M. NourbeSe Philip
Biography
M. NourbeSe Philip is a poet, essayist, novelist and playwright who lives in the space-time of the City of Toronto. She practised law in the City of Toronto for seven years before leaving to write full-time. She has published four books of poetry, one novel and three collections of essays. She was awarded a Pushcart Prize (USA) in 1981, the Casa de las Americas Prize (Cuba) in 1988, the Tradewinds Collective Prize in 1988 and was made a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry (USA) in 1990. In 1994 she was awarded the Lawrence Foundation Prize (USA) for short fiction and her work was recognized in 1995 by the Arts Foundation of Toronto by its Writing and Publishing Award. In 1999 her play Coups and Calypsos was a Dora Award finalist. She recently completed a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio, Italy.
Poet's Note
a poet’s sample sampler simple
note—a single sample knot note that intrigues
me you what! i mean
interesting to write rite writ
erly co(u)ntext
you get my
drift or
what intrigues and samples
me tomorrow is
PERFECT
Am presently at work on a book-length ms which uses a legal case as a foundation text.
One approach was to limit myself entirely to the words of that text to “fabricate” the poems; the other was to fragment/explode/buss up the words of the text so as to be able to cull other words from them. This generates a certain useful and fruitful tension between the ideas of limitation and freedom.
Sample Poem
From Zong! (pdf)