This paper is part of larger work published in Small Axe, 14, September 2003.
WEEK FOUR
Kaiso Calypso
Mauby Maw-beer
'Nanse 'tory
Nonsense-story
NONSENSE
NONSENSE (Keane, 1979, 16)
Oriens ex occidente ... lux - Orientation exercise. Occidentally slipped on the lux: - Motto of the University of the West Indies. (Keane, 1979, 45))
only a fool would suggest laughter is not serious. (Edward Chamberlin, 1989, 27))
The creativity of St Vincent's Ellsworth McGranahan 'Shake' Keane (1927-1997) straddles the conventional boundaries of jazz and poetry. 'Shake' achieved acclaim in the jazz world of 1950s and 1960s Europe as a fluegelhorn and trumpet player.1 While his musicianship will remain appreciated by jazz enthusiasts the world over, less attention has been given to his poetry.
Although Keane published five collections in all2 and a number of his poems have been anthologised, wider recognition for his writing was not forthcoming till he won the Cuban Casa de las Americas prize for poetry in 1979, for his collection One A Week With Water: Rhymes and Notes. However, the work achieved limited circulation and was soon out of print.
Superficially, this suggests that Keane is the epitome of the 'minor' poet: he had a limited output, his poetry for the most part is out of print or not easily accessible and his writing, at present, appears unlikely to outlive him. This is not an unusual fate for most artists. Neither is there any shame or criticism intended in the use of the term 'minor' poet. As a general rule, a writer writes because he is compelled to and more than likely his writing will, sooner or later, be ignored. The label 'minor' poet, however, raises a number of questions in relation to someone like 'Shake' Keane. For example, Keane is not considered 'minor' in his native St Vincent, where his achievements have been recently commemorated by a public monument and the status of 'National Hero'. There is some irony in this official status granted to perhaps one of the Caribbean's most 'unofficial' bohemian artists.
Furthermore, the extent to which a poet is considered 'minor' is to some extent a matter of critical response, which in itself is partly led by fashion and marketability. Thus, it is not only the writer or poet who will 'perform' his reputation, but also biographers and critics, whose attention or lack of it can rescue a 'forgotten' or 'minor' poet, or consign him to oblivion. Critical reputations are also built on the backs of writers' status and perceived literary value at a particular time.
In this context, an unintentional irony is increasingly apparent in the demands placed by many critics on works of Caribbean literature. Along with the many island nationalisms of the past forty or so years, there has appeared a parallel literary process through which the literary critic legitimises, through structures of respectability, certain individual writers as well as various sub groupings of this literature. A central characteristic of this type of criticism is its concern with writing (and reading) that is serious with the result that the writing becomes authoritative and ultimately closed.
This term has been used in a variety of ways by Caribbean critics but their ultimate concern has been to confer legitimacy upon various genres of writing. This has taken a variety of forms, for example by raising the profile of the vernacular - by legitimizing the Little Tradition to become nation language (Kamau Brathwaite), offering special pleas for the uniqueness of Caribbean humour (Roydon Salick) or to give special recognition to women poets (Denise deCaires Narain).
These forms of special pleading, I would contend, are contestable. The result is that emphasis is placed, for example, on the uniqueness of Caribbean folk humour or the gendered nature of much of Caribbean poetry. Alternatively, the incorporative impulse to take folk culture 'seriously' confers legitimacy, and, whether or not intentionally, places it on a pedestal. I argue that taking the culture 'seriously' in this way often implies according it equal status with official culture, thereby loosing an important feature, that is its specificity.
I am not suggesting here that it is necessarily the artists' intention or the primary objective of folk culture to adopt a position which consciously contests official culture, or alternatively, to seek out official recognition. It is more that the prevailing critical approach to Caribbean folk culture has encouraged its official incorporation. It is, I suspect, this goal that underlies the critics' concern with seriousness. This is a retrograde step for folk culture because it tends to repress important alternative ways of seeing the world that folk culture can offer. These alternative ways of seeing, I would contend, challenge the authoritative, the closed and the serious and instead they privilege the 'unofficial', the carnivalesque. The alternative approach, these unofficial concerns for which I am arguing, are located in what Mikhail Bakhtin in his study Rabelais and His World called a 'gay moment', 'a second world' and 'the second life of the people' which the masses inhabit, outside the world of officialdom (Bakhtin, 1984, 9).
