American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

  Rock the party, fuck the smackdown

  under Bill Brown’s blue chicago there’s

  unrest in response to continued scolding.

  thing object. matter ain’t the same

  as one another. things don’t represent

  they must be broke. they cannot pay attention

  to objects like objects so they stay mad

  all the goddamn time, broken glasses

  everywhere. but I sound better since you

  cut my throat. the checkerboard is also a

  chess board. it’s also a cutting board and a

  sound board. it’s also a winding sheet and a

  sound booth.

  now you’re bored with all these healthy choices

  and you don’t want to sound as clean as this.

  shit smoothed out on me by accident too.

  how did I get here? I lost my ideological

  mama and her things. her thing’s in storage

  in north las vegas but no matter. ain’t no thing.

  ’cause when the morning breaks I’ma get my sound back

  and all my native weather will be mine.

  five points, ten points

  whiteness ain’t the same as them

  a grave in exchange for the commons.

  blackness

  is a range of deviations from

    in the commons.

  said no to the state from growl

  to funked-up air from ja to mya, bobby to little esther.

  motherfuckers gave up the commons

  for a grave.

  you gave up the commons for a grave but

  black migrates for who it is

  not for like dee dee.

     so get this up in you

  cut of the black key.

  won’t come when you

  call but them handbills,

  found broadside for runaways,

     my crew is in the corner

  all the time

  and roll the stone. for romance,

  the unhardened minimal

  sound attorney, ungarreted,

  took grave accent to secret stash for striving.

     the serial tonic

  still bursts away from

     ridiculous preachers

    in seizing and flying.

  indented glasgow servants

  long for henrik larssen in flat

  black lines

     you gave up the commons

  for a grave. broken windows

  is a small time patriarch, a little bitty port

     authority. the fucked up waterfront

  is buried in safety from

  backward flowing water and

  charred, current ballads with flight

  inside from wanting what they got

     and got a grave. your fluent

  capture is the same as them

  except your serial remains

  FROM B Jenkins

  gayl jones

  my daddy drank red soda pop.

  once he wanted a fleetwood,

  then he wanted a navigator,

  so he could navigate, check out

  his radio towers, deliver flowers,

  drive back to give me long kisses,

  watch mama burn her books. said nancy

  wilson can’t sing but she can style—

  hold back the force of random operators/

  return to the line refuse to punctuate. a moon—

  but his actual drive was watching clay circle,

  tight-breath’d hunch, tight shoulder. sweet

  nancy wilson was just cold analytics:

  the difference between a new coat and the

  one with ink on the pocket, calculate

  like a fat young minister, strokin’ like

  clarence carter, increase like creflo

  dollar. mama and me stayed up over

  the club, cried sometimes in the same

  broke off the same piece left each other

  the last piece practiced the same piece

  got warm on the same. however,

  I’m so full this morning I have

  to try and make you understand

  william parker

  my town is very large array. look at me

  look up inside my circle and my sounds at

  my music to my left at the birds in the tree

  machine. my music dreams about my mama to

  my boy. they sing to each other in a secret

  for the ordinary culture, the folded play

  on the street about bird pretending and flute

  stealing till it’s time to go to play mountain.

  all this is in the nature of my shelves.

  they are the head archive of very large array

  and if you listen close birmingham and the

  wind blowin’ in from chicago, throwin’ ends

  from chicago, california and rossville, tennessee

  and hamtramck, michigan to united sound

  are all together on the longest road I know

  cut door by door in violent courtyards.

  they decided their skirts meant something

  to do with movement in the page frame, song

  for a moving picture of the tone world, for

  the remote trio, the internal world theater,

  inner ear of the inside songs, the inside

  songs of curtis mayfield by william parker,

  theater in the near, flavor that inside

  outside opening, the ear’s folds, its courses,

  in the open space, do it to me in my common

  ear hole, its porches, insurge of the tone will,

  gone in the sound booth, deep in da inner

  sound ya’ll, invasive song up in you to get down

  through everybody’s open window. now

  my broke inside is a tent city. I live hard

  in tent cities. my town is very large array

  fred mcdowell

  frank ramsay

  What can’t be said, can’t be said, and it can’t be whistled either. It can’t be whispered. The burden can be muted. No wave and the barren sequence rise on our account, triple soft but lashed, like in the first instance, which can be sung. The right to love refusal is black music. The song about desire always wants to disappear. In the second instance, she released in public chastity, flirting at the club and wound. Damaged from repeating, can you stay? Be my ontograph and discompose. If only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be—unutterably—enjoyed in what has been enjoyed.

  nancy wilson

  FROM The Feel Trio

  from series block chapel

  whenever I listen to cornelius I think of cecily

  then fry then house then read the blacks with

  peter pál. but sometimes it gets deep in the hold

  and the cell’s hard pleasure curls up in the water.

  so I sail the dark river in the mind by rocket ship

  (my high water everywhere is outer space, alabama)

  and stay alive in the concept with an outbound feeling

  of refuge, I’ma run, I’mo run, I’m gon’ run to the city

  of refuse, in russell’s anarchy, for angola, by soas,

  then bright dennis morris take my baby picture

  and I’m risen in the balmed-out underground.

