Douglas Kearney: Selections

[Jump to poems by publication year: 2006, 2013, 2019]

               the yes and sir

the room.
the books.
hands telling
what I know
to a machine.
alone. dreaming,
yes, dreaming
of pinning myself
to journals like
a prized butterfly.
the ink of my beauty
fading on the white pages.

—Douglas Kearney, from “The Poet Writes The Poem That Will Certainly Make Him Famous”

Poet, interdisciplinary writer, and performer Douglas Kearney’s full-length poetry collections include Sho (Wave Books, 2021), winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Minnesota Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Award, Pen America, Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and Big Other Book Award, and Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award. Kearney’s Optic Subwoof (Wave Books, 2022), a collection of talks he presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2020 and 2021, won the 2023 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism and the 2023 Firecracker Award in creative nonfiction. Kearney is also the librettist of Someone Took They Tongues: 3 Operas (2016) and has staged four operas, including Sucktion, Mordake, Crescent City, and Sweet Land, winner of the Music Critics Association of North America’s Best Opera of 2021.

Kearney’s lyrical poems range across the page, bridging thematic concerns that include politics, Black culture, masks, the trickster figure, and contemporary music. He describes the nontraditional layout of his poems as “performative typography.” In the Los Angeles Times, poet David St. John observed, “What Doug’s articulating is the fragmentation of the self and sensibility that you see prominently in T.S. Eliot and The Waste Land. He’s at the other end of the century, using a multicultural voice inflected with the concerns of what it means to be a young black man at this time and at this place."

Where Blackness is surveilled and redistricted, Kearney’s original mapping of language creates what Katherine McKittrick calls “black geographies,” which, she explains, “are located within and outside the boundaries of traditional spaces and places,” and in turn “locate and speak back to the geographies of modernity, transatlantic slavery, and colonialism.” The refusal of some of Kearney’s collaged poems to be read, even by him, becomes “a loud-assed colored silence” against these systems.

—from a review of Kearney’s Optic Subwoof  by Cindy Juyoung Ok published in Harriet Books

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Douglas Kearney’s selected poems in order of publication

“The Poet as Setting” (2006)

What is the poet without eyes or ears—reading, listening? He is

a platform—a place to set, that to set it with. And if this is

all, what will he do when the reader finishes a glass,
rises from the poet’s head, and passes

into the city?

In this poem, Kearney points to the objectification of the “artist.” Being fixed or set implies being placed to be observed as a spectacle. The observer or consumer projects their desires onto the artist and the art, spread “like a / table linen, let my bones be silver that touches […]”. A viewer’s empathy may be inauthentic and performative just as the piece they view or interact with may simply be a product designed for consumption rather than an authentic expression.

The body is upon us. Does the table have

a stomach? Is it simply there to bear our hunger

without its own, like a eunuch bathing a stripper?
What is the poet without eyes or ears—reading, listening?

The “poet” is positioned as something that exists to be a “platform” to serve the hunger of others. Both the “table” and the “poet” satiate others while their own needs get denied. “Like a eunuch bathing a stripper” describes a castrated desire, something already “stripped” and also a play on “stripper” as what’s undressed and revealed. Is this metaphor meant to imply care for the performer, the object of desire? Does care for the object being desired require one to be bereft of functional sexual desire? Kearney makes use of incompatible comparisons to emphasize the paradoxes around desire and performance.

Historically, eunuchs were young males that aspired to be performers or whose parents chose that life for them. The boys were then castrated to maintain their pre-pubescent voices and a higher pitch that was unachievable if they reached puberty. There is a correlation to what is musically referred to as “falsetto” and the retired term “castrato.” In the context of this work, Kearney implies that racialized bodies are splayed out to be fully consumed and on display in order to achieve the enjoyment of a “reader” as something to gaze upon for pleasure; pain transfers into art in the “jolt,” something to “chew” or be “heady,” something the reader “sips."

—Natalie Earnhart 

“Every Hard Rapper’s Father Ever: Father of the Year” (2013)

Part of a short poem cycle on notoriously bad dads like Kronos and Darth Vader, this visual poem riffs on the trope of the hard father who begets a harder rapper. Words bear both sonic and material offspring—rhyme makes relation, as does recomposition of the text. Hate descends from Father as much as the slant rhyme Author does. Both visual and vocal, the poem builds into what Kearney calls in Optic Subwoof a “dintelligibility,” where “every collaged voice becomes additional fleshing,” as “what appears as … noise … is in fact complex contrapuntal signals … sensible through the sensual.” 

