How does your work dialog with stereotypes and the imaginations of non-Caribbean and non-Black folks? Tell us about “Groove.” “Groove” does this well, where Winston Shakespeare from How Stella Got Her Groove Back seems to fulfill the fantasy as a way of breaking it apart. Running the Dusk challenges perceptions of homogeneity in the Caribbean as well as in the context of blackness. To give picong to that which is absurd (History) is my pleasure and my work. My Trinidadian family is from South and let’s just say that they are damn good givers of picong. Picong (from the Spanish picón and/or the French piquant) is a Trinbagonian practice of verbal sparring, a ritualized exchange or drama of joshing and insulting through linguistic virtuosity. In any case, satire itself is indigenous to so many global literary traditions. A painting like Picasso’s Three Musicians helps me to make sense of what I mean. It’s not nostalgia, but grief and bewilderment, so we experience the emotional space through a kind of cubist tonality. What you call irony accompanied with nostalgia, I call singing in the mask or mourning in the mask. There’s a difference between standing above feeling and bewildering Caesar. I think the assumption is that all irony precludes real feeling-but not so, not for me. It’s what you see in quite a bit of art in something like the Spring/Break Art Show in NY, and I too find it irritating. critics of irony in poetry are really talking about those that have the luxury of a kind of hipster irony that must lord over feeling. And if you are made by diaspora, this is simply just what speech is, what life is like. We can think of irony as a breach between the said and the meant, or the expected and the actual, or the surface and the subterranean. poets I admire have come out against irony, but I don’t think the conversation has been careful enough and needs to be contextualized culturally. American poetry as in “Nuestra América,” from Nunanvut to Chile, would be another matter. American poetry when you say that satire and irony come and go. I think we should be clear that you’re talking about U.S. I realize some people have read it as I.D., which is interesting, but also changes the rhythm). Obviously, I’m not evoking nostalgia for the “plantation kitchen” in “Lightskinned Id” (which is “id” as in the Freudian id, as opposed to “I.D.” as in identity. It’s not nostalgia there’s no longing to go back. “Masquerade” was about wrestling with the sonnet sequence, sustaining a heartbeat across an expanse. So the questions you raise about tone, subgenre and strategy mainly arise out of the music-work. I must say that my composition of these poems was severely focused on sound, image, language, and architecture more than anything else. What role do they play in your work and why are they attached to nostalgia? In Running the Dusk, many of the poems use an ironic and satirical tone in regards to limiting ideas of race and colonial presentations of self in the Caribbean sometimes this satirical or ironic tone is accompanied by nostalgia, as in “Masquerade” and “Lightskinned ID.” Satire and irony as an element in poetry seem to come and go.
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