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Books by Kwame Dawes
She's Gone /
Wisteria, Twilight Songs
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I Saw Your Face /
Bob Marley /
Impossible Flying /
Midland /
Natural Mysticism
Twenty: South Carolina Poetry Fellows /
A Far Cry from Plymouth Rock /
A Place to Hide /
Wheel and Come Again
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Wisteria, Twilight Songs from the Swamp Country
By
Kwame Dawes
Wisteria, Twilight Songs from the Swamp Country
was published by Red Hen Press in
January 2006. The poems are products of Kwame Dawes'
life in Sumter, a reflection of the profound impact that
the stories he was told by so many older folks in the
community, have had on his imagination and on his life.
Wisteria is a Sumter book and should be launched in
Sumter, celebrated and shared in Sumter.
In
Wisteria Kwame Dawes finds poignant meaning in the
landscape and history of Sumter, a small town in central
South Carolina. Here the voices of women who lived
through most of the twentieth century-teachers,
beauticians, seamstresses, domestic workers and farming
folk-unfold with the raw honesty of people who have
waited for a long time to finally speak their mind. The
poems move with the narrative force of stories long
repeated but told with fresh emotion each time, with the
lyrical depth of a blues threnody or a Negro spiritual,
and with the flame and shock of a prophet forced to
speak the hardest truths.
These are poems of beauty and
insight, that pay homage to the women who told Dawes
their stories, and that, at the same time, find a path
beyond these specific narratives to something
embracingly human. Few poets have managed to enter the
horror of Jim Crow America with the fresh insight and
sharply honed detail that we see in Dawes's writing.
With all good Southern songs of spiritual and emotional
truth, Dawes understands that redemption is essential
and he finds it in the pure music of his art. Dawes, the
Ghanaian-born, Jamaican poet is not an interloper here,
but a man who reminds us of the power of the most human
and civilizing gift of empathy and the shared memory of
the Middle Passage and its aftermath across the black
Diaspora. These are essential poems.
Wisteria is Kwame Dawes's eleventh collection of verse
since his first book, Progeny of Air, won the Forward
Poetry Prize in 1994. Dawes is the Distinguished
Poet-in-Residence at the University of South Carolina
where he is Director of the South Carolina Poetry
Initiative and The University of South Carolina Arts
Institute. Dawes is Programming Director of the Calabash
International Literary Festival.
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Dawes' 'Wisteria,' based in Sumter, reveals realities,
humanity
The distinguished poet Dr. Kwame Dawes has chosen Sumter
for the official launch of his latest book,
Wisteria, Twilight Songs from the Swamp Country. The poems in the
book were inspired by Dawes' relationships with seven
elderly Sumter residents during the past decade.
The public is invited to Sunday's multimedia
presentation at the South Sumter Resource Center at 5
p.m., when Dawes will be joined by composer Kevin
Simmonds, several vocalists and a chamber group of
talented musicians. Simmonds has selected several poems
from "Wisteria" and set them to music, and Dawes will
read his poems, which Simmonds said, "... have so much
music already."
Dawes, distinguished poet-in-residence and English
professor at the University of South Carolina since
1992, also taught at USC Sumter. He is the founder and
director of the S.C. Poetry Initiative. While living in
Sumter, Dawes performed in several plays at the Sumter
Little Theatre, among them August Wilson's "The Piano
Lesson." He is also an accomplished musician and
storyteller, former lead singer of the Canadian reggae
band Ujamaa and a novelist.
Among the many awards Dawes has received for his work
are the Forward Poetry Prize, the Hollis Summers Poetry
Prize and the Pushcart Prize for Best American Poetry in
2001. He is also an accomplished playwright.
Wisteria,
Dawes' 11th published volume of poems, is based on
stories from Sumter County. Since
Wisteria is
a "Sumter book," Dawes said, it should be "launched ...
celebrated and shared" in Sumter. The poems, he said,
reflect the impact older Sumter residents have had on
him through the stories and experiences they related.
Many people will recognize the stories and the people
who tell them as well as some of the true-life
characters who people them. For many, the poems will
evoke personal emotions and memories.
Lana Odom, director of the South Sumter Resource Center,
where Dawes met the elderly African-American Sumterites
he got to know, said she found the poems "true. Harsh,
sometimes, but true."
Already, the performance piece based on the book is
scheduled to tour Europe beginning in the fall.
The program that Sumter will see Sunday was presented at
the Columbia Museum of Art in April, before the book was
published. At that time, Dawes told Ellen Woodoff of the
museum that Simmonds "... is the best person to work
with poets because he is, himself, a quite gifted poet.
… I could think of no one better to work with me on
bringing
Wisteria to life with music. The poems emerge
out of this South Carolina soil — they emerge out of the
generosity of South Carolina's women and men — those old
African-American people who have survived so much."