My objective then, is not to suggest the redundancy of theory but to challenge what I perceive to be an overemphasis by critics on 'seriousness' and to offer a case study of criticism which shifts the emphasis towards a celebration of the unofficial. To this end by applying Bakhtin's framework I offer a critical interpretation of Shake Keane's award winning collection, One A Week With Water: Rhymes and Notes.
Of course, the medieval world that Bakhtin described, is far removed from the late twentieth century St Vincent that Keane recreates. Keane's collection combines a creative blend of jazz influenced poetry with a commitment to Caribbean and specifically Vincentian rural life. But there is much in Bakhtin's analysis of the carnivalesque that resonates with Keane's work. By using these resonances I illustrate through OWWW how folk culture can be interpreted as standing in contestation to official culture. What makes OWWW important and distinctive is the way it demonstrates the nature of folk culture's oppositional and regenerative role, not just for certain elements of the society, but for the whole of a society in the Caribbean. As more and more of the elements of that rural life and the oral tradition that it celebrates disappear from the island, Keane's writing also offers a creative reconstruction of St Vincent's folk culture in a form that goes well beyond nostalgic evocation and conferring of simplistic legitimacy.
When a reader picks up OWWW , he or she becomes engaged in the private and respectable action of reading a 'book', (respectable, because of the traditional association of reading with learning and self improvement) albeit one constructed from a collection of 'notes and rhymes'. The main text of this slim, apparently fragmented seventy-four page collection takes the form of a collage of verse, riddle, story, letters, spoof bureaucratic form, aphorisms, reportage and rhyme. Among the predominantly humorous pieces in the collection are distributed a number of poetic shards with flashes of anger, despair and loss. There are both the sublime and the ridiculous. Regular patterns are avoided. Standard as well as local forms of English appear to be tossed about for humour and with serious intent. The collection, however, maintains a tension between the domain of order and continuity on one hand and on the other, nonsense and fragmentation.
The reader of Keane's 'notes and rhymes' enters the realm of play and a kind of interactive performance. Keane invites us to come out to play with time, words, traditions and received social and cultural order. All of this is framed by a time of reverie. The collection was written, he tells us, for his students 'in the short lonely afternoons before their little town dropped to sleep' (Keane, 1979, 9). That is, a time when thoughts can stray anywhere and anything can happen. Closer inspection of the calendar form, which the work takes, reveals it is neither limited to fifty-two weeks nor is it chronologically ordered. Week forty-four precedes Weeks forty-three and forty-two. The reader is advised to 'check for astronomical errors between Weeks forty-one and forty-eight'. There is a Week fifty-three. Week forty-seven follows a 'discrepancy day (added every 3114 years)'. Week one appears twice, they open and close the collection. In the first 'Week one', which opens the collection, he signs on by relieving himself. He states:
IN THE CARIBBEAN SEA
I WEE
CORDIALLY (Keane, 1979, 13)
In a chronological repetition which is also a reversal, 'Week one' also ends the collection with the same hint of personal release, while also ironically invoking the formality of a letter writer, with the solitary word, 'CORDIALLY' (Keane, 1979, 74).
The play with time; the topsy-turvy nature of the world the reader enters; the attention to bodily functions; the parody of prayer, spoof bureaucratic and legalistic formalities; all suggest that the reader is entering the world of the carnivalesque.
In his study of Rabelais, Bakhtin has traced how the 'carnival-grotesque' in medieval and Renaissance folk culture is gradually transmitted into in a literary form. In the process of transmission its function remained constant: to induce a festive laughter, that is, a laughter of all the people; 'to conserve inventive freedom, to permit the combination of a variety of different elements and their rapprochement, to liberate from the prevailing point of view of the world, from convention and established truths, from clich‚s, from all that is humdrum and universally accepted.' (Bakhtin, 1984, 34). Its essence, then, is a transformative, liberating and regenerative process affecting all the people of a particular society. This, Bakhtin suggests, is the central role of folk humour. In this, three important elements are involved: ambivalence, comic verbal composition and informal speech processes. The ways in which Keane's collection resonates with each of these elements and opens up the scope for regeneration provides the focus for the remainder of this paper.
