rise and fall of tides, changes in address, migrations, music. These all become the substance of his poems. Taylor’s poetry constructs what I read as a Caribbean collective cultural commons or what he calls in the poem “The Last Island,” “a common place” (26)—a space in which we might all rediscover and reencounter each other as well as ourselves with a view to understanding and thinking together about “where we / started from” and moving towards “a further understanding of the life we live.”  

In the discussion which follows, I reflect on Taylor’s most recent volume The Last Train as one text through which we might engage his poetic practice and think about his vision of the Caribbean. I turn to this volume because here we see a poet at the height of his creative talent reflecting on questions of life, art, mortality, and community. I also read this work in line with Myra Malkin who argues in a review of this book, which places it in the wider context of his writing, that: “The more I read him, the more I feel that his whole body of work is really … a single, richly variegated poem” (Malkin, 2023). I suggest that we might read this work in representative terms while also noting distinctions, revisions, and returns in relation to the rest of his oeuvre.⁵  

Mervyn Taylor’s The Last Train is undoubtedly a book of remembering. In keeping with his attention to time, the author offers an indexing of the meaning of the term “last” in the elegiac poem, “My Father’s Last Night” and the book’s title poem, “The Last Train.” These poems mourn the death of the father. They also situate the poet-persona in relation to family, genealogy, and legacy. In the first of these poems, death and mourning are rendered in private terms through the powerful image of the presence of the “women, / my mother among them, [who] stood round, / stirring the night air, while his hands / on the bedspread waited to be still” (Taylor 6). In “The Last Train,” this death is traced in a more public sense through the referencing of the father’s work on the railway. Here the body of the departed is attended to in ways that resonate with “My Father’s Last Night,” but which also extend that portrait. While the father’s hands are a point of focus for the observer in “My Father’s Last Night” in “The Last Train,” it is the uniform of the father, “the blue of his jacket,” his “bright brass” uniform pin and his “cap still dark” that are meant to hold the reader’s attention (25). They become quotidian items weighted with a life’s significance.  

The last train has gone into  
the ether, looking for my father,   
leaving a trail of smoke, the sky  

the blue of his jacket but lighter (25).  

We should not read this solely in terms of finality. Rather, in keeping with Taylor’s concern with cycles and Caribbean vernacular measures of time and movement, the title’s (the book and the poem’s) use of the term “last” comes to signal a previously departed train and or to refer to a prior journey. It becomes a marker of that which precedes the present. In this way, the phrase creates its own simultaneous sense of temporal order and opening. It invites us as readers to think about a before and after. We are left to contend with what it means for us to live in the wake of departed loved ones. 

The poet meaningfully situates himself in the father’s legacy in “The Poem as Train.” That this poem, with its attention to questions of inheritance and succession, appears immediately before “The Last Train” unsettles a total sense of the finality of the departure, (though not the intensity of feeling) that is depicted. Taylor crafts a sense of tradition that resonates, for instance, with Robert Hayden’s well-known poem “Those Winter Sundays” in which the reader is ultimately left thinking about heritage, duty, and succession. In Taylor’s verse, the train as symbol, with its architecture of interlinked carriages, not only connects Taylor to his father, but also comes to hold a larger intergenerational history of labor, migration, movement, death, heritage, and inheritance.⁶ 

While a number of the poems in this volume reflect on death and on the father, the book notably begins with birth and with the figure of the mother. Taylor’s choreography of temporality is complexly balanced from the very beginning. In the opening poem, “Arjun’s Prediction,” the poet is prefigured as prophecy. And is also, at once, a figure out of time. The opening stanza muses on the idea “[t]hat a boy like you would be / born to a woman thinking / herself beyond conceiving” (3). The prophecy of the poet’s coming is presented at once as special and mundane within the flows of local community life. After the mother allows Arjun, the bearer of the prophecy, to “live / under our house for the rest // of his life,” they are left to wonder, “what else he would be right / about; // some revelation to be made / real, however long it took” (3). The singularity of this prophetic utterance is also linked with a sense of a Messianic figuring of the child through the stories of “Miss Ina across / the ravine” and Aunt Marie who “would bring that terror dog / Nazi to stand guard” (3). These wise women, summoned by the baby’s cries, come to visit “to see what allyuh doing the child? (3). The poet figure then is from birth ushered into a community not only concerned with his well-being but who become narrative relations.  

