Skin Inc: Identity Repair Poems, and: Amnesiac, and: The Black Automaton, and: Quantum Spit (review)

Recently, I have been struck by the willingness to revisit, for example, the lynching of Emmet Till, and similarly iconic occasions in our historical memory of racial terror. If only because they are so conspicuous, I’ve grown sensitive to the incidence of poems that will trope on grotesque and stigmatic deformations inflicted on the racialized body sooner than engage the discourse of inequality that historicizes such violence. It might be reasonable to suspect poets’ intentions in these cases are more to shock the reader than to ply the reader’s sympathies—or that the poets are at such a historical remove that they are willing to risk treating such sensitive material inelegantly. I doubt first, however, any reader’s ability to be shocked by depictions of the body—whatever its condition—considering the speed, abundance and impersonality of information exchange we witness today. I also doubt, given the historical significance of Emmet Till’s brutal murder, that some of our finest poets would exploit that or any similar event for sensational effect. No, I believe there is a degree of re-contextualization our poets are pursuing that they feel can be achieved through a quality of seeing that exceeds contemplation. But what spurs this effort?

A range of unique sociological conditions distinguishes our historical moment. Data from our last census show the number of Americans self-identifying as multiracial has grown exponentially, revealing definitions of race to be increasingly fluid. The reverse migration of African Americans from Northern urban centers to the Southern states tests the durability of conventional (“street”) etiquette and social wisdom. Growth of the black middle class, with its information resources and access to education, continues to marginalize poor and working class African Americans. Our technologies for literary production, while democratizing, are the same alienating technologies we use to engage in war and commerce. The accumulation of texts that are all the more disposable because they can be infinitely reproduced and warehoused in virtual clouds of collective memory estranges poet and reader across wastelands of binary code. Our cultural affinity with the author of a text may rely entirely on our trust in the accuracy of an online bookseller’s logarithms. Given all of this, and the historically recent scientific confirmation that there is no biological basis for racial categorization, we could forgive black poets today for suffering the malaise of the motherless child.

Yet, like the placards (which we shouldn’t forget are likewise texts) of striking sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968, the African American poet today is compelled to make the founding assertion, “I am a wo/man.” She does this not because her humanity has been called into question, but, I surmise, because technology threatens to obscure the fact of the racialized body, the one material certainty black poets still have, altogether. Employing strategies that are both conventional and idiosyncratic, poets representative of this trend implicate bodies on both sides of the page, producer and consumer, by elevating the lyric moment beyond the merely descriptive, and beyond the damaged grammar of our age.

Indeed, it is striking the way poets increasingly resort to visual culture to circumvent the obscuring effects of the page. Black poets today foreground the role of the body in both literary production and consumption. While there are often overt references to the body composing the poem, what I find equally compelling are the demands contemporary black poets make on the body of the reader. By employing formal strategies that call for an active engagement with the page, the three poets I am particularly interested in here, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Duriel E. Harris, and Douglas Kearney, enlist the reader in the performance of blackness, and thereby (re)establish the poem as the site of communal engagement. All three poets are interested in the various ways blackness is...