Happy Easter

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Here is a poem.It is not new, but it is Eastery.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Long Island, Bahamas: An Easter Meditation (two of the 5 parts)liruins44. Easter Sunday: RemembranceThe congregation’s young and old; few in between.A young man shakes my hand. His palm is hard—a worker’s palm—and hopeful for a wife.We honour woman-courage on this day:an empty tomb before Black Mary’s gaze.The women who aren’t girls all let themselves wear fatthat cloaks hard muscle, big hearts, brass voices.Their eyes are soft. Their green-eyed childreninhabit skins the shades of sand, of soil,of treebark, eggshell, cedar, earth, red loam.The braveheart women weep, and laugh.The rain falls with the Gospel.Christ is gone, the angel sings,and the silver rain falls down.linorthside5. Easter Monday: The North SideThis Atlantic: bluer than sacrament, brighter than pain,supplier of buoy-pots, candlewax, quilt-scraps, wrecks,ballastbricks for chimneystoves, old tyres for shoes,string and winecasks and even, maybe, bones—the things ships cast off when passing byor sinking down.The resurrection side.A blue hole swallows the unwary, offers upits perfect mystery. A thousand feet from shorea shelf dives undersea a thousand fathoms deep.The North Side ridge looks down. The water’s stripesbleed turquoise, blue, and indigo.You stare into the risen sun until you know.lishore5

Lent/Elegies and the Nanopress

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Some time ago now, the announcement went out that I had published another book. When people began to congratulate me on this, I wasn't sure what they were talking about. Then I realized they were referring to the chapbook Lent / Elegies, a collection of poems that I wrote after the death of my mother. A chapbook is a little different from a book book in that it is smaller, generally comprised of poetry, and it's often done by very small presses, or by the poet herself. My book was a bit of both.Nic Sebastian, an online fellow-poet, created the idea of what she calls the nanopress as a way of publishing collections of poetry. This idea grew out of a number of meditations on the state of publishing, the purpose of poetry, the role of the internet, and the liberation of the word from the page. Here is her description of the nanopress:

The nanopress is a single-publication, purpose-formed poetry press that brings together, on a one-time basis, an independent editor’s judgment and gravitas and a poet’s manuscript. The combination effectively by-passes both the poetry-contest gamble and the dwindling opportunities offered by existing poetry presses, while still applying credible ‘quality control’ measures to the published work.

And here's what she says about the genesis of it:

my personal perspective is that there is no money in poetry and that poetry sits very uneasily in the traditional commercial publishing paradigm. I envision the nanopress as a completely no-profit, non-financial undertaking, with the editor providing editing services on a volunteer basis, the published book sold at cost-price only, and the poetry also delivered free via the web. In the case of Lordly Dish Nanopress, we published book, CD, e-reader and website versions of Nic’s collection. The book and CD are available at no-profit cost-price from the print-on-demand publisher, the e-book is a free download, and the poems (both text and audio) are available free on the website.Be clear why you are doing this: are you trying to make money by selling your poems, or are you trying to get your poems read as widely as possible?

Almost a year ago, Nic put out an invitation for people to submit concepts for nanopress publications to her. She would oversee their production, and she would help get them into print. I spoke to Sonia Farmer, my editor from Poinciana Paper Press, and she came on board, and we submitted the project to Nic. I wrote the poems and sent them to Sonia. She arranged them, discussed titles with me, sourced the cover image (Stan Burnside's fabulous "Age Ain Nuttin But a Number"), corresponded with Nic, looked over proofs, did everything an editor is supposed to do. Lent / Elegies is the result.Nic did all the formatting for us, and even began to work on the audio for me. She has published two of her own chapbooks by nanopress, Forever Will End On Thursday, collection edited by Jill Alexander Essbaum, published by Lordly Dish Nanopress, and Dark And Like A Web, chapbook edited by Beth Adams, published by Broiled Fish & Honeycomb Nanopress. The audio didn't make it yet; Nic had to abandon a lot of her poetry work owing to the interference of what other people might call real life, and I had real problems finding a space quiet enough for me to make recordings that passed Nic's high standards. I'm still working on recording all the poems so that eventually they will all have audio recordings attached and be downloadable as an MP3 file and burnable on a Lulu.com CD. But that will come in time.So here's the thing. Yes, I've published another book. It's called Lent / Elegies and it's a nanopress chapbook. That means you can read the poems for free online, here, or you can download the collection free in ebook form from Smashwords here, or you can order a hard copy from Lulu.com, ($7 + shipping, stamp tax, and 10% duty) here, or buy it from me, which will cost you a flat $3 more per book, as I have to cover the cost of shipping, landing, duty, and delivery, and because I don't like dealing with dollar bills for change.I just love the concept. The book's apparently not too awful either.

