Kwame Dawes

- United States of America, Jamaica, Ghana, -

Kwame Dawes is the author of numerous books of poetry and other books of fiction, criticism, and essays. His most recent collection is Sturge Town (Peepal Tree Press, UK 2023). Dawes is Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University. He teaches in the Pacific MFA Program and is the Series Editor of the African Poetry Book Series, Director of the African Poetry Book Fund, and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. He is a Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Kwame Dawes is the winner of the prestigious Windham/Campbell Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In 2022 Dawes was awarded the Order of Distinction Commander class by the Government of Jamaica. He is the Poet Laureate of Jamaica (2025-2028).

Kwame Dawes (Cornell University, Creative Writing Program - USA) participates in the Versopolis USA mobility project, a collaborative initiative between Versopolis and the Formal Consortium of U.S. Universities and Institutions Dedicated to Poetry.

IT MAY BE A REVISION THING

I have spent so much of my life as a teacher and an editor trying to find the best way to address this most critical problem in a work—the point of the work. And the point of the work, as I have rehearsed above, has everything to do with our own sense of purpose and being. If what we are saying does not seem to justify its existence, then what does that say about us?

But I want to suggest that for many of us as teachers, our view is not that there is no there there, as they like to say, but that you have not found the there that is there. In other words, it has to be the safest and most reliable thing to TRUST that the impulse that has led you to write, no matter what it is, is pure and full of potential. Sometimes we have to examine that impulse and test it so that we can make the best use of it. Now we may fear it, but that fear is fine, too. We have to overcome the fear that if we examine it, it will somehow lose its magic.

But it is also helpful to recognize that if there is a genuine feeling behind an impulse, then it is a good beginning, a good driver for creating something. But I am making a distinction between the revising of a work and the generation of a work. I don’t think that we always know, or even need to know, why we are writing a work when we start to write the work. And by writing, I mean composing it in our heads or on the page. I think that very often, the process of writing, composing or making our art is how we start to find what we are doing, thinking, feeling and saying.

I say this to say that I believe that this discussion of the things at stake is a matter most relevant not during the composing or drafting of a work, but at the point of revising the work. In other words, we should not short-circuit (stifle, kill, thwart, silence) the creative process with those questions until we have something to actually test and question and explore. This is my core suggestion.

I allow that I may be different from other writers in this regard, but I also believe that what I will say next will resonate with most of you here. I don’t believe that I have living in me whole poems, already formed, and all I am doing is yanking them out of my belly. I believe that for me the first impulse is to make a poem. I do not know what the poem will be. But the first impulse is to make a poem. I slowly start to discover what the poem will be as I write the poem. Thus, when I think I have finished a poem, I am aware that what has happened is that I have been discovering what is at stake (or is important, of value, risky, revelatory, etc.) in the poem as I have made the poem. But I also have a global series of values that guide my life and what I want my work to do. I want what I create to matter. I want what I create to be truthful. I want what I create to have a quality of urgency and need that if it is taken away, if it is hidden, something of value would have been lost in the world. But, above all, I want what I have written to have successfully found the language and craft to somehow do justice to what I have imagined and felt. What is at stake is that sincerity of thought and feeling.

This Poet’s Reason

You see, if forced to, I could come up with a list of things that come to bear on why I make poems. I never assume that the making of poems and the sharing of poems is a matter of just expression. In other words, saying that I am just trying to express myself has never satisfied me as a reason to write poems. I quickly move to what I am expressing. So, while I believe in the battle to protect the right to express (it is a human right thing), I live in a place where I devote more of my time to understanding what I am expressing. I could call it a manifesto, but that would suggest that I arrived at this list through the construction of intent and ideology, to then arrive at this “reason”. The truth is that I have arrived at this list by looking at almost forty years of practice and seeing the ways in which I have come to understand what I have been doing. I will not return to this list to determine whether I am living up to some rule or goal, but I will likely return to it to see if it has changed. I believe that this is a list that changes, that shifts. I don’t believe that what drives me should be the same for anyone else, nor do I imagine that my list of reasons should be shared as instructions for others. Instead, I share it as one does in a memoir, to trace the meaning of my own sense of being and self. And I share it as something deeply personal and that I consider important only to me.

