The Belfast Review Team | 21 March, 2024
Thanks for joining us for Week 5 of our Spring Blog. Each week we feature a handful of creatives, with Art & Photography on Sundays, Fiction & Nonfiction on Tuesdays, and Poetry & Song Lyrics on Thursdays.
This week we're exploring the theme of 'Connection.' It's a hot topic in a world where we have so many technologies to put us in touch with one another and yet loneliness has become an epidemic.
“Only connect!” as E.M. Forster wrote in Howard's End (published in 1910). And yet the full quote gives a better context, “Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.” Over a hundred years later, thanks to new technologies, we live in fragments more than ever. And passion has been replaced with the need to monetize.
Where and how are we meant to connect to ourselves, our world, and each other? This week's creatives tackle the subject in unexpected ways.
Featured poet: Joshua Pipkins
This poet admitted to being intimidated to submit to us, and all we can say is we're fortunate this creative writing student felt a little brave and did it anyway.
This poem grabbed us at once with it's evocative, almost musical styling, reminiscent of the great American poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes [1901-1967]. He was an early innovator of what was called “jazz poetry.”
This poem is told from the perspective of a young man who cannot quite connect with his own body and longs for a simpler way to be. There are layers of meaning in that notion. One could read the poem as delving into America's complicated history and its even more complicated present. Or one could even go a step further and tie it into the 'body positivity' movement co-opted by advertisers, or the impact of social media on self-perception; camera filters and AI-generated imagery conspiring to create a “perfect” look – ignoring the sages who warned us that to be imperfect is to be human.
What does it mean to not be able to connect to one's flesh-and-blood self? And by extension – one's interior self? Is it not the foundation stone to all other connections? If so, why is it treated as a secondary concern in our modern, over-complicated world that demands we are true to almost everything but ourselves?
How different would the world be if we were able, each and every one of us, to feel at home in our own skin.
Dogsbody
JOSHUA PIPKINS
I don’t feel right in this body
Slowly, this human monotony begins to kill
Gimme that dogsbody
Give me that antibody
That joins my blood and makes me still
I don’t feel right in this body
There is always an ache, always the need to embody
What is not myself, the disembodying thrill
Gimme that dogsbody
I want to be God’s blackbody
With mutated feet that stomp this world to a standstill
I don’t feel right in this body
So I write poems that’re dark and bawdy
And every night I take a pill
I don’t feel right in this body
Gimme that dogsbody
ARTIST BIO
Joshua C. Pipkins is an African-American poet based in Memphis, Tennessee. He is the author of A Quiet God Howling Over Hymns, a self-published chapbook made in collaboration with Greek artist Dimitri Vasilakis. Joshua is studying Creative Writing at the University of Memphis.
Special thanks to the poet for trusting us with his work.
Thanks to all of you readers for reading! Be sure to like, follow, and share.
Check out our other posts this week:
Wordy Tuesday (19 Mar) with Fiction by A. Joseph Black
Rhythm-Verse Thursday (21 Mar) with Song Lyrics by Rory Strong
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