Tayari's Blog: Remembering Phebus

Posted by TayariJones on April 10, 2007 08:47 PM
Filed under Guest Bloggers

On March 31, 2007, the beautiful, talented poet Phebus Etienne passed on. Phebus-- whose name meant light-- meant poetry. Phebus, crafter of language that captured the spirit of loss and of love and of longing, whose quiet smile could make you smile, whose smart, sly wit rode out on her every word.

I have her unpublished manuscript, Chainstitching, on my shelf with all my books of poetry because this book, printed at her desk and bound only by a clip, deserves a dust jacket, a cover photo, an ISBN. And this is part of why I mourn the loss of Phebus Etienne.

Although her gorgeous book was never published, know that she was not unsung. Those of us who knew her and knew her work know her unique relationship to beauty and the way it has benefited all of us. We understand why she has been anthologized in Cave Canem's Gathering Ground, in Edwidge Dandicant's The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States. We understand how her manuscript was often recognized as a finalist in first book contests (Tupelo Press, 2005, Alice James Book, 2006…) But we don't understand how any judge could resist choosing her as a winner. We understand that this brilliant Haitian-born, New Jersey-based woman, whose mother "packed for diaspora in one suitcase and left Port-au-Prince with warning to none," had the power to speak through her poems, and that her poems, thank heavens, will live on with us.

But there will be no more of them. No more of her soft words, the gleam of her smile, no more of the quiet support she unselfishly offered the people and organizations she believed in.

No more Phebus? She was only 41. She could not be with us long enough. I've said it to others, and I'll say it again. This is how it will be for a lot of us, for a long time. We're going to be steady missing this one. This marvelous, talented, brilliantly beautiful one.

--Camille T. Dungy

To read some of Phebus's poetry, click here.

Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths

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