Dialogue:
Raphael Edookue and S.T. Brant
Raphael Edookue on S.T. Brant’s “Before Consciousness (Transtromer I),” “Individual (Transtromer V),” and “Eternity’s Unraveling (Transtromer VI)”
Death awaits every creature, including man (no matter his social status), it is nature’s curtain that sometimes falls when a man’s role in the movie of life is not yet finished. Despite being a lifelong reality, its occurrence has the potential to alter things—plans, psychology, thus, creating loneliness and glowing griefs. This reality and inevitability (sometimes hard to accept) run through the three poems (Before Consciousness, Individual, Eternity’s Unravelled) of Brant, finely embroidered.
Death happens sometimes, in the most unimaginable way: a child born today to a couple that’s been expecting one for over two decades dies the next day, an only child returning to his poor home with a university degree and a sumptuous award slumps in his office on his first day at work in a multinational company; when these happen, the most beautiful of epitaphs can’t close the mouth of a long and life-threatening grief:
Waking up is going down: a negative parade
Foul nightmare: soaks the
What then is the fate of one who has lost a loved one? This question is answered in the second line of
the second poem (Individual [Transformer V]) as follows:
“Densless heart dedicated by abandon”
Still in same poem, nature’s spontaneity with respect to its occurrences, death inclusive, which seem to render time worthless is then x-rayed:
“Spontaneous nature: devaluation of human time”
However, no matter how realistic death is, it is still a difficult thing for some people feel ready when the thought of “dying someday” comes. This difficulty might not be unrelated to great feeling of nonexistence after death, a belief the poet disagree with b seeing the dead as
“...substantial as the living” (poem 2, line 6)
positing that the dead feel:
“... welcome: unalone ::....” (poem 3, line 3).
These poems are indeed, Brant’s very useful and beautiful artistic effort to chronicle what human life entails. They form a true mirror that reflects the real attributes of man, thus, these poems should be made more concrete and placed in every man’s home.
S.T. Brant on Raphael Edookue’s “Nothing Slits Here”
Notes on the Erasure:
Nothing, in my reading of this poem, has an affirmative presence, as in Nothing is a legitimate force rather than a void or an absence or something that constitutes what we imagine is a Lack-of something; instead, Nothing occupies space in a paradoxical way by not occupying space in a casual, profane way, but takes up space spiritually, and by being attuned to that metaphysical channel, the mythological and functional Nothing by which this poem takes us on the journey across the road, into the forest, through the field, to meet the serpent and win our contest with it by desisting the slaying of the it, becomes a useful tool in our being and the becoming of our fullest selves. I thought the refusal to kill the snake, which I took to be an act of rebellion in the same vein as Lilith’s refusal to subjugate herself to Adam, was a very powerful mythological revision in this poem (again, in my reading) that operated a very clever reversal of its own, whereby the decision to not kill the snake, thus not kill but pardon Lilith, reversed the judgment of her exile, and found a way to gracefully unify the splintered Eden. This, too, is Nothing, as in Not Sin, or the negation of a thing, the thing of the precedent of exclusion, whereby we are doomed and acquainted with Death, thus Nothing is restorative, and by Nothing being Here, where we are, we are restored to Eden, which comes to us as we pacify the violent demands placed on us daily to kill the many different forms of the snake that we are presented.
For each issue, ballast asks pairs of poets to read each other’s work and respond in some way. We hope these dialogues will sound the resonances contained within the issue as well as serve to foster a sense of interconnection and community among our authors.
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