Read an Excerpt
What I Say
Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America
By Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Lauri Ramey The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8800-3
CHAPTER 1
WILL ALEXANDER
Apprenticeship
... between impulse and resistances,
between advances and retreats.
–Octavio Paz, Eagle or Sun?
Here I am
posing in a mirror of scratch paper sonnets
sonnets as rare
as a live Aegean rhino
absorbing the cracklings of my craft
its riverine volcanoes
its spectacular lightning peninsulas
emitting plentiful creosote phantoms
from an ironic blizzard of unsettled pleromas
scouring through years of unrecognized pablums
of constant arch-rivalry with extinction
bringing up skulls of intensive discourse
by the claws in one's mind
which seem to burn with systemic reduction
one then suffers poetic scorching by debris
by inaugural timber which flashes
by friction which flares up & harries
by unrecognized moltens collapsing in glass
of initial intuitive neglect
as if one's fangs
were fatally stifled by incipience
by verbal range war didactics
by territorial driftwood
by sudden undemonstrative detractions
awed
by the diverse infernos of Trakl & Dante
one's youngish body stands
devoured by reverential print trails
momentarily cancelled
by the loss of blasphemous nerves & upheaval
stung
by demeaning neutralities
ravaged
by a blank Sumatran solar psychosis
by a tasteless collision of rums in transition
by a conspiracy of obscured fertility by hubris
as one sucks in doubt from a wave of tumbling blister trees
there exist irradiations flecked with a gambled synecdoche
with indeterminate earthenware splinters
taking up
from aboriginal density
a forge of Sumerian verbal signs
cooked with a tendency
towards starfish hypnosis
towards psychic confrontational drainage
conducting one's frictions in a torrential furnace of osmosis & ire
yes
apprenticeship
means poetry scrawled in unremitting leper's mosaic
cringed in smoky interior cubicles
releasing various deliriums
as if pointed under a blackened Oedipal star
with its dark incapable tints
with its musical ruse of unspoken belladonna
poetics
an imaginal flash of Russian chamber lilies
stretching under a blue marsupial sun
like kaleidoscopic tumbleweed
fugaciously transfixed
upon an anomalous totem of glints
upon rainy Buenos Aires transfusions
above the urinal coppers of a flaming polar star rise
of course
kinetic
like magical malachite rivers
flowing from moons
blowing through the 3/4 summits of motionless anginas
I've looked
for only the tonalities that scorch
which bring to my lips wave after wave
of sensitivity by virulence
yes
a merciless bitterness
brewed by a blue-back tornado of verbs
in a surge of a flashing scorpion chatter
in a dessicated storm of inferential parallels & voltage
like a scattered igneous wind
co-terminus with the bleeding hiatus & the resumption of breath
resolved by flash point edicts
by consumptive stellar limes
by curvature in tense proto-Bretonian fatigue
mixing magnets
juggling centripetal anti-podes & infinities
cracking the smoke of pure rupestral magentas
yes
hatcheries
floating through acetylene corruption of practiced mental restraint
to splendiferous vistas mingled with inspirational roulette
its mysteriums
always leaping like a grainy rash of scorching tarantellas
or leaking moon spun alloestophas
as if speaking
in irregular glossological green Dutch
a frenetic seminar on febricity
a reiteration of hendacasyllabic agitation & stinging
a ferocious vacillation
explosive as random "aggregational" nodes
mimed by a black consonantal dissection
its maximal priority
forked at "hypotactic inclusion"
with isochronous internal procedure
with ratios
with phonic penetralia by distortion
primed by anomalous "nuclear accent"
by a cadence of composing syllables & compounds
yes
poetics
its force
jettisoned by "hypotaxis"
by ... paratactic co-ordination
& fire
The Neutralized Sore of the Unshackled Bear
He had limping blue forelegs. He was a balding Don Juan. Around his hut were shackled secretary birds carving footnotes on the light of his eardrums. He was trapped inside his forehead going over the fire of his backsliding memory. There were harpies with green earlobes hopping over horses. There were meadowlarks in chains eating blood from a dagger. He began to reel. By the following afternoon splotches appeared on his stomach. They were green and blue and mixed like the ointment of a purple flower. Rainbows swam in his ears and he heard the sevenfold lights of blazing ARMAGEDDONS. Apocalyptic sulfurs flooded his soul. He began to groan music. Pythagorean asteroids formed in the branches. Hounddogs clawed at the clouds. There was a bilious upheaval in the trees. They swayed from side to side like twenty ton Medusas. The ground cracked open like light. Astral like daggers flew through his body. Thought forms burst from his breath. Roses began blooming with fish scales. Ant chains turned into lead. Afternoon bled into night. Stars started forming. Their twelve pointed light began to unchain his forehead. His tensions began to drift, and at the instant of this drifting the secretary birds were blown into blood. He freed himself from his hut. He then began to walk, two steps forward and two steps back like a neutralized sore of infinity.