“…home is which part yuh waan to bury…”

Monument

At twelve I monumentalized the towers

of the past: my primary school, its rounded

halls, the hollow empty classrooms where we did

sums, the sweet confusion of first lust’s powers,

unspeakable dreams where my new body soured

in itself. I entered the dense gully, where, grounded

in memory, first secrets were made. My body, confounded

by dread and need, erupted warm ivory flowers.

And falling, falling, I felt the grand release

of elation and fear.

I declare that we are what

we make of joy, what we make of calming peace.

I have often told this memory, (it is not

news), for that day the sky blued the more, and slick with grease

in that shelter, I blessed it the holiest of holy spots.

I write to make sense of what is in me. More than that, I write to find out what is in me and to then find a way to express this with beauty.

I write to know what I know I know and what I feel. I write essays, novels and plays, but I don’t find that they allow for the ways in which my feelings and experiences and feelings and intellect and delight come together with the pure contradiction of lived experience—everything happening at once. Poetry comes with so many ways to engage my inner self with its complications with its lack of linearity, with its layers and with its sensuality and feeling and facts, that I have come to trust it as a way to help me negotiate what I am thinking of feeling or seeing.

I write to record that which I fear I will forget because I have forgotten so much and I want to somehow find a way to keep it. And that thing has to be honest, as honest as I can be, otherwise what is the point?

I write to find a way to expose my secret self. But that secret self does not burden itself with the labels of the pure and the sordid but wants to treat it all as truth—a sacred truth. I have a self that is rooted in fear, desire, faith, joy, love, there is so much deep feeling when I think of my family, my wife, my children, my friends. I have found that poetry has allowed me a space to navigate and express these things.

I write because I want to touch something in others, to successfully immerse myself in what I think others—specific others—think or feel, and to have them recognize this as a gift or as a way of my showing attention, love, care—it is power, maybe, but it is also a desire to be with others.

I write to recreate and somehow return to that which has moved me.

I write because I consider myself part of the tribe of poets that extends throughout time and the world, but I also consider myself part of the tribe of my people who have fought to find ways to record our presence in the world against all odds—in this sense, I am a small speck but an important speck of continuity that says, “We were here.”

I write because I want to leave a mark of what is happening around me in this world. I write because of the silences that have haunted the tribe of mine, the race of mine, the people of mine. I write to chronicle the world I am in because I have been given the chance and the skill to do so. This is a driving force. It keeps me going and going, and I believe that somehow, I have marked out a small spot of memory in this world that might at least say here is a black Africa/ Jamaica who has found in language a way to chronicle the last sixty years.

I write to continue the traditions that fed me. To create that space that I still live in. The space of reading or listening alone. The imaginative transportation that takes me somewhere, and that teaches me how to laugh, cry, weep, think, grown angry, desire, hunger, and fear. And I want to create such moments for others.

Hundreds of poets have been taught by me, and many, I know, look to be to be faithful to the art, to be faithful to excellence, to always reach for hard-fought beauty, and I want to not let them down, and so I want to have the work be of value and meaning and skill.

When my father died, we were on the cusps of starting to talk about art, about writing, about his past, because the rituals of parenting are complex, and in many ways, as I have seen, the time for those conversations arrives when a child is at a certain stage. My father died unexpectedly, suddenly, in an accident. And with his death went a world of things he could share with me, teach me about being a writer, an artist, a man, I sensed this and felt it. But I soon discovered that he had left me something of that conversation in his art, both that which he had published and especially that which he had not published. His letters, his scrap books, his drafts of poems, his speeches, his diaries. And I consumed them. I was trained by them, tutored by them. I have three children, and I have nieces and nephews and maybe they will one day need this thing—to see a whole life in art, and to retrieve it—a flawed, complicated and honest self. And I feel that everything I write is an attempt to share the deepest self with them. It may be a fantasy, but it is startlingly true that at least it will be available—I will be available. And so, I write out of deep respect for them. That is what is at stake. I do not believe that we are all built with this need. But there are people in the world, in our families and in our lives who are, and what we leave for them is important, urgent and needful.

