It's Almost that Time - National Poetry Month Big Poetry Giveaway

Hurray for April; we're almost there! I don't know about anyone else, but for me, April tends to be a good deal more fun than my March. Of course this year, with a great trip to the University of Wisconsin - Madison to celebrate 50 Years of Africa and the Peace Corps - April is going to have to be outstanding!

To help the month get rolling, Kelli Russell Agodon, great poet and friend, is once again hosting the Big Poetry Giveaway at her blog, Book of Kells. I loved being part of this project last year and am signing up for a second time. Here's the deal: in the spirit of creativity and community, poets are giving away two books -- one of their own and one by a poet they love. All you need to do is leave a comment at the end of this post in order to be entered in the drawing.  The first giveaway is ejo - Poems Rwanda 1991-1994 by Derick Burleson. I have been an admirer of Derick's work for a long time and although we are Facebook friends and have one very dear friend in common, Madison was our first chance to spend time together.

If you've heard Derick read, you know he is charming, funny, and honest. He's also not too high falutin to get in the way back of a Subaru wagon when the situation calls for such measures. Derick read "Howdy" at the Orpheum Theater in Madison, WI and had the whole audience hanging on his every syllable - even the spaces in-between the syllables. In the morning Derick read "Remera Arrives" and told our audience the story of saving Remera's life - first with the gift of a rain jacket and eventually by helping him to get out of Rwanda to the United States. 

In case you haven't heard, there was a Rwandan Genocide in 1994 and these poems deal both with this as well as the years before this when Burleson was a Peace Corps Volunteer teaching English. There are several persona poems in the collection such as "Remera Arrives." This is a book you need to read - and although there are heartbreaking poems -- there is also much joy. 

REMERA ARRIVES

Houston, 1997

Oh my God what I have done? 
The climate, it is very hot here. 
All people, where they are?
I hear four millions living here. 
But I see no persons walking. 
There are many cars. All people have one.
Inside the house it is so cold. 
They call that conditioning air. 
Mostly all people stay inside.
Derick is grown fat and ballhead. 
And me too, I am fat now. 
During the war, I almost starved to die.
But now I let grow my dreadlocks. 
You must to have papers here before anything. 
That is same for my country.
Food here is fake. Everythings puts in cans. 
Cheeseburger is not real food. 
The air smells like l'essence. Barbeque is O.K.
For Fourth July they explode bombs
over the city, like back home
in Kigali on Liberation Day.
Me, I am learning slowly English. 
Here all people say Howdy to mean greetings. 
They smile at all the times. That is fake too.

Howdy

And then they were all staring at me.
So I shout: This is a typical American greeting.
C'est une salutation typiquement Am'ricaine.

Please understand, this is the first day of school
and the year before, there was no school
because of the war, une ann'e blanche, a white year,

a blank year, and school was supposed to start
in September and it's October already, the first day
of school a month late, just when we've all begun

to wonder if school would start this year or not.
123 unpronounceable names, every first-year
pre-med student in Rwanda gathered here in this room

to learn from me all the English they'd ever need:
If a bomb went off it would be really tragic.
They throw wads of notepaper, gyrate their hips,

sing Mama We! whistle, sprint up and down the aisles,
leap from seat to plastic seat. I stumble down
each concrete step to the auditorium's bowels

as if I were descending the icy rungs of hell,
and they shriek at me in a language I can't understand:
Umuzungu urashaka iki? Umuzungu subira iwanyu!

White man what do you want? White man go home!
The microphones stainless steel lung looks like
something with which to club them into submission.

So I rear back and holler Howdy, sheer horror
takin' me back to that Oklahoma twang I thought
I'd done gone and give up fer good. And when

they holler back: How-Dee, it's an amazing grace.
So I do it again and so do they. All semester I howl
English and they bellow it back, the future doctors

of Rwanda chanting in unison: shinbone connected
to the kneebone, kneebone connected to the hipbone.
And by December when I meet them between classes

under the blossoms of the campus poinsettia, I say

Muraho and they say How-dee. I say Amakuru and they ask

How're ya'll doin? I say Nimeza and they say Jes fine.

                       ---  Derick Burleson 

In the spirit of the Peace Corps experience, I will also be giving away my first book, The Cartographer's Tongue / Poems of the World. Although the book is my first, I think I have to admit is also my favorite -- perhaps because of the Peace Corps poems. 

And here's a poem from this collection; another Peace Corps poem.

Lost By Way of Tchin-Tabarden by Susan Rich  
                                                                            Republic of Niger

Nomads are said to know their way by an exact spot in the sky,

the touch of sand to their fingers, granules on the tongue.


But sometimes a system breaks down. I witness a shift of light,

study the irregular shadings of dunes. Why am I traveling


this road to Zinder, where really there is no road? No service station

at this check point, just one commercant hawking Fanta

in gangrene hues. C'est formidable! he gestures --- staring ahead

over a pyramid of foreign orange juice.


In the desert life is distilled to an angle of wind, camel droppings,

salted food. How long has this man been here, how long


can I stay contemplating a route home?

It's so easy to get lost and disappear, die of thirst and longing

as the Sultan's three wives did last year. Found in their Mercedes,

the chauffeur at the wheel, how did they fail to return home

to Ágadez, retrace a landscape they'd always believed?

No cross-streets, no broken yellow lines; I feel relief at the abandonment

of my own geography. I know there's no surveyor but want to imagine

the aerial map that will send me above flame trees, snaking

through knots of basalt. I'll mark the exact site for a lean-to

where the wind and dust travel easily along my skin,


and I'm no longer satiated by the scent of gasoline. I'll arrive there
out of balance, untaught; ready for something called home.

Just leave a comment below and you will be entered in the Big Poetry Giveaway. Check out  Kelli's Book of Kells to see what other poets are participating! Maybe you will join in, too?