Goodbye, Telcine

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Woman Take Two by Telcine Turner-RolleYesterday, Arien Rolle, my former student and always friend, posted on Facebook that his mother, Telcine Turner-Rolle, Bahamian playwright, poet, storyteller, teacher and friend, had succumbed to the cancer she has been fighting for years.I cannot begin to express my sorrow at the news. I can't imagine a world without Telcine in it. I have known her, and of her, it seems all my life. She was my mother's friend and colleague in the early years of the College of The Bahamas. She was my colleague when I got my first adjunct appointment at the College to teach literature in 1986; she, like me, taught luminous young Bahamian intellectuals such as Ian Strachan and Tony Bethell—otherwise known by his professional intellectual name, Ian A. Bethell-Bennett. She alone, of Dr. Strachan's admiring teachers—he was an outstanding student, and his brain and his heart made him universally loved—dared to flunk him for not doing his work, which meant that, he couldn't give the valedictorian speech he had planned to give at graduation. He challenged the grade; she won. She was uncompromising, unrelenting, a hard taskmaster, not content to let talent languish untrained or untested. I am sure she pushed Ian because she knew just how brilliant he was, and she was not afraid to do so. She frightened me.Later, when I took over teaching full time, I had the pleasure of teaching Telcine's only child and son Arien in a class of people almost as brilliant as the first class I ever taught, which was at COB when I met Ian and Tony  for the first time. Meeting Telcine the mother was an entirely new experience. Telcine the uncompromising, the brilliant, the prize-winning playwright, regarded Arien as her greatest work, and he was a work in progress. She raised him as she saw fit—which didn't necessarily mesh with what anyone else thought, not even the redoubtable Sammie Bethell at St. Anne's. When Telcine judged Arien was not well enough to go to school, she kept him home, and would send him later with expertly written notes on memorable paper—tinted sometimes, scented sometimes, always incontestable. Arien, for his part, was the most well-balanced, self-contained, even-tempered student I had yet met, who tolerated his mother's attentions without ever complaining.I knew and worked with Telcine's husband and widower, James. He had worked with my father before me, and had charge of the art that went through the Cultural Affairs Division, and was in charge of Jumbey Village before its destruction in the late 1980s. He was one of the senior civil servants who took over as acting Director of Cultural Affairs in the seven years that passed between my father's death and the appointment of Cleophas Adderley to that post. He, like Telcine, invested his own brand of excellence into Arien, and he also invested himself into Telcine, who was always uncompromising and often considered "difficult".There is a reason that her masterpiece, Woman Take Two, was not performed for many years after it won the Commonwealth Prize for literature. This was because she was as uncompromising about its direction as she had been about writing it. She should have directed the play herself; but she wanted it handled by someone else. Not until 1994, when David Burrows began his local directing career, did she find someone who would be as accommodating of her views of the play as he was enthusiastic about the play itself, and so it was David Burrows—David Jonathan, as Telcine insisted on calling him—who had the honour of staging Woman Take Two for the first time, almost twenty years after it was written. The bond he developed with Telcine lasted for the rest of her life, as she was as loyal to her friends and allies as she was uncompromising, unconventional, and perfectionist.I think that as I write this, I am expressing the deep admiration, and, I admit it, the little bit of fear, that I had for and of Telcine. I respected her craft, which was as rigourous as her talent was great. In our country, where talented people often simply let their talent run wild, Telcine was a hard taskmaster. I got the sense that she let nothing leave her desk until she was completely finished with it. She had a mind like a razor, and if she ever offered criticism you'd better take it and follow it. She was one of our greatest playwrights, and one of our best known and beloved. She was an unconventional mother, but a successful one; her son Arien is a gentleman and a scholar. I happen to agree with Telcine that he has not yet achieved his full potential—he is a young man who is brimming over with talent—but he is her greatest work.This week I grieve with Arien and James, and with the rest of the cultural community of The Bahamas. We have lost one of our greatest stars. May Telcine Turner-Rolle rest in peace, and may we honour her lifelong commitment to excellence with excellence of our own.