As the frequency of visual and sonic layering in the poem quickens, the poem births a new track of meaning through a disruption of the infamous DJ Hurricane hook from the Beastie Boys’ “Sure Shot”: “and you can’t you won’t you don’t stop.” This changes the poem’s pronoun from “we” to “you,” suggesting a change in perspective or address as well as the guilt of inherited and collaged meaning in the poem. Kearney’s voice revs up, intensifying as the line repeats. The only other line in the poem constituting a legible sentence (with commas removed), “made of hate far after fear,” reinforces the poem’s tone and timbre and is recalled by the Beastie Boys’ imperative: the faults of the father can’t, won’t, and don’t stop, far after the fear they both cause and are made from. Repetition, like rhyme, like a hook, makes the song—which contains, of course, the word son— recognizable.

—Noah Baldino

“The Labor of Stagger Lee: Boar” (2013)

no drum-gut, Stagger’s stomach a tenement:
his deadeye bigger than his brick house.
Stagger Lee live by the want and die by the noose

The opening “pigs prey to piggishness” is a sort of double entendre that lends itself to be read or heard in multiple ways. One could read it as “pigs (are) prey to piggishness” or as a play on prey and pray. Pigs might imply the animal itself or people who act “like pigs,” often meaning following base impulses and behaving without decorum. The line might imply “pigs” are “prey” to their own inherent piggishness and read with a tone of degrading incrimination. But there is also the important signification that pigs are literal prey to human piggishness and gluttony, which is reiterated by the line that follows, “get ate from rooter to the tooter.”

The first stanza sets up this pig archetype that carries throughout the rest of the poem. Kearney even references “The Three Little Pigs” at the end of the second line with the “wolfish crooner” begging “let me in.” The wolf in the fairytale famously succumbs to a terrible fate by falling down the pigs’ chimney where he is boiled alive and subsequently eaten by the little pigs.

Kearney characterizes the subject Stagger Lee as both pig and wolf. With the insatiable hunger of both animals, Stagger Lee “preys” by desiring to “plumb a fat boy. here piggy!” and, like a predatory wolf, “what Lee see he seize. / manful, ham-fisted.” Stanzas are separated and appear scattered or disjointed, perhaps to mirror the inner voice and consciousness of the character. Kearney’s title “Boar” indicates a “hunter” type pig that is less vulnerable than a “little pig,” implying the violence of which the character is capable and into which he is thrust.

The syntactical and grammatical play in the poem, as in “Stagger Lee live by the want and die by the noose,” makes the lines and words more active. These moves dramatize Stagger Lee’s hedonistic nature, to live in pursuit of pleasure and pleasure alone. This line emphasizes that death at the hands of a cruel other is imminent and unavoidable.

As with the derogatory reference to “whorehouse,” this hyperbole emphasizes the paradox of finding fulfillment in emptiness. While he is using “brothels” to signify emptiness, loneliness, and a way to “fill the void,” which is a well-known trope in the work of some male writers, Kearney also charges this pursuit as one connected to greed.

In the final stanza, the subject accepts himself as fully swine: “Lee admit his squeals weren’t howls. /  he got down. he get dirty.” The title of this poem, “The Labor of Stagger Lee: Boar,” insinuates that something herein is a labor. What exactly is Stagger Lee’s labor? Is it the oscillation of being both pig and wolf? Predator and Prey? Perhaps his labor is the pursuit of pleasure and consumption; the desire itself is an endeavor he must maintain.

—Natalie Earnhart

“Sho ” (2019)

make my tongue a bow—
what’s the gift?! My good
song vox? 

The titular poem of Kearney’s 2021 collection, “Sho”—a homophone evoking the Black vernacular sho (meaning sure), show (noun, as in a performance), and show (verb meaning to show)—initiates an in-your-face multiplicity through sonic sleight of hand. By confronting Blackness’s forced performances, the poem dances with and around the violences it “hock[s] up for to show / who gets eaten.”

The torchon is a form invented by Kearney’s student Indigo Weller and is a take on the sestina; here, Kearney dexterously cycles through the twelve line endings: body, sweat, bloody, spit, show, rig, bow, jig, good, deep, stood, and they clap. Often, these words return defamiliarized and recontextualized across the line break, as in “a rig / id red rind” or ““Rig / ht?” The speaker uses a vast repertoire of wordplay, a “double-jointed literacy” from poetic and pop culture references to puns and portmanteaux to “stay nib dipped” almost compulsively to literally or emotionally survive their performance.

In one moment, for example, where “Braxton’s sweat // y brow syndrome^Ⓡ, spit / out a sax bell,” Kearney invokes Botox, the break-up-and-make-up R&B song “sweat” by Toni Braxton and Babyface, and experimental jazz composer and saxophonist Anthony Braxton, all in three lines. Near the poem’s end, Kearney takes up the gauntlet of American poetry using William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” and dares the reader to fill in modernism’s blatant gaps, which often depended upon the enslavement of Black Americans and its violent legacies for its own success. “E / rato!”— the bloodied goddess of lyric poetry inherited from the Ancient Greeks demands entertainment as sacrifice—a shown show to give the audience something, no matter its brutality, to clap (about).

—Noah Baldino