I believe that I am a chronicler of the sentiment of my time. I feel the world, and I pay attention. I believe I am always, as Paul Simon sang, “born at the right time” and whatever conspired to bring me here now, and to take me to the places where I have been, conspired to ensure that when I leave someone will say, “The poet was here and that poet left a record of us being here”. This is not arrogance, it is vocation, but it is burden, and it is desperation.

I am a poet of the great mythic and historic narrative of the African Diaspora. This is my personal story and my family’s story, and what I consider the story of my time. I have discovered in this understanding a powerful and expansive source of legacy, inheritance, pain, beauty, joy, mystery and understanding. This is my legacy and at the same time it is not my legacy. But there is this body; this body. I write this body into the world, and the world has been writing this body as well, and it is this conversation that sits at the heart of my poems.

Essay written by Kwame Dawes

More about the poet

Poetry

AT ANCHOR: THE REAL SITUATION /

for Bob Marley,  Bavaria, October 1980

In the brilliant morning on a fishing boat,
a dying man dreams of Jamaica,
of the murmur of soft waves.
Here, at anchor, apart from the ordinary lull
of the easy tide, there is peace. |
He cannot know that, in seven months,
the weight of wool on his shoulders will be lifted,
that in the soft gloom of a German chalet
in deep January he will anticipate with terror his death,
rewriting his theology of eternity, shadowed
by the swirling clouds, the bickering sycophants,
the friends who will not stop to pray,
frightened as they are by the end of the crusade.
Here, he already knows that his last songs
convey the weight of a man sitting by the sea,
staring out into its slithering metallic green
and imagining his words as prayers,
for a truth unfettered by the promise
of another morning. The sea is so unremarkable
that it becomes an exquisite maw. What a lofty
standard of beauty that is for a song.
THE PRODIGAL CONVERSES WITH THE LAND /

1
Cape Coast:

I am a city in translation. What I say to you is not in the language
I carry. You will never understand the pidgin of my soil

because you are always a foreigner. It is true
that your grandmother’s bones are interred in me,

and I know you hoped that by returning to me
you would hear her speaking. But you must know

that even more desperate people have come,
asking for some sound to carry through.

At least you know that I was named by white people,
and they have left the noise of atrocities here,

so that when those who come back, year after year,
instead of speaking of the drama of the ocean

beating against the shore, instead of the shouts and songs
of the fishermen dragging their catch across the dark sand

for the women to collect and take to the market, instead
of the clubs, the hi-life, the scent of bread baking at night,

instead of the deep forests that reach the edge
of the sea, and the way the sun sets on Elmina,

instead of this, all they can talk of are the ones
who were collected here and taken across the waters,

only to return as interlopers, people with foreign tongues,
who do not understand our language of centuries.

We are the Akan. We are warriors, the broken companies
of the Oguaa. This means nothing to you. What you know

is the smell of soap and algae in the gutters, and the way the brine
in the lagoons thickens in the air; the addiction to akara

and the tart heat of pepper; and the tom-ba, tom-ba
of the mortar and pestle, the familiar sounds of heart and hearth:

these are the things that you will talk about, places
of nostalgia, of home. But all places know themselves

by the blood that has been shed there, the sadness
that will always haunt the laughter of this place.

Here is that church where your Mammy, the Pentecostal woman,
found her own Jesus, saw the coil of a python on the heavy shoulder

of her daughter, your mother, and they cast out the demon curse
on her, freed her from what would have consumed her.

