"This poem came about at the intersection of my passions and obsessions: the often unbelievable cruelty of life, the total unknowability of death, and our fundamental need to believe that there is someone who cares about us out there somewhere. When, in early 2010, I heard the coverage of Haiti's earthquake on NPR (another passion), I was inspired to do further research into the beliefs of Vodouisants in Haiti and to imagine how desperately they must pray for relief from the calamities that continue to beset their country, how abandoned they must feel in this life, and how ready to welcome the next. Though most of us will never experience anything remotely as horrific as the people of Haiti have, I hope the poem conveys compassion for the inevitable physical and spiritual suffering of this life and hope for a better deal in the afterlife."
The Vodou Afterlife
If we believed, as NPR says the Haitians do,in 16 reincarnations, half as men,half as women, with a year and a dayin "the water" between each,we could live for 800 years,
give or take, with a different bodyeach time, so that even when earthquakescome, and hurricanes, and heart attacks,even when help is hard to come by,there is always next time, another chance
to hear what the rocks say, sense how the trees feel,to learn again what the animals know.Vodouisants are smart enough to knowthat their big guy god, Bondye, is far distantfrom creation, and cannot be held accountable,
so they send their prayers to the loa,lesser spirits, like Papa Legba,the guardian of the crossroads,Erzulie Freda, the spirit of love, Simbi,the spirit of rain and magicians,
Guede, the guardian of death.They don't stick pins, not anymore, butmake fake people out of discarded shoesand nail them on trees near the cemetery,messengers to the otherworld, to say hello,
maybe, or help us out with these hurricanes,or send us some rain in this unbreathable heat,or give us strong magic, or to scream enoughwith the crossroads already, we're already dead.Send water, Erzulie Freda. Send shovels.
| Poet: | Daniel Halpern | ||||
| Featured Poets: | Daniel Halpern, John Ashbery, Russell Banks, Anthony Bourdain, Janie Fink, Richard Ford, Jorie Graham, Robert Hass, Campbell McGrath, and Joyce Carol Oates. | ||||
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| May 6, 2010, 7 p.m. Rosenthal Pavilion, Kimmel Center, NYU, 60 Washington Square South, New York, NY | |||||
| Free | |||||
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Daniel Halpern is the author of seven collections of poems, including Something Shining (Knopf, 2001); Selected Poems (1996); and Traveling on Credit, his first book of poety. He has translated and edited numerous works and anthologies, and in 1970, he worked with Paul Bowles to establish and co-edit the international literary journal Antaeus. Halpern is the founder and editorial director of Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins. He has received numerous honors, including, among others, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He resides in the New York area with his family. John Ashbery's collections include Planisphere: New Poems (Ecco, 2009); Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (2008); A Wave (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Penguin, 1975), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Book Award; and Some Trees (Yale University Press, 1956), which was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Russell Banks has written numerous novels, including TThe Reserve (2008), Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, The Sweet Hereafter, and Affliction, the latter two collections were adapted for the screen. His honors include the Ingram Merrill Award, the John Dos Passos Award, the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Banks is the founder and President of Cities of Refuge North America. Anthony Bourdain is an author and a chef. He is the author of nine books, including No Reservations: Around The World on an Empty Stomach (Bloomsbury USA, 2007); The Nasty Bits (2006); and Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook (2004). Janie Fink was educated at the University of Virginia and Columbia University, where she studied with Halpern. She is the author of Bubble Opera (Carrot Press, 2007), and her poetry has appeared in various journals, including Antaeus, Margie, Poetry East, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Journal and Verse. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter. Jorie Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently Sea Change (Ecco, 2008), Never (2002), Swarm (2000), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She has been the recipient of numerous honors, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, among others. She is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. Robert Hass's books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema (Ecco/HarperCollins, April 2010), Time and Materials (2007), which won the 2007 National Book Award; Sun Under Wood: New Poems (1996); Human Wishes (1989); Praise (1979); and Field Guide (Yale University Press, 1973), which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997, and he currently teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. Richard Ford is the author of several novels, including Canada (forthcoming from Ecco/HarperCollins); The Lay of the Land (2006); Independence Day (Knopf, 1995); which was the first novel to receive the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; Wildlife (1990); and The Sportswriter. He has also written several short story collections, including Vintage Ford (2002) and Rock Springs (1987), among others. Since 2008, Ford has been Adjunct Professor at the Oscar Wilde Centre with the School of English at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland. Campbell McGrath's poetry collections include Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2009), Seven Notebooks(2008), Pax Atomica (2005), Florida Poems (2003), and Spring Comes to Chicago (1996), among others. He has been the recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter-Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Award," among others. He teaches at Florida International University in Miami. Joyce Carol Oates's numerous works include We Were the Mulvaneys (2004); Blonde (2000), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; The Falls , which won the 2005 Prix Femina Etranger; and The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and among others. Oates has been the recipient of several honors, including the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and two O. Henry Awards. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and she is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University. | |||||
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| Sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, the New York University Creative Writing Program, and HarperCollins Publishers | |||||
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| Info: | 212-274-0343, ext 10 academy@poets.org http://www.poets.org/events | ||||