One way for the author to achieve a universal and all encompassing form of laughter is to provide for it an ambivalent edge; as Bakhtin suggests, simultaneously 'gay, triumphant' and 'mocking, deriding'(Bakhtin, 1984, 11 - 12). Keane achieves this ambivalence in a variety of ways. One such, for example, is in the irreverent juxtaposition of humility through prayer immediately followed by pride in the achievement (the latter indicated in italics in the text). The ambiguity as to who is offering up the prayer leaves open the possibility that it might be the poet himself, the reader or anyone else. 'Week twenty-three' then, contains the following:
O SON of MAN O
GardWho bringest dung woe
An mighty hard redemshan
ThRRough dye Lard
Suffer us nat to pass truOUR SON
Duh valley av Galgatta
For we are as a charf upon THY win
A carner stone
In dis die city of sin...
O Gard bredderin
Speak yo mineWas'n dat
a fun tas tic pray
I jus pray dey(Keane 1979, 38)bredderin"
Bakhtin points out how this all encompassing yet ambivalent humour is distinct from that of the satirist who, in his mockery, places himself above the object or person that is mocked. On the face of it, in the text, Keane appears to move away from a universalizing laughter and to slip into a satirical mode when he takes aim at the hallowed practice of naming in the Caribbean. The importance of naming has been a preoccupation of Derek Walcott (Sea Grapes, Another Life Ch.3, Tiepolo's Hound) as much as Kamau Brathwaite (X/Self). It was in the 1970s a fashionable practice to change one's name to register more closely one's association with Africa. Indirectly, all this becomes Keane's target which he both buries and revives with humour. Keen sets up a spoof bureaucratic file. The form he devises refers to a female 'psychological patient,' much of whose career involves avoiding names. She travels to different parts of the Caribbean and Canada. Her aim appears to be to avoid vilification by 'rude' nicknames from her fellow countrymen to which she might be attached. The fear begins at school when Keane records part of her early history as follows:
| Mother's Name: | Tricksy Norman |
| [.....] | |
| name: | priscilla isola |
| HISTORY: | Patient leaves Catholic Primary |
| School after 2 weeks, dreading | |
| nicknames that could be built up | |
| from her initials. | |
| e.g.: PIN ; PNIS ; or the | |
| grotesque PNIN. Problem persists | |
| regardless of use of mother's | |
| or father's family name.... | |
| Actual name used by schoolmates: | |
| PUCKANCE MILLINGTON... |
Later in her career, when she is about to have a child the problem of naming recurs. She makes the following declaration:
If the child is Female, I will call her "X",
until she grows up and/or wishes to make
a name for herself. She can then swear an
affidavit before a notary to the effect that
X and she are one
and the same.
If the child is Male
I will call him
"Priscilla Isola" (Keane, 1979, 72)
One way that ambivalence is achieved here is by the focus on nicknames. The bestowal of a nickname is a common Caribbean practice that often begins in school and may linger for most of one's life. A nickname is an indication of familiarity which elevates the subject through friendship, as not everyone will know or have access to this name. It is equally a form of abuse, usually derived from some quirky aspect of the person named. Of course, familiarity and bawdiness are simultaneously heightened by the play on Priscilla Isola's initials, PNIS, PNIN. Two universalizing elements in the humour are the association of the male member with a female and secondly, the twist in the last stanza when the mother decides that if the child is male she will give him a conventionally female name.
The second element of the carnivalesque is comic verbal composition, often involving parody. The most effective forms of parody test the boundaries of a particular world view which sees itself as 'high' or superior, by bringing it down to earth and challenging its sense of hierarchy. While the examples of boastful prayer and bureaucracy cited above are part of this challenge, one of the most sacred elements of the modern world to be parodied is the official world of statistical calculation and all that goes with it. In 'Week fourteen' of the text Keane observes:
if you take the amount of
strong rum (calculated in proof - gallons)
consumed in any given month
of Sundays, and compare it with
the excise duty (assessed as a per-
centage over and above the actual
value of the liquor), then divide
this amount by the energy required
to deface any number of domino dots
by slamming, over a period, of, say,
one month of Sundays. And if
this entire calculation is undertaken
between nine and eleven-thirty in the
fore-noon of any Sunday, and ex
pressed in terms of foot pounds recurring.
Chances are, you are a genius,
and your wife is probably
wondering what on earth
you and the boys
could be up to
this sunny
Sunday mor-
ning (Keane, 1979, 27)
There is more here than the mere mocking of official statistical calculation or the fanciful mixing of elements to create humour out of confusion. Keane mixes the formal with the informal; proper sounding statistics of rum consumption and official government terms like 'excise duty' rub shoulders with the game of dominos on the one hand, and impersonal statistics combine with personal reflection - the wife's wondering about the activities of her husband and his friends - on the other. By bringing these very different worlds together he firstly reminds us of other worlds outside the official one by bringing carnival laughter into the government statistician's office. Secondly, by erasing the borders between these high and low worlds Keane subverts any sense of official hierarchy by humbling or toppling all that considers itself high, and by implication, 'serious'. More importantly, as argued below, the mere process of humbling is not the overriding concern of OWWW.