Nassau, What Happened?

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Check this out:

Nassau, What Happened? Is a group project that anyone can contribute to by adding his or her own line to a collective poem about the city of Nassau. It will be part of Transforming Spaces 2012 under the theme of “Fibre”.Inspired by an exercise by the poetry festival O, Miami, this exercise is designed to bring many voices together at once in order to hint at a larger, complex voice.via Nassau, What Happened?.

CRB • A Surveyor’s Journal • Ishion Hutchinson

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The more I read by Hutchinson the more he sticks with me. To wit:

I hemmed into my skin this hymn:

O lemming souls of the mass migration that ended in drowningO embroidered heart and marigold wrists that brushed the copperbrown fieldO cargoes that left the dengue jungles and ended on the yellow fever shoresO compass points that needled the new to the old, stitching meridians into one tenseO reflecting telescope that spied the endangered specimens

via CRB • A Surveyor’s Journal • Ishion Hutchinson

An oldie but goodie: Kei deconstructs dichotomies

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Reading round the web in search of wisdom on/by Kei Miller (for this review that Nicholas has surely contracted hitmen to squeeze out of me), I found this,

A description of the successful “page” or “sit-down” poet is, perhaps, someone who has typically published poems in a few major journals, who has a couple books published by a well-respected press, who preferably knows how to hob-nob with the best of them, and is invited to give readings by the National Poetry Society of America. In all likelihood he is, like most sit-down poets, a bitch, and probably, as a day job, holds a faculty position at some stuffy 500 year-old university. In other words – me.The “stage” or “stand-up” poet, on the other hand, has probably won a couple slams and is invited to give performances on BET. He is youngish—not yet thirty—and has funky hair. He would ideally like hip-hop and reggae and fit into that strange demographic America has invented to describe all things non-middle-class and non-white: in other words, he would be “urban.” He is completely social – gregarious even. If he went to university at all, he didn’t finish; he dropped out at the same time the university asked him to leave, and decided then he would become a poet, ranting against the system and all kinds of oppression. In other words – me.That these two descriptions should inhabit one body is perhaps the source of my schizophrenia, because typically I’ve learnt only to embrace the first. So consider this: although I almost never need to look at a book or a printed page to recite any of my poems, I have begun to take blank sheets of paper up with me to podiums, to shuffle through and glance down occasionally at their emptiness, all to give the illusion that I am reading – to remind the audience that I am not performing, or slamming, and that literature is coming, only inconveniently at that moment, from where I stand. Really, at my essence (I’m trying to declare) I am a sit-down poet.via Kei Miller: 91st Meridian V6 #2 International Writing Program, The University of Iowa.

Yeah. One day when I've dented my to-do list satisfactorily, I'll say something about it. But if not, or till then, this is worth some thought, if not a real hard read.

The Caribbean Review of Books • A bimonthly review of Caribbean literature, art, and culture

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Just to remind people who may have forgotten, the Caribbean Review of Books flourishes online. Check out the year-end posts!

The 2010 CRB books of the year . . .Eleven standout books published last year, as chosen by the CRB’s editors: four books of fiction, three of poems, a biography, a book of literary essays, works of anthropology and cultural studies, and an album of photographs.via The Caribbean Review of Books • A bimonthly review of Caribbean literature, art, and culture.

Announcing Mama Lily and the Dead

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This chapbook has been almost 10 years in the making. Yes, I write slowly. But it's here! Launched on Wednesday December 29th at the Hub, Mama Lily and the Dead is a collection of poems about the life of one woman, my paternal grandmother. It's been a while. Copies are available from the publisher, Poinciana Paper Press, and maybe, maybe, after I finish delivering all my belated Christmas presents, from me.Cheers.

BWSI 2010

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BWSI 2010!Bahamas Writers' Summer Workshop 2010. First public meeting/discussion @ the Hub is ongoing. First - what? Panel? Reclaiming the Bahamian imaginal. Discussion about where we situate ourselves and how and how writing must be situated in the imagination of a nation.Commodification of the self - of the national and the personal self - the colonization of the imagination. The separation of the self from the earth. So much to say and more.Who? Lynn Sweeting, poet; Patti Glinton-Meicholas, writer; Keisha Ellis, writer; Christi Cartwright, writer, interviewed by Helen Klonaris.Saturday, July 17th, 7pm @ The HubRestorying the Bahamian Imaginal LandscapeKeisha Ellis, Patricia Glinton-Meicholas, Lynn Sweeting, Christi Cartwright (Interviewer: Helen Klonaris)

More on the Caribbean Review of Books

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The Caribbean Review of Books • A bimonthly review of Caribbean literature, art, and culture

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Big congratulations to Nicholas and company for this venture.I'll be checking back regularly!