Concerning Forms which Hold Heidegger in Judgment
In a flawed Slovakian brickhouse
Dasein
strains to purge from its forms
rulership
pogroms
feces
it seeks general absolution
for its crimes as consultant
for its mirage as a man of just causes
it views from its window
ironic brimstone snow
muted conniving intangibles
& philosophy
an exploded circular elf
a thoughtless sodium concentration
"being in the world"
circuitously tainted by useless Himmlers
by Ernst Junger & his brigades expressive of Dachau
it is 1962
it is 1947
& it silently endures
a mirage of throttled Gypsies
a stony rat's embankment sculpted by sullen Polish teeth
& so
how can Dasein submit expression to fiery flesh entombment
to ironic flights of Hölderlin
to the sun blown away by contradiction
it meanders like a rat across its minimal treaty with verbs
across a treaty monitored by geysers of vomit
it seeks to summon its furnace
with off-white cadavers
with minted cerulean remains
it is menaced by sum as subjective grief
by defeated monarchs as lead
then life arrives
as neurological engulfment
as tariff
as plodding impasse vacuum
its body
polluted hailstone riddles
as shattered morality
as shattered flashback spectrum
the true imposture as carcass
one thinks of galactic sand
somberly sifted in a haunted Lutheran bottle
then
the rectorship lecture
& the quoting of the spirit
by general mockery as journey
by debut at the gate of sickened thinking intensity
or
Dasein as ice in a darkened migratory vein
of its opened being across evacuated vacuums
& so
the corpses mount for Dasein Martin
the mimetic Aristotelian motives
brought back across the eye as dangerous skeletal kinetics
under the guise of eclectic bartering gnomes
Martin
I'm claiming you as leader by acidic incapacity
by megalomania as ejected mirror
not indictment
as "ex post facto construction"
but thought
as eviscerated misnomer
as stalled judgmental breakage
Martin
the wind then ignites disjointed geometries
then the ghosts fly in from the waves
they are ancient & composed of higher bodiless bodies
of nerves that descend to territorial panic
so I think of wading pincers
of moons in the death gas
of claustrophobic beguilement as Richter
the grammar of such German speaking voice
scarred by hardened carrion plums
by diabolical largesse
by the chemical sediments from war
for instance
a seized opal
a seismological burin
a diacritical ammonia
at Freiburg
Dasein open to the strong desolation of ale
to mental properties conceived in an alcoholic law court
by lapse in the stony circle of crises
you exude
basic codes of crime
condoned by illusive electrical cancer
perhaps a triggered ontology as meteorite
as a strange cephalic scaffolding perch
camouflaged at times
by the powers of Parmenides & Nietzsche
beneath your silence
beneath your stony implosives
I invade your deeper storm
concerning illusives
concerning cranial gain & emotion
RON ALLEN
(Untitled)
blow the black from rope
position as finger
as fruit
as remnant
rip my head
from your song
taste my wartorn flesh
consume as wire
the vein of pitch
this as bubble
mud of capillary
of reaching politic
age as space
in puddles
of rice wine
and boiling chaff
in stew of beast
in roach
of colliding missile
in this prayer
of not (praise
is the noise
of collected
fist)
open me
as relic
let my
song ripen
in the rage
of peace
Merchant of the Open Grid
The wall is detroit. It is invading you with cellular truth. The cell is a grid; it bites. It tastes of rind. The rind is a tether. The tether is a word. The word is a prayer. It does not know itself. The rind is knowledge. It knows the grid of your mouth. Detroit lives inside. It is solid with industry. Smog is the image of the cell. It is billboard cool. We walk the high porn casino riff, solid as your teeth. It breathes educated men and women who die at night. They live in the opening of the wall. The wall is in their head, in the grid of the day. They make love to its image. Its image is fear; they swallow it whole. They float on the surface. They smoke traffic lites and creep into the millennium, high on necessity. Their memory is a wound with 40 oz. Dances of Friday. It's a weapon. There is death on the political grunge of votes – high art café grunge smelling of cheap flesh and Cadillacs, communion at 6 p.m., the altar of time. We move like snake oil rhetoric against the grid. Its texture is box cheese. Time card rape, it shines like money. Chance is stuck in the mouth of the city, a holy war of blue jean prisons and collages of bullet love, the holy pride of steel. Jungle rot movieola, mesh of jettisoned mucous revolution. Storefront misery in little sister's grip. The knowledge of the wall, like us, is telephone tightrope hustler. Trickster mythology in can chances of quick grits and game, hungry for mesh sandwiches of luck, tasting chance like the gold fender coney island beauty of deep sleep. We wait for light, amen. The hole in your head is detroit, a stop sign. Movement is skillet-fried chance. Fast food prison of sweat, the grid is rhyme in freezer mack money. Anger is in rodeo pork juke boxes of meaning gleaned as paychecks. Limp rag dances of gas wash vanilla dreams in black muscle mysteries of veins. Requiem for needles, Friday is the date of brew, licking the bone of the grid, wet with desire. Mickey Mouse country bars, multiple shots of rose falling through the hold of supper, to engage. Pedestrian bible-thumpin' midnite shifts, screaming jeopardy at the wind. Eyes rolodex windows of glitter. The way home is scaling hope the naked chest of chance the pork pie slow wit of God. Skin is a coffin, slow shakin' Monday dice. Aim for the top, the sleep benediction. Chance is the road to nirvana, disc jockey spun nerves of Sunday, the playground of Jesus. Wet cuts muck breasts of five-star heroes. The war of roots in techno-fiend landscapes, space foe staged policy carcass. Rusted wino grid of the day, images of strangled chance, aborted at the mouth. Lucid, I pray smog as chance.