Lastly, folk humour is characterized by informal speech associated with the market place. One of the central features of the carnivalesque is the temporary suspension of all hierarchies, distinctions and barriers among participants. This involves an 'unofficial' form of language, one that is used among friends. Friendship gives license for language to be rough and abusive or gentle and sweet. But because friendship is involved, both the abuse and the 'sweet talk' are characterized by playfulness. St Vincent's oral, folk traditions of 'nonsense talk' or 'nonsense making' are an important source of play in the text. Keane recognises that he is playing with 'nonsense' and uses certain features of 'speech performance' in Vincentian oral tradition to set up a tension between 'nonsense talk' or 'nonsense making' and 'sense'. Playfulness within the text is paralleled by playfulness with the reader.
In The Man of Words in the West Indies, Roger Abrahams made a detailed study of what he calls 'alternative forms of Vincentian speech performance'. He suggests that, in rural St Vincent, 'nonsense talk' is usually associated with speech performance in public places or at crossroads where 'rudeness', which involves talking 'broad' or talking 'bad', also occurs. This activity may take place at set formal occasions, the most obvious being Carnival, or equally at informal occasions, for example, through commess or gossip. Those who are the most adept at such performances, either the sweet talk or the nonsense, are described as 'men of words'. They make their name by their ability to see off challenges from others (Abrahams, 1983).
The explanation of Vincentian folk culture that Abrahams offers supports many elements of the carnivalesque. By this token, Keane may be seen as a 'man-of-words' in the St Vincent context. Keane's 'nonsense' can be divided into two types: 'permissible' nonsense and 'rudeness', both of which draw attention to the text as public performance. Permissible nonsense involves elements of 'disbehaving' that are allowed into the yard or area where respectable behaviour is normally required. Forms of permissible nonsense that Keane employs include gossip or commess, nonsense stories, and subverted traditional nursery rhymes and riddles, for example:
Water Stan-Up Water Lay-Dung
Cane?NO. YO FARDER OUT DEY FLAT-
DRUNK IN DE RAIN (Keane,1979, 58)
In the collection the nonsense and humour is balanced by sense and order as well as flashes of anger. In Week three, for example, Keane notes:
For 400 years
out of Ngola40 peopleturned up on the plantations of Brazilevery week very weak
or in the plantations of the sea
dead
Every SundayAs I sugar my teaI want to ShootSomebody (Keane, 1979, 15)
A speech form often associated with anger, as well as an extreme form of nonsense, is 'rudeness'. Rude interventions upset decorum, create embarrassment and generally push social encounters out of control. In the context of Keane's collection, rudeness takes place both in the text and in his relationship with the reader. This is conveyed for example by the author's 'behaviour', that is, his writing style, which appears to be 'out of order' but can also be liberating for the reader. An illustration of this is in his 'Week thirty-three', below.
WEEK THIRTY-THREE
GYURL !
Brung-skin gyurl
BRUNG-SKINWhat yo say?
Is only you-one, she sister, dey?
(thought you was in the U.S.A.)listen Sis...
You and WHO?where de chile?
o.k... You and You
best hads miss me a while (Keane, 1979, 49)
The poet's improvisatory technique, close to jazz in its riffs and refrains, takes shape both in the fragmented arrangement of the text and in the flouting of conventional expectations. The whole notion of poetry as a sinuous piece of writing utilising a particular form or pattern is discarded. Instead, the reader is required to participate, as in the oral tradition. In this context participation involves filling in the blanks in the text: and so the reader is provided with a jigsaw of groups of words with which to make sense of the world that Keane presents. The jigsaw, in turn, allows a process of discovery to take place. What the participation implies as well is that who constructs the world is important - do we do it, or do we allow someone else to construct our world for us? Keane gives us the chance to make sense of it ourselves.
