All Loves Supreme: Comments on Love the 2012 Callaloo Conference

Nelly Rosario

Callaloo © 2012

[matrimonium]

Anniversary of Two Non-Poets: A Sonnet

Her poem is keeping the hairs of his brows from snarling against her dense Sunday rains. His poem happens when detangling the veins that coil round her calves like avid tree boughs.

Hers is chamomile smoke blown into his earache with a joint made from the day’s news. And his is to steal pigeons for the muse that flutters her vegetable soup afizz.

Such is the lyricism of two loves

who know not of sonnets or villanelles, for whom maggots in tin cans of sardines are excuses to dine in fine alcoves by the sea. The verse sustaining their spell

nonetheless shimmers, a silver sateen.

[congressus]

“Love is in need of love” are my very first notes of the 2012 Callaloo Conference in October.

Delivered by Dr. Charles Rowell in his remarks on the Significance of the Occasion, the simple phrase inspires psychedelic doodles on the very first page of my red-covered notepad, compliments of our goody bags.

At the doors of Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium participants meet and greet before the conference launch, many dressed in lustrous reds. How refreshing this all is, we seem to agree, a conference that dares tackle the theme of endearment, affection, passion, tenderness, that eternal present it seems our world has forgotten in its rush to commodify it. We sing it, paint it, write it, fight for and against it, yearn for it, are unable to live with or without it.

And how refreshing, too, for a conference to open with a dance performance, because the poetics of movement is the every-language of the world. Here we are, graced by The Nanette Bearden Contemporary Dance Theatre, whose performance of an excerpt from Walter Rutledge’s On the Block: After Bearden is as collaged and nuanced as the art of Ro-mare Bearden, as love itself. There’s even an unexpected moment of—”Excuse me, but we’re having technical difficulties.”

A hiccup, a misstep in choreography, a miscue of music, a sequence out of order, words misspoken . . .

Yes!

Yes, because to love is always a work in progress, points out Maaza Mengiste in the ensuing “Love in the Poetics of Movement” panel.

Yes, because for the dancers to share their process is an act of love, says Tsitsi Jaji.

Yes, because love’s movement of body, soul, emotion is a risk, says Greg Pardlo: nuance has everything to do with love.

[parentes]

Nuance has everything to do with love.

I write this essay in the month of Valentine’s, so forgive its focus on eros.

And the poet Pardlo also inspires me to dust off “Anniversary of Two Non-Poets,” a sonnet I wrote in grad school. The poem is itself inspired by the actions small and large that form the building blocks of my parents’ simple yet solid love. Theirs is an unadorned, hard-working love, one in which my siblings and I have been fortunate to thrive. Throughout forty-two years, we’ve watched their marriage bloom, in all its eros, philos, and agape.

It’s a romance that got off to a rocky start: the fathering of my half-sister in the Dominican Republic; the break-up of my father’s engagement to my mother that took him years to mend in the United States; my mother’s forgiveness and her agreement to raise my older sister; and finally the humble wedding at my grand-aunt’s house in the DR, fiercely boycotted by my maternal grandmother.

Over four decades later, I can laugh at their bickering, from how “tu papá thinks he’s Samaritan Superman” to how “you can’t tell tu mamá absolutamente nada, she’s so terca.” There was the time I told my same stubborn mother how lucky she was to have such a faithful husband, to which she said, “Hmph. He’s the lucky one.”

They’ve weathered enough. Raising four children while working low-paying jobs, proud...