#anthony kellman

[black-whole]

...The complex texture stemming from the interplay of so many factors or voices is not characterized by fragmentation but rather by an all-encompassing sense of connectedness or wholeness.’

ANTHONY KELLMAN’S POLYPHONIC POETIC AND CULTURAL IDENTITY

[caribbeanwriters]

CONVERSATION WITH A DEAD POLITICIAN

Then Genevieve did something she had never done before. — F.A Hoyos, Tom Adams: A Biography The shadow of the sun followed the sun.  Then you, the shadow, broke at the seams  and the maggots sexed in peace.  Behind your inherited beaming wit,  a seed of darkness glinted (the spoilt child’s dance)  when we turned you on in our living rooms on Budget Day,  your reeded voice smooth and low as any Smirnoff ad.  We smelt your Machiavelli through the screen!  Your heart danced on your tongue! It shone through your eyes! Our love was a land gulping every inch of water,  and when the seam broke and the cocaine crawled  across the island’s screen, the c.i.a projected  your image on our minds and we wanted to stare away because your father, old Sir Grantley, was such a good man. An ox was strapped to everyone’s tongue – the journalists,  even the Opposition, and the police (especially the police).  Your friend, the Syrian Mr. Guzman, charged for possession;  O the fever broke but only to rise higher. The Police rasped: ‘Me hands tied. Me hands tied. O me hands tied up.’ Next week, Genevieve, whose hand you took on British soil,  did something she had never done before: after lunch,  she unfurled her silent demure beauty toward the city to shop while, alone, you fell to the bedroom floor,  sprawled on your back,  clutching your prized album of stamps. No autopsy. No investigation. The nation tortured its face into a smile. I didn’t even hear one palm tree mourn. Did you...? Did the c.i.a...? Did a jealous lover...? Did Castro, remembering Grenada...? Did Genevieve...? - Anthony Kellman was born in Barbados in 1955, educated at Combermere School, at UWI (Cave Hill) and in the U.S. At eighteen he left for Britain where he worked as a troubadour playing pop and West Indian folk music on the pub and folk club circuit. He recalls that this was ‘glamorous and a great deal of fun’, but when the ‘harsh realities’ of living as a full-time musician set in, he enrolled in a journalism training programme.  In 1987 he left Barbados for the USA where he studied for a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing at Lousiana State University. After completing in 1989 he moved to Augusta State University, Georgia, where he is a professor of English and creative writing. He finds considerable resonances between the Caribbean and the Southern states in the USA, which feed into his poetry, where blue jays, dogwoods and wisteria rub shoulders with angel fish, sugarcane and coral reefs. In 1990 Peepal Tree published his third book of poetry, Watercourse, (which appeared with a glowing endorsement from Edouard Glissant), the novel, The Coral Rooms (1994), The Long Gap (1996) and Wings of a Stranger (2000). A second novel, The Houses of Alphonso is due in 2004. All his work has a powerful involvement with landscape, both as a living entity shaping peoples’ lives and as a source of metaphor for inner processes. The limestone caves of Barbados have provided a particularly fertile source of inspiration.  He is currently working on a long narrative poem written in the rhythms of tuk, the indigenous musical form of Barbados. In 1992 he edited the first full-length U.S. anthology of English-speaking Caribbean poetry, Crossing Water. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, his poetry, fiction and critical essays have appeared in journals all over the world.