Poetry and the Author’s Death

Patrick Sylvain

Before I die

I am birthing a poem

That will kill me.

The poem has a voice

In its own, which does not echo

Mine. I don’t mind, 

I’m writing it 

To write itself in the mind

Of the reader who is asking 

If the poem is aware of itself 

As the reader is aware of reading 

As I am aware of writing. Somewhere 

over the Atlantic, a thinker

Claims that the author is dead

While alive writing those lines.

Before I die a real death, 

I’m unwilling to evaporate.

The poem lives as I live through it

As the poem is being read and will be

Read as a poem whose author refuses

To die as an author. So, the poem has you

In mind as you ponder about its lines.

No fishhook in the gills.

Is the author dead?

Now, you are implicated

In the poem’s lifespan.

If you kill it, 

you kill the author

And the blood is in 

Your eyes.

Patrick Sylvain is a poet, social and literary critic, translator, and photographer. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice and has published in several anthologies and journals, including African American Review, Agni, American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Chicago Quarterly Review, Caribbean Writers, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Sylvain received a BA from the University of Massachusetts, an Ed.M. from Harvard, and an MFA from Boston University as a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow. Sylvain is on the faculty at Brown University’s Department of Africana Studies and is the Shirle Dorothy Robbins Creative Writing Prize Fellow at Brandeis University where he is a PhD candidate. Sylvain’s first bilingual book of poetry, Love, Lust, & Loss (Lanmou, Anvi, Pédans) was published in 2005 by Mémoire D’encrier and his poetry chapbook, Underworlds, is published by Central Square Press (2018). Sylvain is the lead author of the forthcoming book, Education Across Borders: Immigration, Race, and Identity in the Classroom, to be published by Beacon Press (Fall 2020).