Metempsychosis Archives

A Guest Series Curated by Nicole Rollender. Intro to project here.

Call and Response: “Metempsychosis”

CALL:

El Salvadoran poet Claribel Alegria, who has written nine books of poetry and prose, has long been a voice for self-determination in her homeland, even though she lived in self-imposed exile in North Africa with her family for a time. Alegria’s long relationship with her husband, Darwin “Bud” Flakoll – spiritual, extremely intimate, devoted to art and dedicated to humanitarian and social justice activities – started as a three-month fiery courtship and a quick marriage and grew into a rich, collaborative life of testimonio. Shortly before Alegria and Flakoll were to go on a trip to southern Asia in 1995, Flakoll passed away. Alegria traveled to Singapore, Bangkok and Jakarta with her husband’s soul, as she has said, and wrote her poetry collection, Sorrow, about that trip – and her posthumous dialogue with her husband.

For this call-and-response, I chose the poem “Metempsychosis,” which captures Alegria’s dual emotions of grief/wanting to die with her husband and acceptance/wanting to continue living, in such spare, short poems that offer wide, open spaces as the point of departure for reader response: Continue reading →

I Call, You Respond: A Guest Series Curated by Nicole Rollender

I asked a group of 12 poets, fiction writers, photographers, visual artists and musicians to respond back quickly and viscerally to poem “calls” I sent them – with a poem, prose, a photograph, music or art and explain briefly why the poem elicited that response. Michèle Foster defines call and response as “spontaneous verbal and non-verbal interaction between speaker and listener in which all of the statements (‘calls’) are punctuated by expressions (‘responses’) from the listener.” Call and response has a long history, documented in sub-Saharan Africa as a working way for groups to govern themselves democratically and participate in religious rituals; this tradition survived on slave ships over into the New World, where it has come through centuries in gospel music, folk music, military cadences, rock and roll (consider The Who’s “My Generation,” call: “I hope I die before I get old; response: “Talkin’ ‘bout my generation”) Cuban music, rumba and more. As artists, we’re calling to readers and viewers with our work, so in this “I Call, You Respond” project, I wanted to see, over a few weeks, what responses four different poems would evoke in three artists. The results are stunning, thought-provoking and diverse.–NR Continue reading →