Composer Simmonds told Woodoff, " ... more music emerges
when [Dawes] reads [his poems]," he said. "Fortunately,
I was able to find 'additional' music, especially
writing for the stunning voices I have to work with."
Those stunning voices are Valetta Brinson, an opera
singer from Memphis, Tenn., and soprano Valerie Johnson,
a professor of music at Bennett College in Greensboro,
N.C.
Simmonds' music is an integral part of Sunday's
presentation.
His work for strings, flute and voice draws on
spirituals, classical music and popular music and is
wrought with his sense of place and texture. The
composer, who wrote the music while he was completing
his doctoral studies in the College of Music at USC, is
traveling from San Francisco to be a part of this event.
Dawes' previous readings from
Wisteria have received
enthusiastic reviews. When he read from the book at
Jamaica's Calabash Festival, the Chicago Sun-Times'
religion writer Cathleen Falsani wrote "His poetry had
seized us. By our spirits."
In a description that accurately describes the works in
"
Wisteria, Dawes told Falsani, "Very often, poetry is
about using language to articulate that which is
difficult to articulate, which is the emotional space
that we find ourselves in, and the things that have
allowed us to reach that emotional space."
The poems in the book were written over a period of
years after many meetings with "the elders of Manning
Avenue and the Southside." Dawes notes in his
acknowledgments that " ... these men and women in their
seventies and eighties ... taught me something about
being southern and black: Mrs. Odom, Mrs. Jones, Mrs.
Richardson, Mrs. Sanders, Mrs. Tarleton, Mr. Ross and
Mr. Thrower. These poems are not transcriptions of their
voices, but a rendering that comes through our shared
language of the Middle Passage and the many journeys we
have all taken."
Most of the 41 poems do not identify the person who
inspired them. Lana Odom, director of the South Sumter
Resource Center, who facilitated Dawes' meetings with
the elders, including her own mother, said the poems
offer universal insights.
"I don't need to know which one is my mother's," she
said.
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Wisteria, Twilight Songs from the Swamp Country
By
Kwame Dawes
Contents
One / Wisteria
| Wister |
15 |
| Recreation |
16 |
|
Tornado Child
|
18 |
| Courting |
20 |
| Hawk |
22 |
| DEM |
24 |
|
Banking |
26 |
| Time |
27 |
| Still Born |
28 |
| Gender |
30 |
| Dreaming |
32 |
| Long Memory |
34 |
| Skin |
36 |
| Script |
37 |
|
Black Funk
|
39 |
| Memory |
41 |
Two / Traveling Woman
| Traveling |
45 |
| Scrapbook |
46 |
| Swamp Song |
47 |
| Work |
48 |
| Train Ride |
49 |
| God Don't Like Ugly |
51 |
| Dream |
53 |
Three / Domestics
| At the Lake |
57 |
| Love Oil |
59 |
| Stations |
61 |
| Story Time |
63 |
| Good Help |
68 |
| Grits |
70 |
| Mother and Daughter |
72 |
| Circle |
74 |
| Poems in Everyday Places |
75 |
Four / Vengeance
| School House |
79 |
|
Vengeance |
81 |
| Snapshot of the Southside |
82 |
| Sleep |
83 |
| Fire Makers |
85 |
| Sanding |
86 |
| Gardening |
87 |
Five / Obituaries
| Obituaries |
91 |
| Tall Man Flies |
93 |
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Kwame Dawes
is the author of 13 books of poetry and many books
of fiction, nonfiction, and drama, most recently
Hope's Hospice (2009) and
She's Gone (2007). He is Distinguished Poet
in Residence at the University of South Carolina,
where he directs the South Carolina Poetry
Initiative and the University of South Carolina Arts
Institute. He is the programming director of
Jamaica's Calabash International Literary Festival.
Dawes lives in Columbia, South Carolina.
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Home Is Where
An Anthology of African American Poetry
from the Carolinas
By Kwame Dawes
In
Home is Where, Kwame Dawes
compiles the work of more than two dozen
African American poets from the
Carolinas, showcasing a vast array of
original voices writing on subjects
ranging from Jim Crow to jazz, haunted
landscapes to romantic love-all in an
attempt to define the South as home.
Dawes-a nationally celebrated poet,
dramatist, scholar, novelist, essayist,
and founder of the South Carolina Poetry
Initiative at the University of South
Carolina-edits this new and unparalleled
anthology from Hub City Press.
The poets range in notoriety from
National Book Award winner Terrance
Hayes, PEN American Open Book Award
winner
Nikky Finney, and Ansfield-Wolf Book
Award winner A. Van Jordan to poets less
recognizable by name whose work readers
will immediately recognize as powerful,
musical, and accomplished. In his
introduction to the anthology, Dawes
proclaims the necessity of this
collection, not only for getting
extraordinary poetry into the hands of
readers but also for the political
importance of the voices represented.
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 11 September 2006
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