She was young then, the age of your youngest
daughter. But she remembers, Chochoo remembers.

2
Kwame:

I know that the invention of memory, the silence before memory is made –
the imagined comfort of language, though failing every time,

though betraying my inner head and liver – is what I have,
is what we all carry. I lied when I said I found

the translation of this land into something like a nation,
or home, or comfort, or the spirits of ancestors –

I lied, and still I will say to you who stand at the gates
of this village, “Tell Mammy her grandson,

the one she teased, tell her he is asking to be let in,
and he is craving her fresh baked bread.”
WELSH /

For Neville

You smoked a pipe,
loved to stare in the camera’s eye,
made of it a twinkle or a wink.
Those were the days of gin and tonic,
the days when you believed in the magic
of your fertile brain, when they hailed
genius in your body, the mastery
over bat and ball, the lithe
youthful walk, the muscles
alert, full of suicidal daring.
That was you. So perhaps
it was no surprise when
in 1949, in a small pub
in Wales, where the regulars
were so coal-stained they called
themselves niggers, they
thought a man who could play
the piano like you, drink like you,
run a hundred yards like you,
and fill your pipe with aroma
like you, had to be at least
as good as the worst Welshman,
and that was good enough
for the twisting, twirling Shakespearean
rag, fa-la-la, fa-la-lee, la-la.
RECALL /

Reggae’s insinuating bass cleaves to my bloodline.
All is quiet under southern skies.
Tomorrow I will go blind for what I have not seen.
It’s a price I must pay.
Tomorrow, my last laugh will scatter over the dry leaves
of live oaks’ shedding. I have heard no ragamuffin
in months. I have forgotten the roll
of my waistline, the offbeat skank.
It is like grief, this emptying, this silence,
waiting for the rush of stones.
I am dreaming now in a smooth southern drawl,
and we have found the muddied bodies,
eye sockets and teeth dragged from the swamp
by FBI agents in their clean white shirts and walkie-talkies.
The reeds are unmoved; they swing back in place
like rubber. Been watching too much
Mississippi Burning and Eyes on the Prize.
Still, it’s true that they lynched someone in Florence
a month ago. On the roadside, a rusting Cadillac,
once green, now chewing grass sloppily
from its gaping windows and bullet-riddled skin,
ticks in the heat. I am dreaming in blue notes,
gospel calling, responding, sing-talking,
yes, swing-talking my way to salvation.
Oh, pipe me back to my familiar earth,
for it is slipping slowly from me.
STURGE TOWN /

i

In this fantasy of home-
coming, the termites,
out of respect, have vacated
the elegant homestead of delicate
filigreed panels and jalousies
that speak of a century ago,
and allowed the trees
to crowd in and shelter
the graveyard, the pimento
barbecue and the porch,
until the return. Of course,
the house is rotting;
the squatters abandoned
it for better walls,
and the prodigals
have not returned.

ii

For too long I spoke of return, a kind
of prodigal fantasy, although, face
set against the sun, I had abandoned
the waywardness of the failed son.
My father is long dead, and I was
faithful to the last. Still, postcolonial
that I am, I built my own myth
of departure, set aside the romance
of the exile for the pragmatics
of family and mission. Return
was to what might have been
had my ancestors lived longer,
had they held on to the cottage
on the hill. To Sturge Town’s
pimento barbecue decks,
the green of an island’s history
marching along the narrow paths
of the enslaved trodding
to the cane fields, I return as one
who visited once. Still, my heart
goldens in warmth to see
he grey slab with DAWES
etched into stone.
IT BRUISES, TOO /