We know that poets are well-known for conceiving their own mythologies. (We might think here of Derek Walcott’s Another Life or Kamau Brathwaite’s Sun Poem or Lorna Goodison’s I am Becoming My Mother, among others). Taylor’s poems, particularly those associated with childhood, are not simply nostalgic; they are carefully constructed temporal signposts of a journey. They conjure a considered yet intimate feeling of place and remembered lives and times. In some instances, they are historical reckonings, such as in “War Days” where childhood memories coalesce with a quotidian accounting of some the incongruities of war-time life in Trinidad.   

Days of rations and shortages,   
and the yellow ration card…

There were rumors of subs  
in the sea all around, of enemies  
embedded with us on this island  
far from any bombing. It was not   
our war. Still my aunt sang.   

   Buy a Flanders poppy, save it  
for a souvenier. When they ask 
who yuh buying it for, say 
Trinidadian boys who died  
In the war. And we remained  

  as quiet as blackout in Britain   
no Carnival for years, only  
the Rediffusion crackling (5). 

This poem is but one example of the historical recalling that is a feature of Taylor’s work. The poem itself becomes a form of memorialization, much like the Flanders poppy and the aunt’s song that Taylor references in the poem. In lieu of physical monuments, commemorating the “Trinidadian boys who died / in the war,” these small things, a poppy, a song, a poem, become keepsakes of memory (Taylor 5). In his own memorializing practice, Taylor remains attuned to how family stories and songs can hold histories. He also offers glimpses of how local narratives and oral tellings can potentially recuperate and remember what might be rendered quiet in national and colonial narratives.  

We can read Taylor’s The Last Train in relation to texts of poetic memoir in the Caribbean tradition such as some of those mentioned above (Walcott, Brathwaite, Goodison). However, Taylor’s practice of narrative rememory is also connected to the broader Caribbean memoir tradition. Consider how the lines above replay and recall episodes from Austin Clarke’s memoir of Barbadian childhood, Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack. In Clarke’s memoir, he writes of the impact of the second world war in Barbados: 

At a certain time of night, we had to turn down our kerosene lamps. Black-outs reached us from up in the Mother Country from various “theatres of war.” The Germans, the British said, were now in Caribbean waters. We got scared. Sireens sounded throughout the night, throughout the country. Searchlights would point in the sky at nightfall; we would follow the line and imagine German planes in it. (Clarke 42) 

Sandra Pouchet-Paquet has argued in her crucial study, Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation, that Caribbean autobiographical practice offers “a linked nationalist-internationalist discourse [which] articulates specific local and global attachments” (10). Some of these attachments are inter-island interlinkings and relations as seen in the connections and echoes between Taylor’s and Clarke’s narratives of war time in Trinidad and Barbados respectively. Other attachments stretch across different diasporic and global spaces. In “War Days,” the interconnections of Empire that link the Caribbean and Britain are underlined. In the poem “The Last Island,” the geographic closeness of Trinidad and Venezuela is referenced to bear witness to how “[t]oday, a refugee / might ride that current to find // a village, and join the singing” (26).  

Elsewhere, Taylor usefully maps Caribbean connections to North American cultural, political, and artistic life and histories. “When We Were West Indian” offers brief poetic vignettes of how Caribbean culture and people have reshaped New York since the 1920s.  

we’ve kept coming, bodies 
wrapped in heavy wool,  
riding the subways between 

Harlem and Brooklyn……. 

….We renamed Flatbush 
J’ouvert City, declared it on the  
signpost by Woodruff, where  
Jerry the jeweler held court

 
on the history of the steelpan (64-65). 

The poet also locates himself in this history and geography of Caribbean New York:  

Not far from there, the poet

 
overlooking Prospect wrote 
verses on post-its, afraid that 
on a trip to the desk, he might 

forget” (65).  

Although he remains interested in offering us the narration of a life, Taylor is not focused on giving us a singular portrait of self. Instead, throughout his work, we encounter the writer-poet always situated in relation to a complex matrix of Caribbean life that is intergenerational and integral.  

