With these unfortunate words a BBC commentator grudgingly greeted the news in 2002 that Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poetry had been included into the Penguin Classics series. Today I went to hear him. Johnson recalled that misplaced put-down and other insults (the Daily Telegraph ran a frontpage story ‘Reggae Rebel joins Betjeman’) as he recalled his musical and literary roots. I forgot my camera, so I will have to suffice with the more superior work of Liz Johnson-Artur, one of my favorite photographers. (While listening to Johnson today, I realized that his first album, Dread Beat An’ Blood, came out almost 30 years ago already and that he is a grandfather. But as the poet Lorna Goodison who introduced Johnson remarked, he is still ‘large.’)
Filed under: Jamaica, Linton Kwesi Johnson, poetry
Johnson is a lion of both poetry and reggae. I’ve also just been listening to his early stuff this past week. I was introduced to him when I was a teenager, out on class boycott in the early 1980s in SA. Poetry was never the same again, nor reggae…
True dat.
Yes I,a roaring lion,just checked out his Reggae Fi Radni yesterday after listening to Corey Harris’ tribute to Winston Rodney from his new album,Zion Roots.