writing
-
Since I’ve been busy not paying attention to this blog, I have progressed beyond Writing the Bones, my previous segment on the writing of my 1st conceptual verse novel. The skeleton is solidly formed and now it’s time to put meat on the bones, so to speak. The next segment, in my progression, will be…
-
World building. It recently threw me for a loop identifying that that is what I am doing with my work in progress. It also excited me but this post is not about that aspect. It threw me for a loop because I’m usually write poems that say something about my life, experiences and/or history. The…
-
don’t ask me how i like it cause i like it like that like lauren velez sticky sweet like honey amped like espresso diaphanous like weed smoke rock solid like ashford and simpson phosphorous like venus everlasting like ever-ready comical like cedric digging dogs like dmx diggedy diggedy like das efx between the sheets like…
-
. . . the Second of October, about 9 of the clock in the morning, Mr. Mavericks Negro woman came to my chamber window, and in her own Countrey language and tune sang very loud and shrill, going out to her, she used a great deal of respect toward me, and willingly would have expressed…
-
Sometimes, the process of writing doesn’t require you to put pen to paper or click away at the keyboard. Sometimes, it involves sitting still on the balcony, looking at cars going where they’re going; looking at the sky and skyline; noticing the trees are an arcing line of shadow at night, scarier, almost, than the…
-
forty-six years of diaspora living and finally, i see myself again. forty-six years of living and i refuse to apologize anymore unless i am wrong and wrongness always has a personal and a political component so goodbye, good riddance and good luck. i loved you once. honestly. as freely as i could i loved you…
-
Elsie was a straight A student, a dutiful daughter and a speaker of three languages. I was nothing of the sort but still, we became friendly enough that I was able to ask why the French teacher called her Tuyet. Americans say its hard to pronounce. I tested it on my one language tongue. Tuyet.…
-
When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautifuland terrible thing, needful to man as air,usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is morethan the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:this man, this Douglass, this…
-
Sometime in the late 1930’s, the government in another of its persistent and futile attempts to suppress African cultural survivals, decided that the colony would more easily be governable if drums and other traditional musical instruments were outlawed. The colonials must have sensed, and correctly, the importance of music in the cultural independence and political…
-
Reggae for me is very much associated with the ’70’s, with a time of a lot of self-questioning, nationally, individually. And not just self-questioning, because also I think it was very much a time when people were open to ideas about what I will just loosely call the spiritual world, you know, the inner world.…
Tichaona Chinyelu 