A note to our readers: Welcome to the new website of The Caribbean Review of Books. From May 2004 to May 2009, the CRB published twenty-one quarterly print issues, featuring reviews of books of Caribbean interest, interviews with writers, original fiction and poems, essays on Caribbean art and culture, and artists’ portfolios. In May 2010, the CRB’s sixth anniversary, the magazine has been relaunched as an online publication, offering the same intelligent, incisive coverage of Caribbean literature, art, and culture.via The Caribbean Review of Books • A bimonthly review of Caribbean literature, art, and culture.

A little meditation on faith

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you only get anywhere near the truth when all the easy things to say about God are dismantled – so that your image of God is no longer just a big projection of your self-centred wish-fulfilment fantasies.What's left, then? This is the difficult moment. Either you sense that you are confronting an energy so immense and unconditioned that there are no adequate words for it; or you give up. From Paul to Luther, George Herbert or Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Hitler's prisons, there are plenty who haven't given up; and they haven't given up because they see their experience in the light of something like this understanding of Gethsemane and the crucifixion.via The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Philip Pullman | Books | The Guardian.

Differing Further

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I only began to touch on the reasons for my not agreeing entirely with Ward on his assessment of the theatre industry here in The Bahamas. To recap: his take on things proposed that the surest way for any writer to make a living at writing creatively in our country is to do it for theatre. He offers these arguments in his defence:

  • Up front costs for the producer-writer are less than production costs of a feature film.
  • Audiences for popular shows are immediate and probably larger at one time than audiences for films.
  • Selling out shows - playing to packed houses - will give you the kindof return on investment that is needed to maintain viability.

and

  • Formulaic writing will ensure the returns for the playwright's investment.