Leading on from this feature of orality, another feature that Keane exhibits is the playfulness of Vincentian peasant humour, the casualness of a lifestyle only loosely tied to conventional notions of time measurement. The author uses the frame of a (more or less) fifty-two week year to provide a comment for each week. He makes the point in a variety of ways that a culture is being formed out of a combination of accident and tradition. This process of formation, he suggests, is chaotic, at times repetitive, but it is also creative. It is distinctly Caribbean, approaching Antonio Benitez-Rojo's definition of Caribbean culture as a culture of performance, located in the public domain and 'whose time unfolds irregularly and resists being captured by cycles of clock and calendar' (Benitez-Rojo, 1996, 11).
However, there is also a serious element to this play with time, in the sense that the way we measure time is culturally determined, and, as such, can reveal important aspects of a society's mode of organisation. The author points out that even calendar time is not set in stone. In a note he tells the reader: 'Only in 1927 did Turkey adopt the Gregorian calendar. Maya astronomy moved easily forwards and backwards in time identifying days 400 million years away.' (Keane, 1979, 61). He appears to be suggesting that, in the context of St Vincent's political independence, achieved in 1980, a few short years after the collection was written, both calendars and new societies take time to become established. The work therefore constitutes an elliptical but nonetheless sustained commentary on a society in transition.
In the full title of the collection Keane draws our attention to the fact that he is providing us with 'notes' as well as rhymes. The provision of notes to a text is part of a long tradition the purpose of which is often to provide a commentary upon and illustration of the main text. For different purposes, the tradition of providing notes has been used as much by T.S Eliot in The Waste Land as by Kamau Brathwaite in X/Self. Edward Chamberlin has drawn attention to the way that notes perform an 'autobiographical' function, enabling the reader to get closer to the author's main concern. And it is in Keane's notes that we get a more direct perspective on what he envisages as important in St Vincent society. It is in the notes that more obvious 'sense' predominates without losing the playfulness and good humour of the author. Ultimately, it is in the sensible elements that we can detect what lies beyond the other side of the ambivalence, the parody and the pulling down. This other side involves identifying the scope for regeneration, not for just one element, but for the whole of society.
The main body of the text contains a small scattering of 'sensible' statements. These include a number of blunt observations on political practice and statements made by one referred to as 'the Sane Man'. For the most part 'sense' is located in the notes. Here, indications of 'sense' take the form of recognition of innovation and creativity. New words and phrases are listed without remarking on them. Occasional footnotes indicate local events that Keane considered noteworthy. For example, in 'Week thirty-six' is the note
Formation of N.A.M. (New Artists Movement) 3 years ago in September. First Vincentian group dedicated to taking the Arts to the people and getting them involved. All those who recognise the importance of Art for social awareness, solidarity and progressive transformation say "yes", hold up your hands, and make them stay up. (Keane 1979, 52).
Another of Keane's universalizing and regenerative devices in this volume is his linguistic orchestration or word-play which also flouts convention. In the first epigraph to this paper, standard English and Creole words are arranged in a pattern alongside each other though they are a part of a text without a sentence. The two streams meet and end in the repeated word 'NONSENSE'. However this may not be quite nonsense, as the overall pattern of words on the page shape a letter of the alphabet, an upper case 'Y'. Keane orchestrates play with words in other ways. 'Truction', 'bodderation', 'long-guts', 'edge up', 'gutsify' and 'jokify' are word creations. They are improvised words that he offers without comment, this time in his notes to the main text, as though challenging the reader to 'read' the experience through Vincentian eyes. Such neologisms or creolisations typify Vincentian speech patterns and, like the two streams of words, suggest a creative and irreverent relationship with language. Here word power (power over the word) and word-play come together in the creation of these new words which are necessitated by local participation. Some of these words belong to unofficial culture; others he may have invented. It doesn't matter. As presented in his 'book' they become atoms floating on the boundaries of official and unofficial worlds.
In the main text Keane draws attention more directly to the liminal nature of words by raising the issue of how to name a village. As signifiers of oral culture, some words are not always easily transcribed into writing. He notes in 'Week six':
BUM BUM is a small but growing
We have not yet devised a means
of spelling its name in a way
that satisfactorily indicates the way
it is pronounced. (Keane, 1979, 18)
Here the poet humorously challenges the non-Vincentian reader by not indicating how the highly suggestive name should be pronounced. At the same time, by drawing attention to the instability between spelling and pronunciation of the name of the village, he indicates the creative tension in naming and locating, a tension that involves the whole society.
