So much things to say

My Jamaican friends will recognize this as the title of a Bob Marley song. It's also the title of a poetry compilation published in 2010 and featuring "100 Poets from the First Ten Years of the Calabash International Literary Festival." My poem Weights and Measures is one of the 100. Today I decided to take a literal stock of the songs posted so far on my new website. I used wordclouds.com to generate this graphic illustrating the frequency of the words on all five lyrics pages.

It's no surprise that love, religion, sing, girl, chase, sun, rise, and glory are prominent words here. These are all lyrical hooks, so they're repeated in the lyrics. It's curious seeing the juxtaposition of words in the graphic. Some eerie-familiar examples I found include:

• "sang inside fish"

• "drink welcomed heart behind bird"

• "what's truth headed went north"

The poetry and the mystery in these random words reminds me of the first line of one of my earliest songs, not yet added to this site but one I've been thinking of for my upcoming album. It's called Sing for You and it goes:

"Words have a life of their own Leave them alone, and they'll sing for you.

Time's not an ultimate thing...

No measuring how I feel for you."

What can you pick out from the wordcloud? Let me know what you see.

Weights and Measures is no longer available online for sale, but speaking of coincidences, I searched the WorldCat and found the closest of the four libraries that have copies are Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, and New York University (Elmer Holmes Bobst Library). These two locations are significant to me, one being the city where my employer, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of the United States, is headquartered, the other being in the state where my closest and dearest living relative resides.

If you have a copy of Weights and Measures, will you let me know? I'd like to make a map. I leave you with an excerpt from an article in Caribbean Beat, which describes the slim volume.

"This year... Calabash launched a series of six poetry chapbooks, all by members of the Calabash Writers’ Workshop... Each chapbook contains about a dozen and a half poems. There is no Calabash school of writing — each poet has his or her individual style; what they share is an admirable frankness about Jamaican life."

"Half the poems in Niki Johnson’s Weights and Measures are addressed to the elusive “Anthony” familiar to readers who know Johnson’s work; these are lyrics of memory and desire, one moment almost embarrassing plainspoken (“Anthony, / do you remember the park?”), the next tangled in puzzling obsessions (“rain is not a tiger / rain is not / a tiger”), just like any real-life adult affair. And the title poem, about two women in a kitchen, finds in this ordinary domestic scenario a gentle metaphor for love, the passing of time, the lessons of age."

© MEP Publishers | What the Caribbean is talking about this month | Caribbean Beat Magazine https://www.caribbean-beat.com/issue-75/what-caribbean-talking-about-month#ixzz7NygGMKtI

Peace, NikiD

PS Get So Much Things to Say on Amazon (not being paid to advertise, I truly think it's a wonderful compilation)