There are so many islands

To belong to an island is to look outwards, understanding that the horizon is not simply a boundary between what is visible and what is invisible, what is known and unknown, but a challenge: to imagine, to yearn, to leave, to search, to return.

— From my foreword to So Many Islands: Stories from the Caribbean, Mediterranean, Indian and Pacific Oceans
.

Nada está perdonado

.
Aún tengo buenas intenciones,
esperanzas de segunda mano,
tres cuartos de corazón.

— Three poems from The Strange Years of My Life translated into Spanish by Adalber Salas Hernández

Nine small compositions

There are no islands without the sea

.
As a matter of etymology, the sea came first.

— From “There are no islands without the sea: being a compendium of facts, fictions, names, etymologies, lyrics, and questions, in the form of a broken-up archipelago”, an essay, if you can call it that, published in Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago

Eager to see the world

From the archive of The Strange Years of My Life
 


Postcard depicting The Leap of the Rabbit (1911), by Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso. Bought at the Art Institute of Chicago, c. August 1997.

Read my poem “Deux Lapins” here. See more of the archive of The Strange Years of My Life here.

Often confiding

From the archive of The Strange Years of My Life
 

 

Entry for the House Wren (Troglodytes aedon), pp. 352-353 in A Guide to the Birds of Trinidad and Tobago (rev. ed., 1980), by Richard ffrench; a prized book in my library, given me as a Christmas present by my parents c. 1985.

Read my poem “Roitelet” here. See more of the archive of The Strange Years of My Life here.

The virgin’s shawls and cloths

From the archive of The Strange Years of My Life



Postcard depicting the Wilton Diptych. Bought at the National Gallery, London, June 2015.

Read my poem “Deux Lapins” here. See more of the archive of The Strange Years of My Life here.

Il tuffatore

From the archive of The Strange Years of My Life



Postcard depicting a painting from the Tomb of the Diver at Paestum. Unsent and undated, published by Edizioni Matonti-Salerno. Found at Librería El Hallazgo, Mexico City, August 2011.

See more of the archive of The Strange Years of My Life here.

Optimal negative

From the archive of The Strange Years of My Life



Results of my malaria test, administered at Woodlands Hospital Laboratory, Georgetown, Guyana, 4 March, 2005.

Read my poem “Everything Went Wrong” here. See more of the archive of The Strange Years of My Life here.

“The time was a page . . .”

From the archive of The Strange Years of My Life



“Reading History”, manuscript draft, 7 December, 2004.

Read the poem here. See more of the archive of The Strange Years of My Life here.

“A backyard on a small island”

My colleagues Sean Leonard, Christopher Cozier, and I cherish this photo — taken in late 2006 by the Trinity College exchange-student photographer Ivan R. Belcic — because it reminds us that Alice Yard began as, and remains, simply “a backyard on a small island.” Ten years ago at 80 Roberts Street, Woodbrook, Port of Spain, there was no gallery, no residency living quarters, no annex studio space, no sign. There was a paved yard with an old concrete laundry sink. There was a physical location made available by Sean, and there was an idea for a space where artists, musicians, and others could meet, converse, exchange, make, perform, imagine, play. There was a name: Alice Yard. There were many questions. There were many possibilities — more than we could yet realise.

Ten years later — after hundreds of events and projects and actions, performances and mas bands, thousands of conversations — Alice Yard is still a Woodbrook backyard. It is still a space of questions and possibilities. It is, thanks to Sean and his family, a space of radical generosity. It is a space to investigate ideas of openness and intellectual freedom. It is a space for play.

As we mark Alice Yard’s tenth anniversary this month, “our instinct,” as we’ve written elsewhere, “is less to celebrate and more to affirm our spirit of investigation and exchange, our ethos of generosity and independence.” My own predominating feelings are astonishment — ten years! how? — and enduring gratitude: to Sean and Chris, to the innumerable others who have entered and engaged in some way with our space, and for the immeasurable enrichment of my own thought and imagination over the past decade.

After ten years, we still have no idea where this will go: that’s the most exciting thing of all.

A Strange Years playlist

AL: As much as many poems are written in code — and one is especially suspicious of the ones that seem to be frank — yours are very much about pace and rhythm. They are lyrics for songwriters from the Beat era, and for the best rappers of today. How’d that happen?

NL: Funny, I thought I was writing lyrics for Satie’s piano works.... Do you want a Strange Years playlist?

— From “A Strange Conversation”, sx salon 21 (February 2016)


Over the years of start-and-stop writing, the sound-climate in which I composed the poems in Strange Years was musical as much as verbal. Sometimes snatches of melody worked themselves into the actual poems, like the “three piano notes” in “Reading History”. Sometimes it was a fragment of lyric. More often it was a tone, an aural atmosphere, a shiver.


