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reviews 148 Recently, a friend and i attended a celebration of the poet Yusef Komunyakaa convened by the black poetry organization Cave Canem. Komunyakaa was reciting his poem “A World of Daughters,” written in 2017. It begins with a series of sweeping imperatives: Say licked clean at birth. Say weeping in the tall grass, where this tantalizing song begins, birds perched on a crooked branch over a grave of an unending trek into the valley of cooling waters. The soil’s thirst, lessons of earth unmoor the first tongue. Say I have gone back, says the oracle, counting seasons & centuries, undoing fault lines between one generation & next… books Conspicuous Erudition The new black poetry Jerome Ellison Murphy CONSPICUOUS ERUDITION | 149 The poem is a consideration of humanity’s origins, of the “seasons & centuries” traveled as “hinged into earth, we rose from Lucy/to clan, from clan to tribe.” Starting with Lucy, the Australopithecus afarensis skeleton uncovered in Ethiopia in 1974 by American scientists , Komunyakaa’s poem traverses the panoramic terrain of paleoanthropology . With its imperative address, it assumes a narrative authority over all “our” origin stories, including, by implication, those of white Westerners. As recently as a decade ago, such authority seemed largely the province of poets who shared in white cultural dominance. You would see it on display in book-length engagements with natural history such as Darwin: A Life in Poems (2009) by Ruth Padel, a direct descendant of Darwin, or, farther back, in books such as Richard Kenney’s Invention of the Zero (1993) and Evolution of the Flightless Bird (1983). And so it was no great shock when in 2019 my friend, a Walt Whitman scholar, remarked of Komunyakaa’s poem: “It might be strange to say, but I was surprised it sounded so…white.” One element which probably made this poem sound “white” to my friend, who is white, was that this speaker was the definer, not the defined; the arbiter, not the recipient, of some specialized knowledge. But in the current poetic milieu, it was the almost scholarly vocal register that made this speaker sound “black” to my ear. These days, work by younger black poets frequently flaunts its formal pyrotechnics and its spirited immersion in specialized disciplines. Thanks in part to the influence of trailblazers like Komunyakaa, Terrance Hayes, A. Van Jordan, and Tracy K. Smith, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning Life on Mars claimed the imaginative turf of speculative science fiction and space exploration for a black and feminine voice, one hardly opens a collection by a fellow black poet today without expecting some satirical torque on quantum physics or zoology, typically wrapped up in an innovative poetic form. Indeed, conspicuous erudition is the lingua franca of the poetic black diaspora, an alternately subtle and vociferous avant-garde that has led a nonwhite poetic renaissance, identified as a new 150 | JEROME ELLISON MURPHY zeitgeist by The Atlantic Monthly, and lamented as such in print, with varying degrees of self-awareness, by several white male poets. Individual predecessors of this movement include Amiri Baraka’s flirtations with Afrocentrist myth-science in such works as Black Mass (1966), echoed by Major Jackson’s evocation of Sun Ra in Leaving Saturn (2002); Thylias Moss’s referential dexterity in Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler (1998), among other works; Nathaniel Mackey’s ongoing explorations of Dogon cosmology; and the pyro-linguistics of Harryette Mullen. On one level, then, what we might call the ethos of erudition (an Erudite-geist?) may be simply the latest iteration of a poetic tradition always seeking new ways to convey complex and disorienting experience; it is a tradition that has long stood in counterpoint to prevalent discourse, playing on its imperialist language. Black poets’ current zeal for formal innovation, manifesting as it often does in an urge to appropriate scientific lexicons, heralds the desire for an imaginative agency profoundly informed, but not bound, by its markers of identity. As Terrance Hayes, one of the preeminent figures in this movement, asks in American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin: “In a parallel world where every Dr./Who was black, you were the complex Time Lord,/When & where would you explore?” And yet, Hayes’s...

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