While Keane recognises that his island 'deals perhaps less comfortably with situations of fact than with engagements of personality,' for him, hope comes out of creativity. Thus his optimistic comment 'what we will create, and even a'ready done start create, pon this scarred and hallowed mountain top, could blow yo mind' (Keane, 1979, 73).
Thus the notes and rhymes make up a whole. In the collection a consciousness of coherence and continuity is being discovered. What Keane seems to be suggesting through his play with 'nonsense' is that social order is not a given, but needs to be worked for and validated.
Karin Barber has noted in another, related context, that of African popular and unofficial arts, '[t]he very indeterminacy and fluctuation of unofficial art is a challenge to the serious, authoritarian, and closed official art' (Barber, 1987, 64). The shifts and ambiguity with which Keane plays in his text make their challenge by opening Bakhtin's 'gay moment' or 'loophole'. Such a moment leads 'onto a distant future that lends an aspect of ridicule to the relative progressiveness and relative truth accessible to the present or to the immediate future' (Bakhtin, 1984, 454).
In the specific, unofficial, 'gay moment' created in One A Week With Water Keane, in his own way, uses this opportunity to pay tribute to a rural folk culture in the process of change. By dramatising the transition, he also offers an oblique comment on the nature of order and its obverse, chaos, in all of Vincentian society. The route that he takes in this personal poetic journey is via techniques of linguistic improvisation - which he calls 'nonsense' - that stretch the language and his readers' credulity, constantly startling us into laughter or unsettling our expectations. Whoever cares to pick up the book is incorporated into a direct relationship with the author, his play with language and the unofficial culture of the folk.
1
Boulding C. Boho Soho revisited: the poetry and horn of Shake Keane, Straight, No Chaser, no. 11, Spring 1991, 44-467.
Carr, I., Fairweather, D. Priesley, B., 1995, Shake Keane, Jazz: the rough guide, London, The Rough Guides.
Keane, S. 1990, Held together with rhythm and rhymes: Shake Keane talks with Perspective, CARICOM Perspective, no. 46-47, 22.
Wilmer, V. 1989, Shake Keane: burning spear, Wire, Issue 68, 44-45.
Wilmer. V. 1997, The anger behind a free form of jazz, The Guardian, 13:11:1997.
Abrahams, R.D. 1983, The Man-of-Words in the West Indies: Performance and the Emergence of Creole Culture, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press.
Bakhtin, M. 1984, Rabelais and his World (translated by Helene Iswolsky), Bloomington, Indiana University Press.
Barber, K. 1987, Popular Arts in Africa, The African Studies Review, 30, 3.
Benitez-Rojo, A. 1966, The repeating island: the Caribbean and the post-modern perspective. London, Duke University Press.
Brathwaite, E. 1974, (reprinted 1985), Contradictory omens: cultural diversity and integration in the Caribban, Savacou Publications, Mona, Monograph no. 1.
Breiner, L. 1998, An Introduction to West Indian poetry, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Chamberlin, E. 1989, Myself Made Otherwise: Edward Kamau Brathwaite's X/Self, Carib, no.5
Cooper, C. 1993, Noises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the 'Vulgar' Body of Jamaican Popular Culture, London, Macmillan.
deCaires Narain, D. 2002, Contemporary Caribbean women's poetry: making style, London, Routledge.
Keane, E.McG. 1950, L'Oubli: Poems, Bridgetown, Advocate Co.
---- 1952, Ixion: Poems, Georgetown, Miniature Poets 10.
---- 1952, Some religious attitudes in West Indian poetry, Bim, 4, 15.
---- 1953, Nature poetry in the West Indies: the religious aspect, Bim, 5, 16.
---- 1970, Rosalie Murphy (ed.) Contemporary Poets of the English Language, London, St. James.
---- 1973, Fragments and Patterns, in Paul Breman (ed.) You Better Believe It: Black Verse in English from Africa, the West Indies and the United States, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
---- 1976, Per Capita Per Annum: Lesson Five in Seven Studies in Home Economics, Kairi.
---- 1991, Real Keen: Reggae into Jazz, London, LKJ Music Publishers Ltd.
---- 1979, One A Week With Water: Rhymes and Notes, Habana, Ediciones Casa de las Americas.
---- 1994, Palm and Octopus: twelve love poems, New York, The Author.
Salick, R. 1993, (ed.) The comic vision in West Indian literature: proceedings of the ninth conference on West Indian literature.
© Philip Nanton, 2003.
HTML last revised 10 February, 2004.
Return to Conference papers.