With star-crossed and magical symbols, the poems of Daniel Garrett speak on aging, loneliness, and the slow, painful wisdom that only comes with maturity. His poems feel like prayers to the stars; pregnant with regret, they analyze past and present realities, exploring the poet's memories and experiences with luscious symbols and descriptions. The reader will feel a sort of quiet awe at the three poems we present here.
Daniel Garrett is a writer whose work has been published in American Book Review, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, World Literature Today, The African, Black American Literature Forum, Black Film Review, Changing Men, The Humanist, and the Quarterly Black Review of Books. He has written a novel, Heroes and Friends, and a play, An Enemy of the President.
Daniel is the founder of the Cultural Politics Discussion Group at ABC NO RIO and Poets House (1989-1993), a group that took as its motto "knowledge, discourse, friendship, and social responsibility." Daniel thinks that the intellectual's principal responsibility is the making, unmaking, and remaking of his own mind (then, after this come other duties, also self-chosen); and he thinks that art is one of the forms of freedom that we have. His favorite writers include Henry James, Rainer Rilke, and Chekhov, and he is especially impressed by the twentieth century work of John Koethe, Yehuda Amichai, Adrienne Rich, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Dawn Powell, Gore Vidal, and Thomas Bernhard. In addition to literature, Daniel likes film, music, and philosophy, and he hopes, more than anything, to grow, publish, and last as an artist. Drop him a line at dgarrett31@hotmail.com.
Daniel's works here at Unlikely Stories are:
2002:
Night Came
We confused intensitites
A Remembrance of Class