sx salon 46

June 2024

Mervyn Morris

This special discussion section devoted to Mervyn Morris’s long career as poet, teacher, and mentor is the first part of a collaboration with the Small Axe journal; the second part will appear in the journal in 2025.

How do we begin to celebrate Mervyn Morris—how to pay adequate tribute to the person whose lifetime of work as a poet, critic, teacher, and mentor has been so profoundly important to Caribbean letters since the appearance of his first collection, The Pond, in 1973?1 There have, of course, been many tributes and recognitions already, among them the 2009 Order of Merit from the Government of Jamaica, followed in 2014 by Morris’s investiture as the first Poet Laureate of independent Jamaica (a post he held until 2017).2 More recently, he shared the 2021 Bocas Henry Swanzy Award with Edward Baugh; the award is intended to “honour and celebrate the contributions of the editors, broadcasters, publishers, critics, and others who have shaped the evolution of Caribbean literature behind the scenes.”3 Morris’s page on the Poetry Archive (where audio recordings of twelve of his poems are available) calls him “one of the most resourceful and technically brilliant of Caribbean poets.” And there is a respectable body of critical literature on his work.

sx salon first joined this chorus of well-deserved acclaim in 2015, when—under the editorship of my predecessor, Kelly Baker Josephs—we published “Making Poems,” the speech Morris had delivered the year prior at the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission’s literary awards ceremony.4 The speech opens with Morris’s characteristic dry humor, but it continues in an earnest tone, offering “[more than] a few words of encouragement and advice” to the emerging writers in the audience. The whole speech is well worth your time, interspersing suggestions about poetic craft with examples drawn from a range of Jamaican poets (Olive Senior, Louise Bennett, Mikey Smith, Dennis Scott, Edward Baugh) and ending with his own poem “Advisory” and its bracing final admonition: “Don’t let anybody / lock you in.” But in case you disregard my advice to read it in full, let me offer just one sample of the wisdom and economy of style to be found there: “The most fundamental point to make is that if you think you have something important to say, that’s good. If you are committed to tackling social or political problems, or to arguing your religious or political convictions, fair enough. But there is more than that to consider. If you are trying to be a writer, you have signed on to a struggle with form.” In that issue of sx salon, we also published “On Mervyn Morris,” comprising brief reflections by four younger Jamaican poets (Kei Miller, Nadia Ellis, Ann-Margaret Lim, and Tanya Shirley) on their experiences of Morris as teacher (all of them having been in his classes or workshops at some point) and poetic influence. Again, I heartily encourage you to read the piece itself and get a sense of the importance of Morris’s legacy for this newer generation of poets, as conveyed in their own words.

I’m delighted that in the current issue we both look back to and build upon our earlier attention to Morris’s work with a special discussion section, the appearance of which coincides with the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Morris’s landmark essay, “On Reading Louise Bennett, Seriously.”5 The section opens with Kim Robinson-Walcott’s piece “Mervyn, My Mentor,” which begins, “Mervyn Morris became my mentor some forty-eight years ago. He didn’t know it then. In fact, we hadn’t even met.” Robinson-Walcott goes on to describe her experience of Morris as supervisor of her doctoral dissertation: “He was gentle in his criticism, he was enthusiastic in his approval, he was insightful, he was encouraging.” The piece sounds notes that will appear throughout the tributes collected here, foregrounding Morris’s warmth and generosity alongside his utter commitment to the poetic craft and to facilitating the creative growth of his many students and mentees. Reprising her appearance in the earlier issue, Tanya Shirley sounds similar notes in her piece “Mervyn Morris: A Portrait of a Poet in Five Parts,” which combines prose essay with verse. Opening with a poignant reflection on the recent death of Edward Baugh in the context of his decades-long “camaraderie” with Morris, the piece moves from that note of grief and commemoration (“Open the bottle of white rum. Pour the libation.”) to a survey of the pedagogical and textual gifts that Morris has consistently offered to all in his ambit.6 Close-reading Morris the poet as she recalls Morris the teacher, Shirley ends by lauding his indefatigable work to sustain poetic community in the Caribbean: “He is a writer’s writer, an advocate and a cheerleader. . . . If it were not for Mervyn, many of our local writers, myself included, would have probably given up on this poetry business.”7

