Remembering Velma Pollard

Lovers of poetry and literature throughout the world are mourning the loss of Velma Pollard (March 26, 1937-February 1, 2025), phenomenal poet, novelist, linguist, teacher, and scholar. Her enthusiastic fans include every group (children, Rastafarians, feminists, academic literati, drylongso folk). All who knew her grieve the demise of a brilliant, caring, ebullient friend who always celebrated love, culture, family and beauty – most especially flowers!

While I shall have much to say at a later date about her remarkable oeuvre, I must first celebrate her impact on my life from the time I met her forty-seven years ago in the fall of 1977. She and her sister Erna Brodber and several other Caribbean writers came to Richmond under the auspices of an Eastern Virginia International Studies Consortium Grant received by Virginia Commonwealth University, Hampton University, Virginia Union University, and Norfolk State University. By the time we had toured all of the Virginia colleges in the consortium and I had made a later visit to The University of the West Indies, Velma, Erna, and I were dear friends, bonded by our love of literature and African Diasporic culture and by our enthusiasm for the teaching, the research, and the writing projects on which we were embarking.

From that first meeting in 1977 to the present, Velma and I have been in constant contact, supporting and encouraging each other in all of our professional endeavors. We sent notices about opportunities; we provided nominations; we wrote letters of recommendation and support; we wrote introductions and reviews and blurbs; we read and critiqued each other’s works. One treasured example, Velma’s response to initially opening Remembering Paule, my last book:

I was … skipping about in wonder, getting goose pimples all the time and tears welling up unasked … What a magnificent work of love! … Daryl, I cannot thank you enough for doing this for me and the whole world at least of Caribbean literature.

Email, January 29, 2024

Though we lived far apart, there were times when Velma and I were together for extended periods. She hosted me when I had a Fulbright research grant to Jamaica. I hosted her when she was a visiting professor at UR. She hosted me when I returned to Jamaica once to serve as an external reviewer; again to serve on a dissertation committee; and another time to serve as a Coordinator of a Summer Institute in Jamaican Life and Culture. She was at UCLA the same year I taught at UCSB–a whole year of frequent get-togethers. She and I have appeared together as conferees, speakers, lecturers, panelists, readers, in countless places: Richmond, Hampton, Norfolk, Harrisonburg, Miami, LA, Jamaica, Haiti, Curacao, Antigua, Dominican Republic, Trinidad, Martinique, Spain.

I interviewed her on several occasions: one of those interviews appeared in my New World Adams: Conversations with Contemporary West Indian Writers in 1992; one appeared in CLA Journal in March 2004; another was a part of Furious Flower II: The Black Poetic Tradition (California Newsreel 2005). She was also a part of my later “Conversations” growing out of New World Adams: one at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 1994 that also included Kamau Brathwaite and Erna Brodber; and another with Derek Walcott at UR on October 19, 2001, the very day that it was announced that V. S. Naipaul responded to the notification that he was to receive the Nobel Award with, “It is a great tribute to both England, my home, and to Indian, home of my ancestors.” Needless to say that was a heated conversation!

Velma and my collaboration of forty-one years continues. My review of Violet Harrington Bryan’s book, Erna Brodber and Velma Pollard: Folklore and Culture in Jamaica, appeared in the summer 2024 issue of The Journal of American Folklore. The introduction to Karl that Velma just a few months ago asked me to revise will appear in its reissuing as a Caribbean Modern Classic by Peepal Tree Press in April 2025. In a forecast by founding editor Jeremy Poynting, he announces that the book will have “an introduction by another of Velma’s and Peepal Tree’s oldest friends, Daryl Cumber Dance.”

In retrospect, I think my friend Velma and I were saying goodbye in our last letters, without realizing how little time we had left to share. When she received my Xmas letter, she wrote:

Thank you Daryl
What a full year!!
I love you for many things.
Your energy is very high on the list.
What comes to me immediately are the words of a Goodison half line
“… like a horse that never tire(s)”

In Velma’s very last letter to me when she got out of the hospital on December 20th after surgery to reconstruct an Achilles tendon, she wrote:

Enough to say that since the surgery I have been in bed My left toe must always be on a level with my heart. Try it Healing is slow
The end is not in sight
Early birthday wishes and much love
VelmaP

Note her rejections of periods. I expect the computer slipped one in.

It is appropriate that my memories of Velma conclude in the brilliantly philosophical and haunting lines of the poet non pareil:

and so we sit with our invisible pencils
working out strategies to cope with brevity
to cope with our adieux
to love — too sweet to forget
to life — too intense to leave
but most
to friends and friendships
mangroves of our shelter . . .

“Two for Neville,” Crown Point and Other Poems

Also from Boomer: Tips for Adults Reinventing Themselves: A Four-Part Series