Loud as Voice

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs’ instrument is encoded language   Her first poem who you callin’ a jinx (after mista popo) put me and anyone reading it on notice, this poet is loud and won’t back down or shut up for nobody.  It’s almost a spoken word piece the way it lays on the page.  The words and the attitude wring into the work defiance and indignation.  By shaving words and using near sounding words that rhyme like “Hater-aid” she makes language her servant.  Slant rhymes like Aladdin’s bottle with laughable cannibal are unexpected and fly.  (I guess the word now is dope but I ain’t trying to front.)

She really made me work for her poems.  There’s a level an outsider like myself has to decode if I want to experience these poems.  To Diggs, it’s irrelevant if someone who’s not all the way down doesn’t get it.  These poems are for her inside fellow family members of culture and there’s no apology.  There’s no need.  Get it or bless it and move on.  Her work feels like the deliberate embrace of a poet ensconced deeply in her oeuvre groove.  gamin’ gabby made me read out loud and it brought more awareness of the poems in through an experience of the language heard.  It took me a couple of tries to understand the last poem of the four in gamin’ gabby was a re-rendering of the first of the four.

Making me work just as hard at decoding is the graphic poetry of Douglas Kearney.  I didn’t know one could control text to that degree to make it do the work of fooling a listener/reader into thinking they might know a direction the poem is heading in – the sky? – only to be shoved back into the green groin of Liberty.  But hey, who loves ya? America.  Love, America.  I could smell the scratch we’re all after in this country and we have to do a level of bending and bedding to get paid.  It’s wrapped in the phonetics of beatboxing and that too made speaking it aloud part of my understanding.  In Kearney’s poems, text is the instrument bent to sound through size manipulations among the words framed and rebuilt to suit the noise level.

What does Danez Smith do with the essay prose form?  He claims a place in space for the difference he’s tired, tired, tired of having to explain, navigate, negotiate to survive.  He’s done with it and he lets Amiri Baraka and James Baldwin bring him the waters to turn the soil into the good wet earth that is his and his people’s color.  His work was the most emotional I read.  Because the writing doesn’t hit like a fist, more like a plea to heaven for release so filled with longing it makes me join his chorus in support.

The poets in Coiled Serpent were all cleanly wrought pieces, each with a distinct representation of an instrument.  For William Archila, it’s perfectly visualized metaphors for Mingus’s bass, including one description of “Chinese acrobats bubbling.”  Anaid Carreno rides the tongue of the snake to declare her freedom from an America that shackled and labeled her.  It is the taut retelling of an encounter with a homeless man by Anthony A. Lee that silenced me into a reverie of grace and awe.  His precision with the poem, the work on the page, the reclamation of Christian lessons to treat everyone as his brother as the Christ would have, the holding of accountability to our fellow kin on this planet, “the least of these” that made me bow my own head in praise.  How different is that man who was dry but relapsed?  Is he really the other, or are we when we refuse to see?