In “Shadowing Mervyn Morris,” Geoffrey Philp moves us more solidly into the realm of Morris as poetic influence, presenting a discussion of two of his own poems in aesthetic dialogue with Morris’s: Philp’s “Lime Quay Rock” and Morris’s “Valley Prince for Don D”; Philp’s “Bad Friday” and Morris’s “Rasta Reggae.” Ranging over matters of language, structure, and theme, Philp offers an intimate look at how a poet takes in, lives with, and honors another poet’s work through the making of new work. “Through my encounters with Mervyn Morris’s work,” Philp says, “I have learned to appreciate his pioneering role in shaping a distinctly Jamaican aesthetic,” one characterized by Morris’s “precise diction and deliberate focus on the local context.” These touchstones—issues of style and setting—are foregrounded again in Shara McCallum’s “Mervyn Morris: An Appreciation and Close Reading.” The essay pays meticulous attention to one Morris poem—“Jamaica 1979”—as demonstrating “some of the aesthetic and ethical values . . . underpinning his entire body of work.” McCallum goes on, “While I was never fortunate enough to be his student at the University of the West Indies, I have positioned myself at the feet of Morris’s poems many times.” The essay’s deft reading of Morris’s brief, powerfully understated text opens up the poem’s proliferating possibilities for the reader before noting, in conclusion, that Morris’s poems “are disarming, inviting, direct, and a bit sly, all at once, in the best ways. They sneak up on you, with their quiet wisdom, and stay.”

The final piece in our Morris-themed section is Velma Pollard’s appropriately titled “Last Reel,” which is also the title of Morris’s most recent poetry collection (Ian Randle, 2024); it reproduces Pollard’s remarks on the occasion of the collection’s launch.8 In a witty, aphoristic style that conjures the trademark dry humor of Morris’s own work, Pollard provides a swift survey of the collection’s thematic, tonal, and aesthetic range. “Professor Morris’ poetry is not new to anybody here,” Pollard begins. “If you were not made to read one or two of his poems in school, your children and/or grandchildren brought them home as homework. So you know what to expect of a Morris poem.” She then directs her audience’s attention to specific traits of the poetry, citing for each a specific example: “brevity,” a “photographic eye,” “catchy rhyme-and-rhythm,” and irony. We are shown the many faces a love poem can present (“Love works in these poems,” Pollard comments pithily. “It does not always.”). The piece ends by citing a “hymn” that evidences “a little-known aspect of Professor Morris’ life—the faithful Anglican churchman.” The last lines of that poem serve not only as an elegant ending to Pollard’s remarks but as a fitting conclusion to our celebration of the innumerable gifts encompassed in Mervyn Morris’s life and work:   

and we, your congregation,
are grateful servants who
give thanks for your creation
The harvest comes from you.

Staying within the Jamaican context, this issue’s discussion section wraps up with a three-way conversation by Nicosia Shakes, Maziki Thame, and Herbie Miller on the recently released and much discussed film Bob Marley: One Love. The exchange draws cogently on the experiences and expertise of all three interlocutors, generating a densely instructive reflection on the film’s achievements and shortcomings in representing Marley and the broader context of late twentieth-century Jamaica.

Our reviews section opens with reciprocal reflections by Emily Zobel Marshall and Geoffrey Philp on each other’s recent poetry collections (Bath of Herbs and Archipelagos, respectively). Then Laurie Lambert reviews short-fiction collections by three Jamaican women: Alexia Arthurs’s How to Love a Jamaican: Stories; Wandeka Gayle’s Motherland, and Other Stories; and Zalika Reid-Benta’s Frying Plantain. The section is rounded out by three discussions of new academic work: Alick McCallum on Celia E. Naylor’s Unsilencing Slavery: Telling Truths About Rose Hall Plantation, Jamaica; Nathan Dize on Lucy Swanson’s The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction; and Michele C. Dávila Gonçalves on John T. Maddox IV’s Fractal Families in New Millennium Narrative by Afro-Puerto Rican Women. Finally, we bring you new creative work: poems by Mayra Santos Febres and their translations by Seth Michelson; poems by Johanna Gibson; and a short story, “The Black Box,” by Omega Francis.

As we honor Mervyn Morris, a literary giant we hope to have with us for many years to come, we must also sound a mournful note as we mark the passing, on 2 April 2024, of Maryse Condé. Obituaries, tributes, and biographical sketches abound—here are but a few examples, from the Guardian newspaper, the Columbia University French department, and the Small Axe Project.9 While critics and scholars (myself included) have spent much time and many words trying to do justice to the breadth and subtlety of Condé’s oeuvre, such is the richness she has left us that we have still only begun that work; much remains to be said. For myself, I am most moved by and grateful for the way her deep care for Caribbean and Black diaspora people—especially for the girls and women among us—never spilled over into cant or sentimentality. From her debut novel Heremakhonon (French edition 1976, English edition 1982) and through all that follows, her work is ever pointed and precise, deploying a wit that punctures illusion and pretension without degrading the characters it skewers or alienating readers from them. Look out for a forthcoming special issue of sx salon devoted to her legacy; for now, let us pause in the silence that follows her passing, to acknowledge our gratitude and our grief.

Enjoy, stay well in these tumultuous times, and let us know what you think: rlm@smallaxe.net.

