Respect Due: Symposium on the Work of Kwame Dawes
The inaugural symposium on the work of a major poet.
Three weekly installments of
essays—by peers, elders, students, collaborators, colleagues, friends,
observers and witnesses of Kwame Dawes—attentively engage with his work to
inform us of the nuances of his significance while resonating with the ethics,
aesthetics and insights that make him so remarkable.
The contributors responded to
questions of poetics, thematics, craft, lineage, and artistic and cultural
contributions, critically examining the lines and arcs of Dawes’ poetry,
thought and praxis and, in several cases, specific memories of him in order to
address his impact personally, socially and historically.
FORUM ONE
Set Dem Free Again”: Duppy Conqueror and the Invocation of Legacy by Corinna
McLeod
What We Have Learned by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Kwame Dawes’ Requiem—Or, A Defense of Narrative in Black Poetry by Honorée
Fanonne Jeffers
FORUM TWO
Prophet Man by Shara McCallum
BOSOMTWA: The Sacred and Profane in
Kwame Dawes’Prophets by
Vladimir Lucien
Seven for Kwame by Kevin Simmonds
Forum Three
Kwame Dawes on Shore by Ishion Hutchinson
On Kwame Dawes by Linton Kwesi Johnson
Kwame Dawes and the Reggae Aesthetic: a
cultural, social and political proposition by John Robert Lee
Respect Due to Kwame by Lorna Goodison
POSTSCRIPT
Sight by Kwame Dawes (poem) &
Kevin Simmonds (music & commentary)
Visit
Kwame Dawes: An Archive of Online Poems