“I was attempting to write song lyrics before I realised it was poetry I was writing”
Legacy
I see you Elvis in Blue Hawaii where
dancing girls swayed their hula hips
fell beneath the spell of your blue trans
-Pacific lure on US-colonised white
beaches. I see you Elvis
Jailhouse rocker break
ing out black and white soul and blues a Mississippi
scourged by lynchings saved by gospel
I see you Elvis in Acapulco under
the halo of sombreros the compulsory fist
fights hitting the wires
with the twang of steel slides and fingerpicks
I see you Elvis
in GI Blues with your curled lips
singeing the movie screens with the white
bright un truth of America I see you
Elvis in my mother’s flared skirts coming
back from the movie house running
up our front steps like a girl where later
my dad would recreate those scenes
with his Hawaiian guitar
well actually there’s no such thing as a Hawaiian guitar
I’m told when I go on The Repair Shop in 2022
only Hawaiian music, the style
indoors, Billie Holiday and Ella
struggled to breathe through vinyl
stacked in the radiogram
I lost you Elvis when I boarded aeroplanes
you refused to fly lost you
as you trailed cross-country in white
diamante jumpsuits filling stadiums
from Madison Gardens to Vegas
your followers like a coven
carrying on the mission from working
men’s clubs to Graceland
I lost you Elvis
in the decades of guns and roses
The Floyd Jethro Moody Blues Cat Stevens Bowie Springsteen The Wailers
Cohen Tina Aretha Dylan Baez
and in the unpredictable future
my cuttings of you, Priscilla
and Lisa Marie are a time capsule
until he comes
Michael.
On my initial reading of Legacy, the first song I can remember to like came to me. After several re-readings, I found that wider and deeper memories came up. This was not simply a series of events but rather the remembering of a spiritual space as I reflected mindfully on the poem. Already in school, it would be great if the same importance was given to the reading and analysis of poetry as is given to novels and plays. What are your thoughts on this?
Firstly, thank you for such a close reading of my poem. I think poems ‘about’ music will always find resonance with readers who know the artist or the song; music inhabits that special space that has its own language that doesn’t need words.
I can’t really answer your second question as I don’t know what the percentage is between the assumed importance of reading and analysis of novels and plays over poetry. I have been in numerous spaces throughout my life where poetry was given much attention, academically and in workshop situations, and many opportunities exist through groups like Stanza and the Royal Literary Fund’s Reading Rounds.
I felt an electrifying tension when I saw your poem on the page and I anticipated something substantial. The structure of lines and stanzas of a poem will affect how a piece of work flows. What inspired you to choose this form and what mood did you want to create in this poem?
I’m thrilled the poem had such an impact on you!
I don’t think about structure until I am well into writing a poem. For me the idea comes first and in this case it was the first line ‘I see you Elvis’ that got me into writing the poem. Elvis was about movement, and his singing and dancing were featured in movies made in the 50s and 60s, including Blue Hawaii and Jailhouse Rock. Two things: I saw these movies as a young teenager and they made a huge impact on movie goers in Guyana. His dance moves were a talking point and later in life I would learn how much he had drawn on Black American dance and music and there was criticism about this, what we now call ‘cultural appropriation’. My placing the words on the page is an attempt to suggest that movement and the poem needed to break out of the usual formal structure to illustrate movement and rhythm.
I am deeply moved by the musicality that language can create in poetry as well as being fascinated by how diction can be used to produce a myriad of effects, e.g. the double meanings of certain words. What draws you to poetry as a genre?
I was attempting to write song lyrics before I realised it was poetry I was writing. If I had known how to write music I would probably have become a songwriter. My dad was a guitarist and doubtless listening to him play was as impactful as were all the expressions of utterance around me, from pop music to hymns, gospel, to sermons in church and in the study of poetry in high school. For me the act of utterance that poetry provokes and the search for the right words is accompanied by the importance of getting the poem to sound right. In live performance, my voice does these things, on paper I have to work harder!
How much of your legacy do you attribute to familial influences compared to that from societal influences and how is this reflected in your work?
I’ve partly already answered this question in my last reply, drawing on my dad’s guitar playing and my upbringing in the church in Guyana. These influences, added to by movies such as those mentioned in the poem, are permanent legacies in my writing, but of course there are many more influences in my work, from musicians and poets like Leonard Cohen and Pablo Neruda to Kamau Brathwaite, to post-colonial history, migration and gardens.
Can you tell us what legacies you would like to leave behind with your artistry?
If people continue to read my work, that’s legacy enough!