The book also records what we might understand as a community of the word. Throughout the collection, we see the poet in the company of other writers (including some mentors and friends now departed).  “I wander into your poem” is how Taylor begins “Afield (with Derek W)” (15). We might read this poem as a dialogue with Derek Walcott’s verse and as a companion piece to “The Poem as Train.”  However, if in “The Poem as Train,” the poet is represented as taking passengers on a journey, in “Afield (with Derek W),” the poet stops to “wonder how the poem can go / anywhere it wants in the world / without the poet” (15). Two poems, “Reading Outdoors” and “Reading in Bars,” might also usefully be read as companion poems. In each of these, the poet humorously reflects on the challenges of sharing one’s verse in unusual venues where disruptions and distractions abound. In “Reading in Bars,” we also see the poet in the company of Amiri Baraka, another poet he has identified as an influence:  

Amiri waits his 
turn, his back killing him, Newark 

still a gleam in his eye. (23) 

In the recollection of these moments, we come to understand this book as one concerned with poetry as practice, not just on the page but also shared interpersonally and communally.   

Part two of the volume remembers and recalls the late Jamaican poet Anthony McNeill to whom the book is dedicated. McNeill (1941-1996) was known for his experimental verse and was a contemporary of Mervyn Taylor’s, emerging on the Caribbean literary scene alongside other poets like Mervyn Morris, Dennis Scott, and Wayne Brown (the last two listed now deceased). In Section 2 titled, “A Bus Called Blue Danube (Jamaica Suite),” we witness the poet as travelling and writing companion with McNeill. Taylor conjures a space where Tony, the poet and the man, might be invoked and remembered again. “Bluefields” evokes “Tony’s poem / about defecating on a neighbor’s porch” (42). The poem can be read in relation to Taylor’s epistolary note, “Letter to Anthony McNeill, poet, 9/22/2016,” written on the occasion of McNeil’s birthday seven years ago, in which Taylor humorously reminiscences about McNeil’s advice on how one should deal with one’s enemies: “Shit on their porch,” you said, “as I believe you actually did one time”⁷ Taylor deliberately and disruptively refuses a past temporality, Tony’s poem, he suggests, “repeats its scatology in my ear” (42). In “Red Caps” we see Taylor writing a poem about McNeill writing a poem. The returns charted are temporal as well as spatial. The section offers what is in effect a travel itinerary with several poems named after places they travelled to together: Negril, Montego Bay, Hellshire, Linstead, Bluefields, Liguanea, Nine Miles, Goshen.  

While Taylor is best known for his writing of the cultural geographies of Trinidad and Tobago and of New York, in which Brooklyn becomes rendered as a northern Caribbean metropolis, (these locations also appear in Parts one and three of this book), his attention to Jamaica in Part two, is offered with an intimacy, fondness, and an eye for small details that makes these poems rewarding to read. Taylor assumes the position of an observer who is not a native of the island but is also at the same time not a tourist. His relation to the place, much like his relation to Tony McNeill, is resolutely fraternal. Jamaica is observed with an astute curiosity and poetic generosity. This offers moments when he is able to leverage insightful critiques. We see this, for example, in the poem “Rundown” which offers keen reflections on the intimacies and complications of Jamaican class politics.   

We also see in these poems about Jamaica, as well as elsewhere in this volume, a theory of the Caribbean as repeating islands (to borrow a term from the Cuban writer and theorist Antonio Benítez-Rojo). In some instances, this sense of repetition is prompted through the observation of spatial and geographic details. Bluefields, for instance, sparks a note of recognition. Taylor writes, it “[r]eminds me of the town I come from / in Trinidad, lanes and little houses. (42). In other instances, this sense of repetition is prompted by a realization of the cycles through which we experience Caribbean time and history and the challenge that this offers for postcolonial narratives of progress. The poem “Liguanea” ends with the line, “Ruins of plantations loom again” (34).   

The final poem of the book, “Three Chains,” is one that also invokes this sense of history. This time the repeating temporality of the islands is charted through the rise and receding of waves. The poet brings us “down to the water’s edge where/the foam retreats to become/ wave again” (89). “Three Chains” focuses on questions of property as a way of thinking about the complexities of Caribbean belonging and explores “Beachfront property” as another terrain in the long, ongoing story of Caribbean land conquest. The poet reminds us of a collective imperative and what is at stake in terms of people’s sense of place when he writes:  

….We the people  

can claim the island’s parameters.  
sink our feet to the ankles in  
sand dollar and shell, pretend we  

 own one of the yachts out there,  
since like flotsam we arrived,  
and like driftwood, we stayed. (89)  

That the “water’s edge” should remain the terrain of “we the people” is a matter of the flow and tides of history (89). This politic of place is what is actively being claimed through the remembrances as poems and the poems as remembrances gifted to us in this work. This is a history from below, marked by a poetics of accumulation, by ocean water sediments, and time as tide. This is how we “see where we / started from” (8). 