Erik Satie, Gymnopédies (1,2,3); Croquis et agaceries d’un bonhomme en bois; Vexations

Frantz Casseus, Suite No. 1 (Petro, Yanvalloux, Mascaron, Coumbite)

Boby Lapointe, “Framboise”

Franz Schubert, Piano Trio No. 2 in E Flat Major

Richard Strauss, Four Last Songs (as sung by Gundula Janowitz)

Heitor Villa-Lobos, Bachianas Brasileiras (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9)

Rodgers and Hart, “My Funny Valentine” (as sung by Chet Baker); “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” (as sung by Ella Fitzgerald or Anita O’Day)

Ivor Gurney, “I Will Go with My Father A-Ploughing”

Igor Stravinsky, Ebony Concerto

R.E.M., “Strange Currencies”

Bacharach and David, “Anyone Who Had a Heart” (as sung by Dionne Warwick)

Matthaeus Pipelare, Een vrouelic wesen; Fors seulement

Local Natives, “Wooly Mammoth”

Billy Strayhorn, “Lush Life” (as sung by Johnny Hartman)

Traditional, “If I Were a Blackbird” [alas, I can’t find a version I truly like online]

Traditional, “Río Manzanares” (as sung by Isabel and Angel Parra)

Charles Ives, The Unanswered Question

And a lagniappe:

Traditional, “Congo Bara” (as sung by the Keskidee Trio)

The Strange Years of My Life

Le voyageur

The Letters

I have just arrived at my hotel, I am waiting to check in. Porters hurry past, ignoring me and my small suitcase.

My friend surprises me. “You here?”

“Of course,” she says, “I’ve been looking for you. J is here too.”

At once I’m annoyed. “Why is he here?”

“He says he has all of your letters, and he wants to give them back.”

“What letters? I never wrote to him.”

“Nonetheless, he wants to give them back.”

When I wake up, I’m not sure what annoys me more: J’s false claim that I wrote to him, or the fact that I’ll have to take possession of these letters, carry them away in my small suitcase, file them among my papers at home, already too voluminous.

Cousin Arthur + Uncle John

Find or make your space; or, Sunday thoughts

In the past seven and a half years, Alice Yard has hosted roughly three hundred public events, by my approximate count. These have included exhibitions and artists’ projects, performances, discussions, readings, and film screenings organised and curated by the three co-directors, my colleagues Sean Leonard, Christopher Cozier, and myself; the “Conversations in the Yard” series run by Sheldon Holder from 2006 to 2008; and events of all kinds organised by all kinds of people for which we lend our main space in Woodbrook and our adjunct Granderson Lab in Belmont.

This is not to mention the numerous activities that happen in the yard out of the public eye: countless hours spent by artists imagining and making, and by musicians rehearsing (almost every night of the week); conversations, meetings, brainstorms, informal workshops, chance encounters, photoshoots, video shoots.

We’ve hosted nearly three dozen artists, curators, and other creative practitioners visiting from outside TT. Our guests have included world-famous names who would make a splash in any metropolitan city, but often we've been most motivated and inspired by new, young artists, musicians, and writers near the start of their careers, who challenge us to respond to their energy and ideas.

This has all happened in a simple backyard in Woodbrook which we and our collaborators have reimagined over and over again -- the space continues to surprise us. And it has all happened with no paid staff and very minimal funding, raised from our modest resources and efforts. We’ve never applied for a grant or received one, and never had to pursue anyone’s agenda but our own. We’ve never been anxious about the resources we don’t have. Instead we’ve imagined the biggest things we can make happen with what we do have. It’s a modus operandi of improvisation, and an attitude of possibility. If Alice Yard had a motto, it would probably be something like “find or make your space.”

The original and enduring animating force that makes this possible is the generosity of Sean Leonard and his family, who have given so many people permission to play in their yard on Roberts Street. And the other fund of possibility we’ve been lucky to draw on is our always changing network of collaborators here in TT and around the world: artists, designers, writers, musicians, doers, and makers of all kinds who have responded with energy and eagerness to our invitation to step into the yard and imagine with us. Thinking about last night’s Douen Islands event -- and all the people who made it possible by sharing time, expertise, equipment, and labour -- I was struck again by the generosity of our network and its immeasurable value.

Small artist-run initiatives and contemporary art spaces like Alice Yard get asked a lot about “sustainability,” and usually what people mean is, how do you pay for all this? We’ve been criticised before for not being “serious” enough about finances and funding, and what’s implied is the idea that the value of a project like ours should be measured in successful grant applications, international donor relationships, plane tickets, and appearances in the art world’s social circuit.

We got to the point years ago of realising that “value” and “sustainability” mean something very different to us. What sustains Alice Yard is our sense of curiosity and the enjoyment of engaging with the ideas and imaginations of everyone who steps into our space. TT is a small and mercenary society where -- unlike some other Caribbean territories -- official culture institutions are weak, there is no tradition of private philanthropy, and no wealthy expat/tourist population to “support the arts.” Our agenda and our reward are to make room in our context for imagination and generosity, and serious work that at the same time is also serious play.

The motive is to keep ourselves challenged and fascinated, and in conversation with people who energise us. It’s as selfish and as selfless as that. As simple and as complicated as that.

Better a poem be nearly wrong than nearly right.

The Arts of Strangers

You cut your own hair,
you wring your own shirt,
you do your own favours.