By Mel Cooke, Freelance WriterWESTERN BUREAU:
CONNIE BELL lifted up her voice to the Burning Spear once and Anthony Keith Miller opened with sparse words for Professor Mervyn Morris last Wednesday night.
The two were the featured poets on Red Bones, The Blues Cafe's end of month 'Evening of Contemporary Literature'. Jill Gibson on keyboards and Gert Beyers on guitar plinked and plucked away through the clink of cutlery, din of conversation and occasional guffaws of laughter as the scheduled 8:30 start went by.
Connie Bell was up first at the 21 Braemar Avenue, New Kingston, venue. "I'm going to bless it up a little bit," she said, as Gert Beyers provided guitar accompaniment. The last line of her opening piece set the tone for her presentation:
That is how it is, when we love under the Jamaican sun
The next piece dealt with a man who watches the object of his desire, but never makes a move.
Ms. Bell used the lectern provided, but often closed her eyes and recanted from memory, her well modulated voice giving the poems extra energy as she moulded her stress patterns to suit each piece.
Her hands were as involved in the delivery as her voice, her fingers curling and clutching in time with the poetry.
Her third poem took on a 'nicely naughty' note, as she said:
Bed smells like love
Even better, bed smells like sex
Digital Ying and Yang preceded a poem in which the voice of the poet and the voice of the singer became one. Her blues and jazz influences came through as she trilled the 'drunken Armstrong blues'.
Caught Up In The Battle of Life shifted the focus from romantic love briefly. "Sometimes we get so caught up in life that we forget to live," Ms. Bell said in introducing the poem, which ended on 'exist, exist, exist'.
Cane Juice brought the strongest applause so far, Saturn wandered into dreamland and Quieted By The Moon wondered about life. I Am Having a Party and The Boxed Man continued the introspective vein, then Ms. Bell tapped into the root of repetitive lyrics, as she used the melody and some of the words to Spear's Let's Recall Some Great Men:
Let's recall hope and what it felt like to fight for something good
Let's recall some great instance in our lives when God must have been real, if even for a minute
It proved to be a fitting end to Ms. Bell's presentation.
Anthony Keith Miller came to the lectern with an impressive list of credentials and promptly moved the lectern out of the way. Tossing his file of material to the ground, he said that it was an evening to give thanks. The first person to who he showed gratitude was Mervyn Morris, "The first person who taught me to write." Cutting the last 30 lines from his lengthy pieces was an essential part of this process, it seemed.
Surrealist expressions, in the vein of another inspiration from Ted Hughes followed. Dis Johncrow stemmed from seeing a dead johncrow on the road one day and said in part:
A johncrow eating a johncrow and justifying it
Dream Country and Salvation, the first piece for which Mr. Miller abandoned his memory for paper, continued the surrealist theme, while Disturbance of Cows brought it to an end.
There was no musical accompaniment for Mr. Miller, as the guitarist twanged a knife and fork.
"Another influence has been women writers. I have always found it more interesting to write about women than men. I am especially interested in the women who survive," Mr. Miller said, singling out Lorna Goodison's Survivors and Grace Nicholson's The Fat Black Woman Poems.
Noctophobia, which the audience delighted in, was for his grandmother.
Church Women Hats, Church Women's Mother and Church Women Mourning constituted a sub-theme all of their own, while Death of a Fish Woman was well received:
At 12 she found a green marble in the mouth of a barracuda
At 20 she was still living in a shack near Papine market
The influences continued.
"Bob Marley and Third World their influence on me was very political and made me feel that I had to write poems that said something, spoke out against injustice or some crap like that," Mr. Miller said. "Just imagine some Bob Marley song or something playing," he said, introducing The Death of Fishermen.
Upon Reading Martin Luther King's Promised Land Speech preceded the A Who Sey Sammy Dead trilogy, all containing a line of Spanish and about Sammy the monkey who escaped from Hope Zoo and was killed by dogs.
Mr. Miller's final poem for the evening, Recognised in The Bank Line, gave a peep into the poet's life, as a lady speaks to him in a financial institution:
She doesn't know you are sick of poems
So you say "Sorry lady, ah can't help you"
The audience showed its appreciation and Jill Gibson and Gert Beyers picked up where they had left off earlier, as music from man-made instruments replaced the melody of the spoken word.