The haunting has killed before.
Find words to describe the stone
heavy in the bowels. Before us
are the disasters we make
of our lives. I am a clumsy
journeyman. You find me
on a road that curls across green
plains. You’ll see me with my staff
from many miles away. We follow
the contours the mountains
make of the road until, hours
later, after two light showers
and a burst of sunlight, we meet.
I tell you I am doing penance,
and swear that these words
I am speaking are the breaking
of a long fast, and my voice
sounds alien even to me.
You ask why I wince like that.
“The silence,” I say. “It bruises, as well.”
And after the elation of this meeting,
we part, you towards the light, me,
into the gloom you left behind.
WHAT A FATHER GIVES /

There was an impatience in your genius that was admirable
if never endearing, the way you regarded as ordinary,
the product of that most common of gifts –sense,
as if it’s in the air, floating by, asking anyone to pluck it,
and only a fool or a scatterbrain lets it slip by.
So, you instructed with a callous disbelief when you
encountered someone who simply could not do the ordinary,
most humble of things: hammer a nail straight, imagine
the calculus of wood, its substance, its bend,
its swell, the mechanics of shaving, cutting,
the pure exquisite grace of the snug fit
of plank with plank. Just use your head!
Look, look, look –easy as that! Were you
simply ignorant of your genius, of the gift
you had been given? That would be quaint, loveable,
but you were so convinced of the ordinariness
of your craft you imagined all of us should
manage to replicate it, that we were lazy,
snobbish, blind, not to be able to do the same.
I long envied and feared your elegant carpentry –
the gift so freighted with dismissive self-deprecation,
a gift you gave your daughter, so it became hard
to reassure her that she was not the product
of child labour, or one forced into the family trade,
but that her hands and eyes, her brain of quick solutions,
the capacity to unlock the complex language
of flowers, trees, wood, stone, flour, and the secret
ingredients in food –that these were all
signs of grace, gifts of genius. But it helps to know
where it all comes from, it helps to know.
WORK /

Nine days to go, working for the next day
— Bob Marley “Work”

It is easy to slide over the word work;
take it to mean what it isn’t.
Look at this man’s hands, look
at the toughness in his fingers,
the way his nails darken at the edges,
the way his skin is marked
by old scars, the way his palms
are leather-tough – a grater of skin
if he drags them over your arm.
Those hands still remember
the grooves where the blisters
would settle and then harden
to toughness from holding the handle
of the clumsy seed-planter
bouncing on the uneven furrows,
planting, planting. Sometimes it’s easier
not to know that on the plantation
out there on James Island,
every morning, seven days a week,
a bell sounds out, just thirty minutes
left before you line up by the fields
to start to sweat all day
to pay rent on that wood shingle
and mud chimney that they’ve given you.
And if you miss a day, your family
will lose shelter. That is work,
keeping the wolves from your door,
the left foot following the right,
the sickle swinging, the dirt
on your skin, and the shadow
over you when the script runs out.
Work is always behind, always owing
somebody something – payment in June
for debt from December when the cold
reached into your gut, held you down.
Work is one pair of shoes each season –
 grown man barefoot all summer long,
and mules for the freeze all winter.
Work is the crocus sack, stained
with dung and sweat, smacking your back,
filled with cotton. Work is the day
you think you are grown enough
to run, to stop this constant stepping back,
only to find that big-bellied white man
with his straw hat, overalls, cigar
in his mouth and black-as-night shades,
with a shotgun in his hand saying,
“Here are some stripes, nigger,
nice stripes to help you work better.
Now you get three meals a day, uncle;
now you get a bed to sleep on, boy;
now you got something to live for.”
Work is the time you spend trying to eat away
the time you owe; work is all a nigger has
for sure, and work tells you that nobody,
nobody is going to give you something
for nothing. Work is like breathing,
but after a while there is no more
breathing left, and every breath
is a loan, and your pocket is empty,
and you will never pay it back. Work is all
a man has, and work is nothing,
nothing at all; work, work, work, work...
ON HEARING NEWS OF ANOTHER BLACK MAN SHOT /

