... if you see me

looking at your hands

listening when you speak

marching in your ranks

you must know

I do not sleep to dream, but dream to change the world.

Anticipatory chatter across Alice Yard, the venue for Friday's poetry readings dedicated to the late Guyanese poet Martin Carter, turned to an attentive quiet governing this same space.

The gathering at 80 Roberts Street, Woodbrook, was organised by The Bocas Lit Festival as part of the 30th Annual West Indian Literature Conference, "I Dream to Change the World: Literature & Social Transformation," which took place at the University of the West Indies from October 13-15, 2011.

The conference's theme comes from a Carter poem, "Looking at Your Hands".

The Bocas Lit Fest, Trinidad and Tobago's annual literary festival, inaugurated in April of this year, will take place 26-29 April 2012.  

The 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature will be presented during the Festival. OCM, One Caribbean Media, is the parent company of the Trinidad Express and Barbados Nation newspapers, TV6, Hott 93 and the Caribbean Superstation.

This was not a night for long speeches from dignitaries and corporate sponsors, although Nicholas Laughlin, director of programming for Bocas was happy to announce that the National Gas Company has pledged to sponsor the literary festival for the next three years. This was a night to dream in various forms: anecdote, poetry, prose and music.

There were three featured writers for the night — Vahni Capildeo, Nalo Hopkinson and Barbara Jenkins — each of whom read from their own work as well as Carter's.

Hopkinson is Carter's niece and shared that she was honoured to be reading his work, describing Carter as the "quintessential mad poet".

Local rapso group, 3Canal also spoke of Carter's influence on their work and joined each song they performed to one of his poems while talking about its current relevance to Trinidadian politics.

For 3Canal's Wendell Manwarren, it was not the line about dreaming to change that was the most outstanding but the first line "No, I will not still my voice/I have too much to claim."

Manwarren shared that the group came across Carter's work while creating work for a US performance six years ago and were surprised at not being familiar with him previously.

The reading was meant to highlight the intellectual continuance of Carter's work in Caribbean art, music and writing as was noted by Dr Gemma Robinson, who edited a selection of Carter's poems in University of Hunger during her opening remarks.

She spoke to the movement of Carter's poetry and the span of his influence. Here we are, some 60 years after his first book was published, and Carter has inspired poets, scholars and writers as varied as Linton Kwesi Johnson, Gordon Rohlehr and Ngugi wa Thiong'o.

"This is a body of work that travels near and far. From father to daughter, to the streets of Georgetown, to Woodford Square in the 1950s and tonight to Alice Yard," said Robinson.

Carter was born in 1927 in Georgetown, Guyana and died in 1997. He has written several volumes of poetry including The Hill of Fire Glows Red and Poems of Resistance. He was deeply involved in Caribbean politics and was an avid supporter of the Walter Rodney founded Working People's Alliance.  

Visual art created by James Cooper, Marlon Griffiths and Rodell Warner was also on display.