boss napalm
pushin the five finger
freedom of fist busted
mall frenzy fickle muse
a delicious tight kiss
of wicked boss weed
flavor of school heads talk
boss ass rhyme of dime trippers
on the horrible muse of money
tight with ego \
lame intellectual food
bank plastic foot fake medicine
in your face
big peer murder
choice is commodity needle music on the vinyl vein
authentic fear in church
saved at the octave
in the throat of jesus
pain is delicious
on the plate
starved in the third mind
desire of desirable cancer open the shirt and grin
pinball circus president fodder
i won the spirit
behind the wall of antichrist
two dollah out the door
a shelter is mouth fried wet time
in the skin of struggle
post punk funnies
on the page of shit
a fallen angel grips the neck of pain
and swallows midnight
and drowns the minute in joy
and and breathe
Pimp Chain Radiator
mellow blue mesh wire
intense summer purging smiles
barbeque the pimp summer
cosmic bop of grass
dollar killed the thirst
the cotton fashion syringe
style is my gait
the mystic Christ
the peppermint oval beer city
poly-amber traffic smog shook shit
inhale
The raw cityscape of pimp shoes
bustin' out culture raw melon dog
sense to some rational eye
flowers peel Coltrane
combustion of makeshift porches
of neck bone queens
obelisk of dead codes
maddog lean brothers
trippin' on desire
wire concentration camp summer
cosmic bop taste of purple word
this last poem of thirst
T. J. ANDERSON III
Better Get It in Yo' Soul
— Charles Mingus
the pound of uniform blue ...
this is my house my house this is where I live no can of
snow paint can splatter no wide-eyed boy wanderer
can disturb the space between this door
no thankful chained man climbing the steps
of that great ol' 'mancipatin' statue marble monolith
(when across the train
yards and cotton fields
I hear the black thumb
thump of Charlie Mingus
and it hits me that I
can bring this city down
on its concrete knees)
no cohabitation with some insatiable sex kitten
from kentucky who wants to ride me hi ho silver
and beat me with roses and slice my smile torn face
this is where it begins my antebellum athena my
columbia no mississippi sun turned match to scorch
my skin in the hound hunt night
no not this time that screams like a lace-shrouded
whore to say it's bleeding time now and I wake
with a slab of neon stuck to the womb of my eye
but for you who are far off ...
Al-Hadiqa Street Mirage
dispatches to the outback
of me a mouth brambled
staggers on honey
there's some thing I was
fingering on
but noon's frame
in the open window high
above the mange
dog howls and ceiling
coral glistens texture of braille
I unmask the motherlode
dumpster's boot black
cat swagger
where mashrabiyya women
view my holster's
blank appointment
their tao heads brimming
an unclaimable prairie
of stares
At a Column of Crutches, Basilique de Ste-Anne-de-Beaupre
found lacquer sun
in aquamarine window
marble tongued stairs
dusted is saint's bones
lightning
to deliver me
to hands pressed in holy
jesus how these
squared-off trunks spasm
in slithery strides
spray glaze the bondage
of shape
the confessional ear sucking
TISA BRYANT
from Tzimmes
1.
Her empty cup. Because it is no longer full, what remains is thought to be untouchable but yet must somehow be reached. Bow your head over the (scar, plate, memory or phantom feeling). The impressions are named to represent and hold. Silver platter. (Re)searching. A friend's religion. At the age when one should annually. Pilgrimage. Potluck. Fate leaning over to serve it up.
A tight top. Domestic décolletage. Stay there and STAY THERE.
From hardwood to kitchen floor, I pace, peeking in the fridge. Is this chilling. Back to the map. Sticking pins in names, a spell to affect place and time, the shape of the land a butterfly in profile, or, as uncle likes to say, a pork chop. I of course disagree, more with the chop than with the pork. Heading west.
Back to the bed, the breast. Sugar burns, explodes beneath the surface, into puffs, into blood, out of economy. Blood quickens. Early detection. Garnet yams, not jewel. This cinema, this research, this recipe. What is called for confuses.
She speaks directly, directing.
Place matzo meal, eggs, pareve margarine, apricots, ground ginger and apple juice on the auction block. And don't forget, pure cane sugar. Food soldiers against forgetting, packs a wallop, mounds, pounds, Mapp Hill. Grazing again through plantation names. Getting the picture. What went in to make us.
Downes. Cutting. Two Englishmen with ships, carrying lots of families with needs and others to attend to them. Add Kirton. Haynes. From each a woman extracted. The mix settling over centuries. Family compound parcelled by relative extension, tenantry, muscled by squatters or hotels. The spread changed. Barbados giving it up. Worry hands with suds. Rise.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from What I Say by Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Lauri Ramey. Copyright © 2015 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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