Father, Son and the Holy Ghost
We pray mainly in the alleys of memory.There, shards of smiles glitter the ground, buthere we wear—almost—identical namesas scars, though you won't or can't remember what date I was born. Something trickles downthe side of my face. In some versions this may be all you have taught me: needles arehollow lines which collapse as many familiesas veins. Now a convict in death's work camp,you wither each day until we may count yourT-cells with one hand. When Mama's voice begsfrom the phone "Please buy a dark suit to wear,"i may be wrong—but I say "Don't some of uswear black all day, everyday, anyway?"
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- November 8, 2023
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“Father, Son and the Holy Ghost” from IDEAS OF IMPROVISATION: by Joel Dias-Porter.
Published by Thread Makes Blanket Press on June 14, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by Joel Dias-Porter.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Joel Dias-Porter (aka DJ Reneg8d) is a former DJ who was born & raised in Pittsburgh, PA. A 5X Individual Finalist in the National Poetry Slam and the 1998 & 1999 Haiku Slam Champion, his poems have been published in; Time Magazine, The Washington Post, NY Times, Best American Poetry 2014, Mead, POETRY, Callaloo, Ploughshares, Asahi Shimbun, Red Brick Review, Under the Bashō, Beltway Quarterly and the anthologies Gathering Ground, Love Poetry Out Loud, Breakbeat Poets, Short Fuse, Role Call, Def Poetry Jam, 360 Degrees of Black Poetry, Slam (The Book), Revival: Spoken Word from Lollapallooza, Poetry Nation, Beyond the Frontier, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, Catch a Fire, and The Black Rooster Social Inn. A recipient of the 1995 Furious Flower “Emerging Poet Award,” his performances include the Today Show, SlamNation, on BET, and the film Slam. A Cave Canem fellow, his latest book is Ideas of Improvisation on Thread Makes Blanket Press (2022).
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Ideas of Improvisation interrogates how the I & the I of the imaginary can appear perpendicular to the axis of the real. In addition to the expected body of words, Joel Dias-Porter improvises on the idea of the lyric by marooning text to create ghost poems that float above the page and add a new haiku-like dimension. Like the rook in brook, in Ideas of Improvisation we hear how Dias-Porter, a neurodiverse technician of the text, reformulates form to navigate the spectrum of possibility.
"Joel Dias-Porter's much-anticipated poetry collection is for poetry's true believers."
—Yona Harvey
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