Rachel L. Mordecai

Mervyn Morris’s poetry collections

  • The Pond. London: New Beacon, 1973; revised edition 1997.
  • On Holy Week: a sequence of poems for radio. Kingston: Sangster’s, 1976. Subsequent editions: Brown’s Town, Jca.: Earle, 1983; Pathways 10, April 1988 (Kingston); Sydney: Dangaroo, 1993; London: New Beacon, 2016.
  • Shadowboxing. London: New Beacon, 1979.
  • Examination Centre. London: New Beacon, 1992.
  • Vestiges / Spuren. Bilingual limited edition of one hundred copies, with paintings by Ulla Schoedel, translated into German by Wolfgang Binder. Bavaria, Germany: Erlangen, 1996.
  • I been there, sort of: New and Selected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 2006.
  • Peelin Orange: Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 2017.
  • Last Reel. Kingston: Ian Randle, 2024.

Table of Contents

Reviews

“‘The Earth Vex’: A Blistering Warning from the Archipelagos” — Emily Zobel Marshall
Review of Geoffrey Philp, Archipelagos (Leeds: Peepal Tree,  2023)

“Poems of Healing and Transformation” — Geoffrey Philp
Review of Emily Zobel Marshall, Bath of Herbs (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2023)

“Estrangement, Alienation, and Vulnerability in New Short Fiction by Jamaican Women Writers” — Laurie Lambert
Review of Alexia Arthurs, How to Love a Jamaican: Stories (New York: Ballentine, 2018); Wandeka Gayle, Motherland, and Other Stories (Leeds: Peepal Tree, 2020); Zalika Reid-Benta, Frying Plantain (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2019)

“A Microhistory of the Neither Written, Kept, Preserved, nor Remembered” — Alick McCallum
Review of Celia E. Naylor, Unsilencing Slavery: Telling Truths about Rose Hall Plantation, Jamaica (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022)

“The Zombie Returns to the Caribbean” — Nathan Dize
Review of Lucy Swanson, The Zombie in Contemporary French Caribbean Fiction (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2023)

“Afro–Puerto Rican Female Writers Debunking the White Family Myth” — Michele C. Dávila Gonçalves
Review of John T. Maddox IV, Fractal Families in New Millennium Narrative by Afro–Puerto Rican Women (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2022)

Discussion

“Mervyn, My Mentor” — Kim Robinson-Walcott

“Mervyn Morris: A Portrait of a Poet in Five Parts” — Tanya Shirley

“Shadowing Mervyn Morris” — Geoffrey Philp

“Mervyn Morris: An Appreciation and Close Reading” — Shara McCallum

“Last Reel” — Velma Pollard

“Representing an Icon: A Conversation on Bob Marley: One Love” — Nicosia Shakes, Maziki Thame, and Herbie Miller

Poetry & Prose

poems — Mayra Santos Febres, translated by Seth Michelson

poems — Johanna Gibson

"The Black Box" — short story — Omega Francis

[1] See the end of this introduction for a bibliography of Morris’s poetry collections.

[2] The National Library of Jamaica page honoring Morris on his investiture as Poet Laureate also contains a link to a bibliography of and on his work. See https://nlj.gov.jm/poetlaureate/professoremeritusmervynmorris/; and “The Mervyn Morris Bibliography,” https://nlj.gov.jm/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Mervyn-Morris-Bibliography.pdf.

[3] “The Bocas Henry Swanzy Award,” Mervyn Morris, under “All Awardees,” NGC Bocas Lit fest, https://www.bocaslitfest.com/awards/henry-swanzy-award/.

[4] sx salon 19 (June 2015).

[5] “On Reading Louise Bennett, Seriously”—which, as Velma Pollard notes in this issue, “taught us how to read Miss Lou”—was first published in the Gleaner in June 1964 and reprinted in the Jamaica Journal in 1967; extracts of the essay were reproduced in The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature, ed. Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh (London: Routledge, 1996).

[6] Edward Baugh, also a renowned poet, critic, and professor of Caribbean literature at the University of the West Indies, died on 9 December 2023 at the age of eighty-seven. See biographical sketches and in-memoriam tributes from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Peepal Tree Press, and the Small Axe Project.

[7] Shirley’s suggestion here is borne out in Ann-Margaret Lim’s contribution to “On Mervyn Morris” in sx salon 19 (June 2015),in which she recalls meeting Morris some years after taking a poetry class with him at the University of the West Indies. When she confessed that her poetry-writing had lapsed in the interval, he responded, “If that’s the case, I should have failed you.” Lim continues, “I knew exactly what he meant, that I should have continued with the poetry, and that’s how and why I started writing poetry again in the latter half of my twenties—Mervyn Morris’s disappointment, admonishment, and foresight. He is my first poetry father.”

[8] My thanks to our Book Reviews editor, Ronald Cummings, for suggesting that we solicit from Dr. Pollard the text of her remarks, and of course to her, for her generous agreement.

[9] These recent essays in sx salon engage—to varying extents—Condé’s work: Corine Labridy, “Permission to Speculate Wildly,” sx salon 44 (October 2023); Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel, “On Disorderly Women Who Love Themselves,” sx salon 44 (October 2023); Jonathon Repinecz, “Maryse Condé Speaks: The Death of Negritude and Other Life Lessons,” sx salon 28 (June 2018).