Feast

I was more hungry than I knew.

* * *

I was drawn to Callaloo first because it provided a site for the presentation and discussion of literature from throughout the African Diaspora. Some of my favorite issues of Callaloo have focused on writers and writing from places I had not visited but felt some kinship with and sense of being located in relation to—South America (especially Brazil), Puerto Rico and Haiti and various other islands in the Caribbean, even the Atlantic side of Mexico and Central America. My appreciation of the Diaspora had been more intellectualized prior to reading Callaloo; it was the poems, the fiction and the essays that facilitated a more personally meaningful connection to African descendants speaking to each other from all over the world.

* * *

As I ate, the air became crisp and thin;

The sky which has been always there became

Its newest blue, rare clouds stark and white.

* * *

But Callaloo is also special because of those issues or sections it devotes to featured writers or themes. It offers thoughtful reflections on the work of some of my favorite writers—the Sterling Brown and Yusef Komunyakaa issues stand out immediately as exceptional reference volumes. And its themed issues include such personally meaningful topics as jazz poetics, cultural politics, and emerging African American writers. I am particularly grateful for its early devotion to publishing articles on black queer studies, and the issue which paid tribute to Audre Lorde and Melvin Dixon.

* * *

I remembered what I had not thought I'd noticed;

* * *

But what I believe Callaloo will be remembered for most is its collection of interviews. The poems, fiction and essays can be published many other places, but few other publications have sought out and presented interviews with the stunning variety of African American and African Diaspora writers and artists appearing over the years in Callaloo. And it has been these interviews that have helped illuminate aspects of the writing not immediately apparent to me as a reader, have helped locate the diversity of traditions giving rise to that variety of writers, and have provided a record of writers reflecting on their own work as that work joined those of kindred others. It was in the pages of Callaloo that I got to learn more about the thinking of Etheridge Knight, Maryse Conde, Larry Neal, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Rita Dove, and Will Alexander; as well as younger artists like Suzan-Lori Parks, Carl Phillips, Fred Moten, Deborah Richards, Reginald Shepherd and Elizabeth Alexander. Some of these writers I had enjoyed before I read their interviews, but the interviews in all cases introduced me to the writers and their works in ways I would not otherwise know.

* * *

And a song someone used to sing to me

Echoed belly-deep and ancient.

* * *

I had the honor of participating in a Callaloo-sponsored trip to Cuba in 2001. It was wonderful to join what proved to be a cultural "exchange" between artists from Cuba and the United States, and I was privileged to learn that the musics common to artists from both locations undergird the languages and the literatures of each. It was also a pleasure to get to know other poets on the trip—Toi Derricotte, Harryette Mullen and Kevin Young, among them—and to join a fellowship of other African American writers who have traveled in groups under the auspices of Callaloo to places we learned upon arriving were already very familiar.

* * *

I swallowed all that was before me,

Consumed by the poem I do not think I have made,

* * *

As one who has had the honor of teaching in two of the summer creative writing workshops sponsored by Callaloo (along with fellow poet Natasha Trethewey and novelists Percival Everett, Helen Elaine Lee and Mat Johnson), I appreciate the opportunity such a workshop has provided in nurturing the works of developing writers particularly from the South, many of them students or graduates of historically black colleges and universities. And I have marveled at how this program has joined with others at Cave Canem, the Hurston/Wright Foundation and Voices of Our Nations in shaping the current literature and that...