  I get preoccupied with the tonal situation. I got

  to kiss somebody to end up in the original. It’s like

  that outside drama is our knowledge of the world

  and nobody claims it but us. we get it twisted

  in the diagram. we know the score. we got a plan.

  …

  welcome to what we took from is the state

  welcome to kill you, bird. the welcome state

  and its hurt world, where you been lost and tied,

  bird. it’s some hot water on the second floor<
br />
  and the altar on the bottom is an ordered pair

  of lemon chocolate on the curb. get jumped in.

  enjoy the recital and the hospitality. come upon

  surround recall the project rubble everywhere.

  come up on some common operations. drink the

  open of the open evening mix. english breakfast

  and some curd and light whipping. get up on the

  cooling board of new opposite steps and come

  upon remains arranged by hand like an english

  garden. cant to refuse the unsung isolation.

  that sad impersonal personal shit that play off

  every other frank but my little irregular frank,

  his body shaped like an accordion, his body shaped

  like a pear, in the every day feast day, but come up

  on. you the one with so much work to do, merchant.

  sing a shattered self is just a shelf, young captain,

  sea? you perfectly welcome to what we give away.

  from I ran from it and was still in it

  I burn communities in shadow, underground, up on the

  plateau, then slide with the horny horns. vision’s festival

  is folded in overtones and outskirts. j tizol, harry carnival

  and feel lined out around an open forte, an underprivilege

  of the real presence, curled up around an outlaw corner.

  curling around corners puts me in mind of jean toomer.

  I think I’ll change my name to gene tumor. I want to be

  a stream tuner, unfurled in tongues that won’t belong in

  anybody’s mouth, mass swerving from the law of tongues,

  let me slip my slap-tongued speech in your ear, the burnt

  starry star of all love in your ear. o, for a muse of fire music!

  …

  I often amount to no more than a stylistics. airrion

  love and uncountable son and I want to amount to

  nothing more than that. my gift is more than you

  can carry. all other things are just my style. my thing

  is everything is everything and there’s nothing more

  than my bouquet, my uncountable thing outside. my

  voices inside blow up inside a blackening gift from a

  broken hand. we were cagey in our bib caps and our

  overcoats carried the hidden weight of our broken

  circle. lost city people make the world go round.

  remember that time at the marriott wardman park.

  …

  I am foment. I speak blinglish. at work they call me

  but I don’t come. I come when she call me by my

  rightful name. I come to myself from far away just

  laid back in the open. I ran from it and was still in it.

  it’s a blue division on my goodbye window. I’m full

  of outer space. I’m free as dred all night. I get clung

  with a voice that gets held back by surge protection.

  I’m daddy I come when he crazy he call me I’m crazy.

  I come when he call me once upon a time in arkansas.

  when the water come I come to the unprotected surge

  and division in my old-new sound booth. I am fmoten.

  FROM The Little Edges

  the gramsci monument

  if the projects become a project from outside

  then the projects been a project forever. held

  in the projects we the project they stole. we steal

  the project back and try to give it back to them.

  come on, come get some of this project. we protect

  the project with our open hands. the architect is in mining

  and we dispossess him. we protect the project by handing.

  let’s bust the project up. let’s love the project. can the

  projects be loved? we love the projects. let’s move

  the projects. we project the projects. I’m just

  projecting the project’s mine to give away. I’m not

  mine when I dispossess me I’m just a projection.

  projection’s just us that’s who we are that’s who

  we be. we always be projecting. that’s all we have.

  we project the outside that’s inside us. we the

  outside that violates our block. we violate the auction block

  experiment. we pirates of ourselves and others. we the friend

  of all. we the cargo. are you my treasure? you all

  I need. are you my wish? come be my sunship. you are

  my starship. you meant to fly but don’t be late. I dream

  the sails of the project from the eastern shore. plywood sails

  the city island past the enclave mirror till the bricks arise.

  at the fugitive bar and the food be tasting good. kitchenette

  my cabin and flesh be burning in the hold. I love the way

  you smell. your cry enjoys me. let me taste the way you think.

  let’s do this one more time while the project repeats me. the project

  incompletes me. I am replete with the project. your difference

  folds me in your arms, my oracle with sweets, be my

  confection engine. hear my plea. tell me how to choose.

  tell me how to choose the project I have chosen. are you

  the projects I have chosen? you are the project I choose.