Notes

1. See “Mervyn Taylor: A Strong sense of home, of rediscovery” https://opalpalmeradisa.com/2021/04/09/mervyn-taylor-a-strong-sense-of-home-of-rediscovery/.
   See “Mervyn Taylor: A Strong sense of home, of rediscovery” https://opalpalmeradisa.com/2021/04/09/mervyn-taylor-a-strong-sense-of-home-of-rediscovery/. ↩︎
2. See for example Taylor’s poems “The Years”, “The Year of Hungry”, “The Year of No Carnival”, and “The Year No One Died”, which can be read as a sequence of poems in the volume The Last Trian (2023). ↩︎
3. See Taylor’s mappings of Caribbean space in North America in poems such as “Nostrand Avenue” and “Three from the Garment District” in Voices Carry (2017), the section titled “Overstayed” in The Waving Gallery (2014), and the poems “Brownstones” and “Train on a String” in Gone Away (2006). ↩︎
4. My use of the phrase “epistemologies of Caribbean re-encounter” builds on the centrality of understanding to the poetics that Taylor outlines. ↩︎
5. It is useful to note that a few poems are republished in this volume that previously appeared in Taylor’s first book An Island of His Own (1992). ↩︎
6. I am interested in the narrative return to the figure of the Black Railroad worker in the current historical moment. We might think of a number of recent Black cultural texts that have taken up the railroad as a site of Black historical formation. We might consider, for instance, the Barbadian writer Cecil Foster’s book They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada (2019), Suzette Mayr’s The Sleeping Car Porter (2022), a winner of the 2022 Giller Award, or the television series The Porter (2022). ↩︎
7. See Mervyn Taylor “Letter to Anthony McNeill, poet, 9/22/2016” https://mervyntaylorcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/mcneill.pdf ↩︎

 

Works Cited  

Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.  

Brathwaite, Kamau, Sun Poem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.  

Clarke, Austin. Growing up Stupid Under the Union Jack: A Memoir. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2005.  

Foster, Cecil. They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada. Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis, 2019.  

Goodison, Lorna. I Am Becoming My Mother. London: New Beacon, 1986.  

Hayden, Robert. A Ballad of Remembrance. Paul Breman: London, 1962 

Malkin, Myra. “Review of The Last Train by Mervyn Taylor.” Tinderbox Poetry Journal, vol. 8, no.1, March 2023. Retrieved from https://tinderboxpoetry.com/review-of-the-last-train-by-mervyn-taylor

Mayr, Suzette. The Sleeping Car Porter. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2022.  

Pouchet-Paquet, Sandra. Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and Self-Representation. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.  

Taylor, Mervyn. The Last Train. Frankfort, Kentucky: Broadstone, 2023.  

—. “Mervyn Taylor: A Strong sense of home, of rediscovery,” April 9, 2021. Retrieved from https://opalpalmeradisa.com/2021/04/09/mervyn-taylor-a-strong-sense-of-home-of-rediscovery/ 

—. Voices Carry. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2017.  

—. “Derek Walcott, Man of Faith.” Retrieved from https://mervyntaylorcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/derek-walcott.pdf 

—. “Letter to Anthony McNeill, poet, 9/22/2016.” Retrieved from https://mervyntaylorcom.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/mcneill.pdf 

—. The Waving Gallery. Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2014.  

—. Gone Away, New York: Junction Press, 2006.  

Walcott, Another Life. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972. 

Wynter, Sylvia. “1492: A New World View”. In Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas, edited by Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995, pp. 5–57. 

Read more in this issue: Interview | Writing Prompt | Poems

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Ronald Cummings is an associate Professor of Caribbean Literature and Black Diaspora Studies in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. His work focuses on questions of gender and sexuality and Black cultural resistance. His work has been published in various journals and he is the editor of four critical volumes including Caribbean Literatures in Transition 1970-2020, co-edited with Alison Donnell (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Harriet’s Legacies: Race, Historical memory and Futures in Canada, co-edited with Natalee Caple (McGill Queens University Press, 2022). Harriet’s Legacies was the winner of Canadian Studies Network Book Award for Best edited collection (2023). Cummings is also the editor of Make the World New: The Poetry of Lillian Allen (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2021). He is an affiliated member of the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender, and Class (RGC) at the University of Johannesburg.