Erica Hunt and Brent Hayes Edwards wax poetics for and through Césaire
or that you might stand on the brink and see a reflecting pool, a myth recited then written in the open ended curve of your own myth floating there, letters spread out on the waters of the Caribbean, as stars in the open sky paint the sea with old light.
Counter-Response: The Enigma of Return
Somehow it seems appropriate, though, to try to write about Césaire in his wake, even at so great a distance, when the last eddies are hardly visible on the surface, and the only trace of the vanished behemoth lingers in an interlacing of submarine currents. To start with nothing, or an almost-nothing that is not nothing.
Rejoinder: Césaire and Poetic Knowledge
Cesaire’s poems have been texts in motion, their instability and evolution from prose to poetry (and drama) back to poetry from edition to edition and from translation to translation were in some way constitutive , implicit in their aesthetic strategy, an embrace of fluidity in their quest to exceed conventional limitations.