  FROM The Service Porch

  it’s not that I want to say

  It’s not that I want to say that poetry is disconnected from having something to say; it’s just that everything I want to say eludes me. But if I caught it I wouldn’t want it and you wouldn’t want it either. Maybe poetry is what happens on the bus between wanting and having. I used to think it was what happened on the bus between oakland and berkeley. And it was, too, like violet texas in people voices, all kinda subtle transmission broke off by stops and bells, repercussive riding, mobile contact, slow symposium. Now, even in the absence of my office, I still want to move and so I have to move but never get there in this whole extended region of not being there, of stopping and saying not here, not here, and of that being, in the end, pretty much all I have to say. What I want to say is that having something to say is subordinate in the work of being true to the social life in somebody else’s sound and grammar, its placement in my head, my placement in the collective head as it moves on down the line. The itinerant ensemble arrangement of the 40, and sometimes of the 15, is where I started studying how to live in poetry. I want to transfer study as a practice of revision on the edge, where ethics and aesthetics are in parallel play. Some kind of homeless shift between reading and writing that emerges in a set as our cut-up schedule, a willow’s diverse list of things, point to point restlessness, interlocking schemes of material breaks, the constantly renewed syllabus of a new composers guild in the middle of enjoying itself. What we come together to try to do starts to look like what we do when we come together to enjoy ourselves, handing saying what we want for one another to one another in and out of words.

  POETICS STATEMENT

  Can we figure out how to keep the contrapuntal in mind, hold the collective head in the collective head, as the head, from the start and in advance, before the very idea of the very beginning? Can we have multiple lines in the poem, or want every line to be multiple, plied, pied, chromatically saturated, threads coming apart in quiltedness, anarkestrally shawled, caressively ungendered and hypergeneric, regeneratively, xenogenerously, anti- and ante-genocidally committed to as much going on as possible, which means that what’s at stake is a concern for poetry that overrides concern either for the poem or for the poet? Can we (want to) keep it all operative? All won’t all operate with the same intensity all the time, but when we get to the undercommon protrusions and folds can we be aware of this arrivance and want the people to sense it even if the differing and apposition are not as audible as visual, not as flavorful as tactile? Can we make it funky? Can w
e create our own little spatial justifications and then disrupt them? Can we protect the block in breaking it? Can we form an open set of projective habitations? You could say that these are Olsonian questions, which is cool, as long as you say they rise and fall in a black maternal ecology. Can we make that plain?

  SOUNDING THE OPEN SECRET

  The Poetics of Fred Moten

  Brent Hayes Edwards

  Full of rasp and burble and torque, flamboyantly maximalist and yet persistently elliptical, a polygraph of vagrant tongues and itinerant shards of language—an intermingling of conspiratorial whispers, philosophy (homespun or pedigreed), plans and proclamations, boasts at the edge of the dance floor, a house party heard from down the block, song titles and half-remembered lyrics, goads and hecklings and interjections and casual intimacies among friends and lovers (“but I just want to sit here with you if that’s all right”)—the five full-length books of poetry Fred Moten has published since 2008 can only be read as the announcement of a major voice, uncompromising and unique.1 If many readers of Moten’s poetry, despite the mainstream accolades it has received (most notably, The Feel Trio was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award), tend to characterize his work first of all in terms of its difficulty, its opacity, its “noise,” it is worth emphasizing that these qualities are the result of his deliberate commitment to a musical poetics: a way of working written language beyond itself, as it were, toward the medium of sound. As Moten puts it, “at a certain point, I’ve decided that what it is I want to say is subordinate to the sound, subordinate to a kind of feeling, a content that only that sound can provide.”2

  One reason that Moten’s poetry might seem noisy, even roisterous, is that there are so many people in the room of his pages: along with the sheer breadth of its range of attention, the other immediately striking quality in the work is how populated it is, not only with things and voices and places, but also with named individuals, not all of whom linger long enough to be fully identified. Take the first lines of The Feel Trio: “whenever I listen to cornelius I think of cecily / then fry then house then read the blacks / with peter pál” (FT 3). At every level of the poetry—from the formal predilection for montage and seriality in the ways the books are put together; to the constant paratactical jumps and shifts of its grammar; to the abrupt transitions among subjects, geographic locations, and registers of language; even to the repeated homophonic and anagrammatic slippage from one word to another (from Jean Toomer to “gene tumor” and “steam tuner”; from slave trade to “salve trade”) (FT 74; HT 65)—Moten’s work suggests a sort of coming together or assemblage of an unspecified and continually reconstituted collectivity. The bibliography on these “shelves” is the “head archive of a very large array” (BJ 26). Thus, too, the repeated predilection for imagining sites of congregation, especially when they are squats or bivouacs, illicit, pop-up, on the fly, underground: “the secret whole / in buildings” (BJ 12); the rent party with its own native “curriculum” (LE 62); the “block chapel” (the prison cell that is paradoxically also a space of worship or exaltation) (FT); a “vestibule” or “anteroom” (BJ 86); the “murmur garden” (LE 68); and Hughson’s Tavern.3 The challenge of the poetry, then, is less a matter of its music than of the dialectical shuttle of a poetics that enacts collectivity while at the same time insisting on the inevitable ephemerality of its convocations. This problematic is summed up, for example, in “barbara lee,” the three-part ars poetica toward the end of B Jenkins. On the one hand, “poetry investigates new ways for people to get together and do stuff in the open, in secret. Poetry enacts and tells the open secret” (84). But, on the other, if “the world is a zone from and within which life is constantly escaping,”4 then poets “sing the form of that endless running, that ongoing running on, always busting out of the sentence or cutting being-sentenced” (86).