(Ward, correct me if I'm offbase here -- this post has been some time in coming and I may have forgotten details, but it seems to me that these are the basic premises you put forward.)My problem in jumping on his bandwagon regarding the rewards adhering to writing for the stage in The Bahamas involve most particularly the fact that theatre (in all its forms -- dance, opera, and drama) cannot take place on its own. Of all the arts, it is the most collaborative. Oh, sure, you can say that film is collaborative too, but it is quite possible for an individual to make films; BIFF is full of them, documentaries that rely on a single camera, a single person, and a catchy subject. The fact that film is a medium that records and plays back (and is therefore infintely portable, theoretically, and therefore able to generate revenue from many markets, not just one) is one of the most liberating aspects about it; and if one wants to make a living as a documentary filmmaker, in The Bahamas or anywhere, I would argue one can do so. In fact, the more exotic the topic the better in most documentaries, so perhaps The Bahamas provides the perfect palette for the filmmaker. We're as exotic as they come, our aspirations notwithstanding.But theatre? Can that exist without collaboration? I'd say not. At the very very least, the artist needs an audience. Usually the artist also needs a whole heap of other supporters as well: technicians to handle light and sound, people to assist backstage, people to sell and market the show, and so on. It is indeed possible for a multi-talented individual playwright to do all of that himself. But easy? No. And not even preferable. The energy required to perform to the audience's satisfaction is far better concentrated on performance, not on hustling and promotion and production. Michael Pintard's success has, ironically, led to his retirement from the stage; he works behind the scenes, while he hires people to deliver his words. Terez Davis, on the other hand, has a business partner who helps her to manage the publicity and dull stuff to allow her to slip into the character of Daisy and remain in front of the audience.So the centrality of collaboration that lies at the heart of theatre, which gives theatre its peculiar power, is also what makes it oddly less able to sustain a long-term living for its practitioners. The revenue might be enviable, and come in all at once. But nobody seems to consider the overheads that are incurred -- or that they have to be spent before the revenue comes in, on faith as it were. One might say that this is not so different from film, and one would be right. But the immediacy of theatre also lends it an urgency that film does not share. Film records and retains, and its preparation can be done in stages over long periods of time. But theatre? The alchemy that drives performance -- especially performance of the part-time community variety -- has an expiry date. When people do not have the luxury of full-time engagement with the stage, their energy comes from a number of sources -- the freshness of the material, the chemistry of the cast, the response of the audience. It's possible, when people are fitting their performances around their everyday lives, for a show to peak and to taper off. Where there is no extensive community of ongoing classes, courses and workshops and no time to engage in them if they do exist, part-time performers find it more difficult to keep things new and exciting, and shows can go stale over time. And so in the kind of theatre that exists in The Bahamas, productions have an optimal rate of investment and return. And as live performance is variable, and unpredictable, that rate will vary over time.In order to make money off your writing, Ward argues, you need to find a formula and stick to it. In order for your writing to be viable, to sustain you, the formula will suffice. This formula will find a ready audience, will allow for a stability of expenditure and revenue that, once it's been fine-tuned and located in fairly predictable spaces (like James Catalyn and Friends' relation to the Dundas), will work. And he's right, as far as it goes. My objection comes from the idea of sustainability. The problem with formulae is that they are boring, especially in live theatre. They can work fine day in day out on apparently "free" media like television, because there's no effort involved in consuming them; they can also work fine in film, because most blockbuster films have the money and clout behind them to create a demand among audiences who might not otherwise be interested in them. But in live theatre? Not so much. I would argue that the formulae that he extols would begin to pale, to taper off, if they had to run day after day after day, if they were mounted on a monthly basis, if they were produced in the kind of time frame that would allow for real sustainability. Even Pintard's shows have expiry dates. Even Summer Madness has a season -- the end (and in good years the beginning) of Summer.No. If we're looking for formulae, I would argue that the true measure of sustainability in contemporary Bahamian theatre lies elsewhere: in Thoughtkatcher's Da Spot, which sustains audiences for weekly performances over two or three months (again, a season), perhaps precisely because it's improv, because of its unpredictability. There is a formula, true, but it's not the writer's formula. It's the performer's, and audiences go back because they never know what will happen next.Or perhaps the other formula that was truly viable and which could be maintained over time was the formula practised by the Dundas Repertory Season between 1981 and 1999, and which allowed for the production not only of formulaic comedy shows but for plays, musicals, new shows and old. That season ran from January to May, and ran a rotation of shows, a different one every month, during that time. Some shows made money, and some shows lost, but for 17 of its 19 years the season never made a loss. The revenue from the season sustained the Dundas and paid directors and technicians (though not actors or backstage crew). And unlike the formula proposed by Ward, the revenue didn't rely on meeting the audience's demand. Rather, it depended (like Hollywood and other truly successful art forms) on having the audience discover a demand for things it never knew it liked before, and thus laying the foundation for future sustainability -- the possibility for growth.So what am I saying? Perhaps I'm agreeing now with Ward -- that theatre allows the Bahamian writer her best chance for making a living. Well, I don't know about that. The whole secret of the Season's success was that it served up a variety of shows for a wide range of audience tastes, and therefore didn't depend on a single writer. But it also spawned a whole crop of new writers as well -- who didn't necessarily make a living off their plays, but who were nevertheless able to write what they were called to write without tailoring it overmuch for an "audience" that they knew only imperfectly. But I am conceding that it may be possible to sustain your living by writing for theatre -- but only if you recognize the need for collaboration, understand that theatre cannot happen with one person alone, and -- perhaps most important -- have the ability to access performance spaces that allow for viability to happen, that are not so prohibitive in their overhead that all one's revenue goes into paying the rent.

Bahamas Summer Writers' Institute

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Right. So. BWSI came to an end on Friday, which was when the participants got to present to us all, rather than the other way round.

The event took place at the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, with the sun setting behind the building. Thirty-odd student readers read to their friends, family, and teachers, and some of them blogged about it.

Two such blogs: Lotus Rose Sightings & Tings Mash.

Here are some photos to give you an idea of the evening.


Bahamas Writers' Summer Institute

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Telcine Turner-Rolle reads at the opening of BWSIYou know, it's about time I blogged about this topic. It's been coming for a good long while, and now we're in its third and middle week, and it seems to be going really really well.What is it? you ask. Well, I could give you a long answer, but I'll spare you that. Here's the short answer, culled from the FaceBook Group page:

The Bahamas Writers Summer Institute, in collaboration with the College of the Bahamas’ School of English Studies, is a Caribbean-centered creative writing program that brings together beginning and established writers in an exploration of craft, theory, and the relationship between imagination and culture.