I ask you for the lemon-green room, the room
where colour enfolds, leaving a soft
and comforting green over the worn
books and discarded folders. Let me describe
this green as the light filtering through
the shade of leaves. Imagine a bowl
of green olives or grapes in their variable
shades: this is the green I’m thinking of,
or a green that’s settled after an explosion,
or the multi-voiced shades of my island.
I must be clear about this, for green
is as fickle as the bodies we live in.
I’ll sit there, dappled, as if there are trees
filtering light over me. Over there a lime tree,
stunted by the entanglement of its roots
in the pot, smiles sheepishly in the corner.
How addictive is the green shade that
covers me now; without it, I become
a creature shuddering for the caress
of tender light. I am feeling the news,
the chattering noises, the illogic
of another black body broken by bullets,
by the heaviest of sorrows.
Forgive me, friend, for asking you to take me
into your verdant backroom. Forgive me
if I sit quietly in the corner rocking, hoping, maybe,
for earth to hold steady my vegetable self.
from DECUBITUS IN FIVE PARTS /

After Santiago Carbonell’s La Persistencia de la Pintura

1
After the Rebels

“It was as if Death,” she said, “Halted us,
and said, you came to find me, and you
think you have, not till now – this
that you don’t want to look at, this
is me.” She took the photo of the long
tree lined boulevard, the one that
connected the grand mansions that
were now gutted, their white walls,
black with soot. There was no scent;
the snowless winter took care of that;
the ice crystals floating in the air
a kind of deodorant against decay
and rot. He was dressed in a black
tweed suit, a tailored shirt, still
brilliant white in spots, and though
the fabric was rent, the cloth
stained in parts with blood, one
could see how it ended, his leg
thrown apart, his arms wide open
with the kind of resignation that
followed the crossed arms of self
protection; as if to say, okay, okay,
I resign my body to you. The crows
had been there. The skull, for that
is what it was despite the preserving
ice and chill, despite the known
fact that the assassination had
happened only a week before; the skull
was almost clean but filthy as
detritus, the kind of careless stained
filth you wrap in a garbage bag and
discard, the skull was almost detached,
and the crows had chosen the head, easily
reached, none of the distraction of
frozen cloth. She said, smoking,
“This was death, for me at last;
and I took the photo; so that
only late at night in the dark room
would I see that what he rested on
was not a shadow, but the residue of him,
a kind of afterlife, the thing that
will remain on the cobbled ground
long after he was lifted onto
the cart, and taken to the open
fields of his estate.”
IN THIS SAYING /

i

There is a way to end books;
the gathered papers, their weighty
gift—the clean parade of words

in columns of paragraphs and in columns
of images—the tidiness of things—
and numbered, they form the thing

you have labored over for years.
To end a book, you tie a blue ribbon
around the heft, make a bow, kiss it.

ii

The way to end the year of cataclysms
is to find a piece of land by water,
where old boats rot at the edges,

and the place smells of ancient things,
sulfur, salt, rotting fish, and
the deep musk of mud and grass.

To then sit on a moving jetty,
rocking against the universe’s
pulse, and there wait for the moon.

iii

To end this way alone, is to end
with the hollow melancholy
of loss and regret. Better to end

with the voice of your woman—
for you will need that voice
ordinary as rain, talking your name.

Perhaps it is the intrusion of her scent
filling the air, or the cool of her touch
slick with tomato pulp and herbs.

iv

I know the gender
of this poem, do not
worry, it is because

I know the name
of the bodies standing
in the dusk by water:

Kwame and Lorna.
They will hold hands,
and in this saying, the poem ends.

Kwame Dawes

- United States of America, Jamaica, Ghana, -

Poetry

AT ANCHOR: THE REAL SITUATION /

THE PRODIGAL CONVERSES WITH THE LAND /

WELSH /

RECALL /

STURGE TOWN /

IT BRUISES, TOO /

WHAT A FATHER GIVES /

WORK /

ON HEARING NEWS OF ANOTHER BLACK MAN SHOT /

from DECUBITUS IN FIVE PARTS /

IN THIS SAYING /