Beyond This World

In part one, I explored how poetry’s political power lies in its ability to transform the reader, focusing in particular on performance. In this section, I turn my attention to the lyric form, and to music, and consider how they shape what we see as possible for living.

In my debut poetry collection speculation, n. I use sound and performance to imagine a world beyond the public speculation on Black life. The poems consider all the inescapable forms of news that we encounter daily (from videos of police brutality to more implicit forms of anti-Black violence). How can we make a record of, yet resist these images? Further, what can Black futurity promise us now and how might we become reporters of our living—how might we write ourselves into the future as an act of resistance?

While writing this collection, I thought about the fire that Douglas Kearney speaks of—one that heats and lights—and how I might wield it myself. As an interdisciplinary artist, I see the intersection of mediums—particularly how they “perform” together—as a space in which to surprise myself and the reader; every crossing is a transformation. In speculation, n. this interplay takes place on and off the page. On the page, I play with graphics and news typography, allowing the text to subvert the reader’s expectations. Off the page, I use my body to animate what appears on the page, mimicking the typographical play and erasures through silences and staccato in my speech.

This is one way of drawing heat.  

In the physical space, I invite the images in the poems into the room through my movements and expressions. When I stop in front of an audience member and ask a question from within the work: Can you hear that? Did you see that image? Was that you on the news, in the street, in the headline printed in our memory? I am asking viewers to become a part of the poem, the way the media is so much a part of what we see. I move into the spectacle with intention, only acknowledging it so that I can make it disappear from the space, so that we can be here together.

This is one way of drawing light.

As the text and performance of my book came together, I again considered the poet’s responsibility to wield the fire Kearney speaks of, while trying to make sure I allow the reader to see, to feel without reproducing the images that we know so very well? I asked myself: how do I honor our need and our right to protection? I thought of levity as a place of resistance: what brings me relief when I am overwhelmed by the media? What do I turn to when I am in need?

I realized that music, which I see as an extension of the lyric, is my mechanism for relief. To honor this, I decided to thread the poems in my book with a 14-song soundtrack that interrupts the narrative in the same way that a song might interrupt a thought or a moment—providing a different image, a different sound, a different feeling in the body—one of reprieve or comfort or release. Featuring artists like Mereba, EARTHGANG, and April + VISTA, the music (hosted by a radio built into the book) is in conversation with the poems, and expands the narrative of the book. The lyrics speak of grief, anger, love, joy, survival, exaltation, immortality. The soundtrack is not an aside, it directly addresses the poems—it is a lyric within itself. This lyric extends the conversation that I am able to have as poet with the world, but also that between myself and the reader, between reader and song, between song and world.

One song that heavily inspired the book and that is featured in the soundtrack is “HEAVEN ALL AROUND ME” by Saba. In the song, Saba raps,

I got a light I gotta go, forensics search for follicle

I promise y’all I’m not a ghost, I promise y’all

Look, there’s heaven all around me
There’s heaven all around me
There’s heaven all around me

There’s heaven all around
No, I can’t feel pain but I can see the stars
I ain’t leave in vain but I know we with God

For some time, while working on my book, I found myself at a creative juncture wondering: where can the book go after these poems about news images and these ghosts and this grief? This, I realized, was also a personal juncture: where could I go? And this song was a kind of light, it opened up a conversation I desperately needed to have. After listening to it, I began to move more into the lyric, writing poems that, like the song, were conversations between me and the world, between me and my grief, between me and the images I could not escape but also the images that I could, through that opening, suddenly conjure. The writing, one lyric poem after the other, became more personal; I now had permission to address the world and in that, myself.

The lyric, as I understand it—whether in a song or in a poem, is a conversation between a speaker and the world. While this song is a conversation between Saba and his late cousin John Walt, when I heard it, it became a private conversation, too, between me and my grief and all the ghosts I felt around me, that I could feel myself becoming. I am deeply grateful to have found words that witnessed me when I felt like I could not be seen. Upon hearing it and feeling it within my body, the song became a part of this book and more importantly, it showed me what I was able to write toward.

The lyric, here, is an admission, a confession:  a public and private conversation between the poet and herself, between the poet and the world. To acknowledge those ghosts was to admit to the world my aloneness. But to acknowledge any ghost is also to admit that you are alive.

My book, which began with media images and speculation surrounding Black life, gave way to a speaker who was now the agent “speculating” on what might exist beyond this world. What had I not yet acknowledged, and thus what had I not yet imagined? What had I endured that I had not yet named? What images might I draw up for myself on the page? What worlds could I create? These poems, first comprised of grief, were now made of new flesh, of stars and heavenly bodies. They were made of heat and light. After the body, I considered, what do we become? And after this world, who could I be? By imagining this “after” I was writing both to and against the world.

“There are worlds they have not told you of. They wish to speak to you.” – Sun Ra

In the conversation between this world and the next, are the questions one might ask between life and death—between what exists here (with the conditions we might need to escape) and someplace else, a place that might be capable of holding us. This admission, this contemplation of somewhere else, was important to me. It was political: acknowledging the fact that one might not want to die but might consider what else exists out of need is important in order to truthfully reckon with the conditions of empire. Death is political. And so is survival. And so is living. My decision to write poems that imagine an afterlife that is speculative—an “after” that takes grief and turns it into light, into celestial bodies, into star matter, was both a choice and a need. I was saying, it is okay to imagine somewhere else. It is okay to imagine elsewhere when so much of this world requires us, particularly those Black, queer, trans, poor, to live with the world on our shoulders. I was saying, it is okay to imagine elsewhere, and I hope you stay here to imagine it—I hope you play the radio and listen to the next song and the next and the next. I want you to know, like the song, like the poem, like the lyric that carries us on, that the next day is possible.

“It was 4AM when I realized that I was alive.

One day already into the next.” – “4AM” speculation, n.