Wanted: Poems for the new St. Martin collection of Poetry, Where I See the Sun

Great Bay/Marigot, St. Martin — “All poets and spoken word artists of St. Martin – South, North, and those studying or living abroad” are invited “to submit up to five poems” for a new poetry book, said House of Nehesi Publishers (HNP). Where I See The Sun – Poetry in Contemporary St. Martin is the working name for the upcoming anthology. A wide range of subjects and writings styles are encouraged, said Jacqueline Sample, president of HNP.

HNP easily issued the “Call for Poetry” online last week but the guidelines could make getting your poems in the new book a bit tough. Nevertheless, it is an exciting proposition from a press that has published literary giants like Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados) and Amiri Baraka (USA), a Harvard scholar like Marion Bethel (The Bahamas), and a lifetime collection of poems by the late Charles Borromeo Hodge, hedging his work from obscurity on his own island.

The full guidelines getting poems in the new book are found at http://www.facebook.com/nehesipublishers. The guidelines can also be requested at houseofnehesipublish@gmail.com, or visit the Philipsburg Jubilee library and the Public Library in Marigot to see the guidelines on the bulletin board.

Deborah Drisana Jack, poet, artist:
 “We must make way for the cubs.”
 (HNP photo)

“If done right this publication can be used in schools throughout the region and in colleges. A strong collection is needed; a kind of a one-stop introduction to St. Martin poetry,” Drisana Debbie Jack, one of the nation’s leading author/artist. Over the last four years, poetry readings at Axum Café, Top Carrot, and the park of the Hotel de la Collectivité suggest an emerging generation of poets and writers of poems eager and willing to get their work out to the general public.

Changa Hickinson:
will poems from his unpublished
 collection enter the upcoming
 anthology?

The recital of unpublished poets Rochelle Ward and Mariela Xue at the 10th anniversary of the St. Martin Book Fair in June, tell us that some fine writing is in the making, said Sample. The last anthology of St. Martin poetry was Winds Above the Hills, compiled by Wycliffe Smith and published in 1982 for SMAFESTAC. Thirty years since that groundbreaking festival – in which the Ponum was revived! – there have been about 16 single-author collections published. But there has not been a single poetry anthology, even after both parts of the Friendly Island attained an adjusted autonomous political status. “It would be great to have some new voices. We must make room for the cubs,” said Jack in response to last week’s “Call for Poetry.” Both of her books published by HNP have been used in US universities.

One of St. Martin’s “new voice”
poets Rochelle Ward (L),
 during her studies at UWI,
 with Trinidad’s great novelist
 Earl Lovelace (RW photo)

A rigorous selection process by a confidential editorial board is planned for Where I See The Sun. The writers submitting their work “just have to meet the measure,” said Jack. Her first title, The Rainy Season (1997), was one of the most read HNP poetry books in 2009, according Philipsburg Jubilee Library statistics. Jack thinks that the title for the new St. Martin poetry book is an “inspired” one. Hopefully the idea and challenge of the anthology will inspire poets and aspiring poets to take a chance at getting published in it, whether they’ve been published before or not, are senior wordsmiths or young upstarts, write regularly or now-and-then, or express themselves through traditional meter, free verse, or spoken word rap. In his book Salted Tongues (2003), the writer and critic Fabian Badejo has already advised, in a somewhat priestly tone, “Publish and be Blessed!”