Pitch Dark Anarchy by Randall Horton (review)

Randall Horton’s innovative third poetry collection, Pitch Dark Anarchy, both engages with and departs from his earlier works’ concerns. He revisits themes (such as the inner city’s harsh realities and the South’s complicated racial past), and he situates the poems in comparable milieus (such as urban America and Birmingham, Alabama). He also evinces this engagement with his keen attention to detail and his frequently plangent tone. But he departs from his previous volumes’ aesthetics with Pitch’s pronounced theoretical musings, fragmented syntax, and distinctive punctuation.

Horton intermittently uses typographical innovations for both visual effect and signification. He inserts colons between letters of words such as f:l:a:s:h:i:n:g l:i:g:h:t:s and f:i:el:d h:o:l:l:a. This sui generis, ideogrammatic device amplifies the sense of a flashing light’s brightness and a field holla’s loudness.

He also uses typographical innovations for polysemous effect. In the poem “Dear Reader (1),” Horton writes “before that final echo dimming the sun display(ed) for the (dis)placed.” The line could be read in the present or past tense; it could be read as “display(ed) for the displaced” or the “placed.” Horton’s parentheticals create multivalent ambiguities.

Occasionally, he places lowercase words between two periods, such as “.or.,” and then suspends the word in the middle of a line. The suspension and framing periods create a syntactical rupture and syncopation. The suspended “.or.” also makes it seem as if Horton wants the reader to “hear” him thinking, as if he wants readers to occasionally experience process and not just polish.

In the essay “Notes for an Oppositional Poetics,” writer Erica Hunt avers: “Languages contain us, and we are simultaneously bearers of the codes of containment.” Horton uses Hunt’s statement as an epigraph. Then, interspersed throughout Pitch, Horton places parentheses and brackets around personal pronouns. In the poem “The District’s Park,” he writes, “the lake holds (us).” This nifty typographical device simultaneously shows humans trapped in or by language and serves as a visual metaphor for Hunt’s contention.

Horton does not limit his poetic departures to typography and syntax, however. He also innovatively writes about subjects he has previously explored.

In his first book, The Definition of Place, Horton titled the third section—which is about 1963 Birmingham—“Colored Water.” One poem in that section, “Barriers in the Magic City,” describes segregation as:

a city of two worlds divided bysocial mores; one fountain oldand decrepit with rust stains, openwounds that do not cauterize; theother smooth white porcelain, clearand postcard ready.

Pitch Dark Anarchy, however, frequently skirts such directness. In poems such as “Home Sweet Home,” Horton “remembers” yet “reworks” his hometown with elliptical, sportive, and figurative language; he describes Birmingham, Alabama, with phrasing such as “say then red clay marks the proverbial X.”

Horton also employs a more theoretical approach when writing about Birmingham and the South in general. One of his poems alludes to a lynching in both its title, “‘Pictured’ Remembrance: Limp at the Neck,” and in three lines of this same poem’s final stanza:

running inside the eyes of the world a witness, “pictured”hanging right-side up from a cedar. the constructinverts the default

He weds the clear image of “hanging . . . from a cedar” with a conceptual musing. Horton’s theoretical turn creates a dialectic with the poem’s epigraph, for which Horton quotes deceased poet Reginald Shepherd: “blackness as an identity, assumed or imposed, is a social construct just as whiteness is. But blackness is the marked construct, while whiteness is the default: it fades into a privileged invisibility.”

Horton’s line—“the construct/inverts the default”—suggests that “blackness” takes on a “privileged invisibility” after a person of color has been lynched. I can only assume Horton is being ironic about the “privilege.”

Horton uses words such as “(in)visible,” “echo” (ten times), “erase” (five), and “zero,” “shadow,” and “void,” throughout Pitch Dark Anarchy in what might...