It started two weeks ago, with classes in various areas of the craft as well as a class in Caribbean context and literature and special seminar events where the students enrolled in the various disciplines can come together to talk about writing and literature as a whole. These take place on Mondays, Tuesdays and Saturdays. On Monday evenings there are conversations about the business of writing, on Saturdays there are readings and discussions with practising writers about their craft, and on Tuesdays are the discussions about the Caribbean context and literature of the region. Wednesdays and Thursdays are the craft-specific workshops.I'm teaching playwriting. I have a class of four students, and so far it's been a blast! The other workshops are creative non-fiction run by Marion Bethel, fiction run by Helen Klonaris, screenwriting run by Maria Govan, and poetry run by Obediah Michael Smith.It's the brainchild of Helen Klonaris, supported by Marion Bethel, and grew out of the movement that began with the establishment of the Bahamas International Literary Festival by Alesha Hart last year. If I had more photographs I'd show them, but they're all on Facebook.But I started this because last night's discussion (at the Hub) was about blogging. The discussants were Ian Fernander, Lynn Sweeting, Angelique Nixon and myself, and we spoke to an audience of writers and others many of whom read blogs, but virtually none of whom blog themselves. The discussion covered the value of blogging -- and of course with people like Lynn and Angelique and me there we talked about the radical power of blogs and bloggers.The Institute continues till the end of July. The Monday and Saturday sessions at the Hub are open to all (they start at 7 and end around 9). If you're interested, drop by -- and if you like the idea, I'm sure Marion and Helen would love to let you know what's happening next year! One thing, though -- next year's Institute should have its own open blog, so that people who aren't on Facebook can see what it's doing.Here's the schedule, courtesy of Bahamas Uncensored, which is the only place you can find it on the open web.

Here's to the MJ I knew

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF0o-W5uu8o&w=425&h=344]Off the Wall was one of my favourite albums. Of course Thriller and Bad were up there, and they have some of my favourite MJ songs ("Man in the Mirror" would probably win the sweeps if I had to choose), but if you wanted me to tell you which one gave me the most joy, it'd be Off the Wall. It was the last one which had Michael Jackson looking the way God intended him to look -- like a damn cute black boy.Of course, when "Billie Jean" hit the charts, and Michael moonwalked across the stage, like virtually every other woman of colour that I knew (and men too), I leaped out of my seat and squealed. When he released  the "Thriller" video and the world fell for this cute black boy, we moonwalked across our floors.The whiter Michael got the further he got from me and from my friends. The more he assimilated, for whatever reason, the closer he came to yesterday. By the time his hair caught on fire on the Pepsi shoot, we'd determined that Michael, the Michael Jackson we'd grown up with, the singer of "Ben" and "Got to Be There" and "She's Out of My Life", was dead. All that was left was the clone.But here's to Michael -- to all the Michaels that he ever was -- the greatest performer I've ever seen.And I don't do starstruck.http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9/25560314001?isVid=1&publisherID=1348423968

Interview - Antilles: the weblog of the CRB

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I count Nicholas Laughlin as one of my cyberfriends, though I think we really met over the telephone during the last CARIFESTA (such arts festivals are always, truly, such a waste of time, are they not? They make no connections, advance no careers, clearly, and they are so much a waste of money that we prefer to spend our millions on, oh, Miss Universe. But I digress.) Since then we've been communicating and collaborating online, and he has been a champion of tongues of the ocean.Anyhow, Nicholas is the valiant editor of the Caribbean Review of Books, which he continues to publish in the face of opposition, failing finances, exhaustion, fed-upness, etc.In the spirit of massive support that he'd already established, he recently interviewed me about tongues. Go check it out.And then, if you like it, go subscribe to the Caribbean Review of Books.Antilles: the weblog of the CRB.

Many Antilles readers are familiar with tongues of the ocean, an online poetry journal based in the Bahamas, which was launched in February 2009. Edited by poet and playwright Nicolette Bethel, and focused on poetry from the Caribbean and its diasporas, tongues plans to publish three issues per year, with the contents of each issue appearing gradually week by week.Soon after the second issue of tongues — dated June 2009 — began appearing, Bethel answered some questions via email about the journal’s background, influences, and modus operandi.