The Architecture of Language (review)

The Architecture of Language, Quincy Troupe’s eighth volume of poetry, is redolent with the fragrance of Guadeloupe, flavored by a strong sense of African American and Caribbean history (slavery, lynchings, the Katrina disaster), and shaped by the rhythms of blues and jazz, hip-hop and rap. Stichic and declarative, Troupe’s alliterative prosody is a series of pronouncements about island and mainland life, childhood, racial tension, beauty, and power. These poems persuade cumulatively, the way tides do; they proclaim that passion matters and that politics has a central role to play in contemporary poetry. The strongest of the poems in this collection are explorations of the power of language to frame experience and give it back to us as something transformed, muscular, and, ultimately, celebratory.

Troupe’s indebtedness to musicians like the legendary Miles Davis (Troupe is the author of the bestselling Miles: the Autobiography, and Miles and Me: A Memoir of Miles Davis) and to the syncopated rhythms of his forebears is evident. More than half of the poems in this volume were written while Troupe was residing in Guadeloupe, and we see the influence of a vibrant multiethnic Caribbean culture in this book.

The poems in The Architecture of Language are particularly effective when they are grounded in a vividly rendered dramatic situation, as is the case in the opening poem, “Eggplants: A Fable,” which beautifully captures the naïveté of childhood. An eight-year-old girl, who doesn’t realize that “eggplant” is one word, watches and waits for her mother’s egg plant to drop eggs from its vines. This subject becomes the perfect choice with which to open a collection of poems that deal with language’s ability both to transform and to limit experience. When the word is yoked to a child’s imagination it becomes the catalyst for dreams, which even the “plump dead rat” (i.e., the purple eggplant) cannot destroy when it falls from the vine. The child is seen trying to square this new revelation—eggs don’t grow on the vine after all—with the fantastical, fairytale narrative she has constructed for herself. “Eggplants: A Fable” tells the tale of a child’s ability to overcome the limits of language and not allow the merely literal to quash her imagination.

In spite of the title of this volume, Troupe makes scant reference to linguistic theory. The original title for this collection was “The Architecture of Speech”—more apt, perhaps, because it is the spoken word that is foregrounded here. (An even more apt title could be “The Architecture of Rhythm,” for it is that which takes center stage.) Troupe’s vision is grounded in the primacy of sensory experience and the joy of the natural world. Filled with synesthesia, his strongest lines seem barely able to contain the richness of the senses: the way a word sounds in the mouth, the way music “boils,” the way “bird-calling” colors entice him—these elements all help to describe the trans-migratory relationship between one sense and another. As Troupe writes in “Eye Am Thinking of Moments,” “the sound of language percolating everywhere” inspires him. Onomatopoeia and other techniques which emphasize an oral tradition are evident in these poems which demand to be performed. They are, as one would expect, anaphoric, melodic, and, at times, didactic, even though didacticism has fallen out of favor in many academic circles. For Troupe, the poet is still prophet; s/he still has something worth teaching.

Troupe knows as well as anyone writing today how to interrogate a word’s sound-sense as he does in “Vichyssoise”—a poem about a word Troupe says he has always liked. He gargles with the sound until “vichyssoise” metamorphoses into a strange new creature that has to be yanked back to its literal denotation:

   fishy sea syllables swishinginside your mouth like wishes, then yeasting offendings, as in a jimi hendrix wah-wah riff,the word brought to mind soirees,colors swirling around in space,

then you found out it was a soup...