Cornel Bogle
Alt text: Bogle has a shaved head and glasses. He is smiling at the camera, standing against a backdrop of brick and greenery. He is wearing a gray polo shirt.
Biography
Cornel Bogle was born and raised in Kingston, Jamaica, and is a poet, critic, and teacher in the Department of English at Simon Fraser University. His scholarly work includes essays, interviews, book chapters, and articles on Caribbean, Caribbean Canadian, and Black diasporic expressive cultures, creative writing studies, masculinities, and life writing, published in various journals and edited collections. As a poet, he uses techniques such as erasure, found poetry, and lyric poetry to explore personal and collective archives, bringing forth lyrical subjects and voices that reflect the experiences of Caribbean peoples across different times and places in the diaspora.
Poetics Statement
“My creative practice explores the complexities of identity, diaspora, and postcolonial experience. Through various expressive practices, I navigate the intersections of queerness, race, and masculinity, drawing from my lived experience to uncover the often-unspoken knowledge embedded within these identities and the communities from which they arise. By using creative expression as a form of research, I challenge conventional scholarly boundaries, embracing the subjective, emotional, and personal. My process involves a deep engagement with intertextuality and relationality, drawing inspiration from diverse archives. Through a poetics of rupture, appropriation, and remixing, I aim to challenge dominant narratives and question the frameworks through which stories are told. My work fosters a more expansive and inclusive dialogue about diasporic histories and the continuous search for belonging.”
Sample of Poet's Work
Left Behind
Scarred benches mirror the back window of the
bleached minivan as it drives away from the
schoolyard. My eyes reach out to the fading cricket bats
casting a long shadow on unyielding concrete.
Who left the bats behind?
I raise my head to the cry of a petchary
and the mistress shifts to Bennett.
My eyes search for the restive petchary,
but finds in her place bare,
embarrassed almond trees, their last leaves
consumed by small, pernicious caterpillars.
First published in Moko: caribbean arts and letters. 14.1 (2018).
A Niagara Landscape
at port dalhousie we follow
our reflections
in the pallid
lake weighing the promise
of freedom 'gainst the
vast stretches of stolen land
June 8, 1979
I use to work a place where I cut news clippings
till one day I left my scissors and reach for a blade
next ting I know is blood all over,
so I start write letters to the editor instead.
June 20, 1980
Me see you gone all the way out there to
the kiss-me-arse Wess — tek train, tek canoe
tek plane and walk pon foot
spread yuhself cross white man country
like a hand o’ banana.
“June 8, 1979,” and “June 20, 1980,” have been published in Pree - Caribbean Writing, April 2019. https://preelit.com/ 2019/04/16/june-8-1979/ and has subsequently been reprinted as “Poems,” in Bookmarked. PREE Ink. 2021, p. 227.