nium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, vol. 2,
From Postwar to Millennium (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), “In-
troduction,” especially 11–12, as well as the many examples of polyglot works in the
text.
- Kamau Brathwaite, Trench Town Rock (Providence, RI: Lost Roads, 1994), 9.
21. Alfred Arteaga, Cantos (Berkeley, CA: Chusma House, 1991), 20. - Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001), cited from Poems for the Millennium, vol. 2, 838. - Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The Development of Nation
Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon Books, 1984), 13. - Joan Dayan, “Who’s Got History: Kamau Brathwaite’s ‘Gods of the Middle
Passage,’ ” World Literature Today: Kamau Brathwaite, 1994 Neustadt International
Prize for Literature Issue, 68, no. 4 (autumn 1994): 727. - Kamau Brathwaite, Barabajan Poems, 1492–1992 (Kingston: Savacou North,
1994), 378. In “Wordsongs & Wordwounds/Homecoming: Kamau Brathwaite’s Bara-
bajan Poems” (World Literature Today: Kamau Brathwaite, 750–57), Elaine Savory dis-
cusses the poet’s “video style.” “Bob’ob” was Brathwaite’s grandfather’s brother, a car-
penter; “Kapo” is a Jamaican folk wood sculptor called Mallacai Reynolds whom
Brathwaite knew in the mid-1970s (see “Wordsongs,” 756, note 5). - See “Wordsongs,” 751.
- See Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, “Glossary,” in M. M. Bahktin, The
Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and
Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 425. - See Walter K. Lew, Excerpts from Dikte for Dictée (Seoul, Korea: Yeul Eum,
1992), cited in Poems for the Millennium, vol. 2, 844. - While I was completing this essay, I received issue 5 of Chain, “Different Lan-
guages” (1998), ed. Jena Osman and Juliana Spahr. Most of the work in this issue is
bilingual (often English and Spanish) or multilingual, in keeping with the aesthetic
of Brathwaite and Cha rather than the internationalism of Jolas, although many of
the experiments, like Will Lavender’s “Glossolalia” (125–29) and Jessie Jane Lewis and
Peter Rose’s “Pressures of the Text” (130–37), interpret multilingualism as the inser-
tion, into the English structure, of technological languages, dialects, pictograms,
visual devices, and so on. In any case, as we see in Chain, multilingualism is very
much in the air.
Chapter 6
- See Raymond Kuhn, The Media in France (London: Routledge, 1995), 87–89;
James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1996), 305–08. - Michel Serres, “Platonic Dialogue” (1968), in Serres, Hermes: Literature, Sci-
Notes to Pages 95–103 281