Poem of the Week | December 04, 2012
Kwame Dawes: "Stop Time"
This week we’re going to let Kwame Dawes raise the hymn with a new poem. A Ghanaian-born Jamaican, Dawes is the award-winning author of sixteen books of poetry (most recently, Wheels, 2011) and numerous books of fiction, non-fiction, criticism and drama. He is the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner, and a Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. He also teaches in the Pacific MFA Writing program. Dawes’ book, Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems will be published by Copper Canyon in 2013.
Hear Stop Time.
Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Author’s Note:
African-based syncopations in music tend to seduce us and enliven us with the illusion and reality of how rhythm can be manipulated. Stop Time, like the seeming off-kilter of reggae’s rhythm, for instance, or the irresistible “pockets” in dancehall rhythms and the clave patterns of the rumba, is often the basis of the swoop and sway of the dances that it creates. I have been fascinated by the way in which stop time is a beautiful and persistent piece of luggage Africans have carried with us even without knowing it is there, and in the poem the church becomes the place where it finds sacred power—a metaphysical moment of helplessness that relies on faith—the gap, the absence, the separation—before the bridge of faith that spans the gap and brings us safely home.
Stop Time
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