All posts tagged: Colin Channer

Colin Channer and the Diaspora of Dub

By NOAH BERLATSKY

Cover of Colin Channer's Console—rubble and an old bicycle.

“My way is so long, so long, but my road is foggy, foggy,” reggae legend Winston Rodney, aka Burning Spear, chants on his 1980 song “Road Foggy.” The beat sways underneath him like a horse plodding on a mountain track, and the horns sound muted and distant through the mist. It’s a song about the song as journey, a track that feels like it’s never meant to end. You travel not to get to get to the end of sound, but to luxuriate in it. As Spear said in an interview, “If I walk away from music, I walk away from myself.”

Colin Channer includes that quote and the line from “Road Foggy” in several poems in his recently released second collection Console (FSG). The volume is suffused in dub and reggae recordings he loves from his homeland. Dub is not just something left behind, though. It’s also a metaphor for the way that Channer’s own experience and existence makes Jamaica live in his new home of New England, and vice versa. Music creates an imagined space in which disconnection is its own coherent landscape. The consolation is that the places you go are both where you’ve been and who you are.

Colin Channer and the Diaspora of Dub
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Mons of Luke al Dente

by COLIN CHANNER

Basil from a pot on the veranda,
over-priced pinoli and pimientos
pressured into dust,
brassy olio from TJ’s rumored virgin,
Greek alleged,
Israeli sea salt from Whole Foods
and Parmigiano-Reggiano
from that shoppe in Wayland Square
where la señora with the Spanish speaking helper
and the bum preserved by lunges
reaches from her core
for briny lemons brie and sausage
taut ficelle flown in from Orly and loose tea.

Mons of Luke al Dente
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