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robhendricks's review
4.0
“read the leaves roll the dice shuffle the cards lay the runes and pray pray pray” (27)
This is, at face value, a gesture of vulnerability and openness. It could be the existential vulnerability of the human spirit, or it could be the vulnerability of intersectional and structural oppression (emotional experience of helplessness) in particular social locations. I think that this ideogrammatic poem on pg. 27, this pictogram, in which the text quoted above drills five layers deep in concentric circles, presents a misdirection of Giovanni Singleton’s approach to her work. It verbally articulates a straw-woman methodology, and pictorially articulates it by evoking things like archery targets, or ripples of water expanding across the water’s surface around a point of entry, or annular marks of growth in a tree-trunk, things which imply qualities of slow growth, or centering, or focus, or taking aim, or outward reverberations of impact. Certainly Singleton does gather the symbolic materials, bring them into the field, and then drop them before us, so we can see what they will reveal about our present situation. But the implications of her “sortilege” are rather more calculated than such procedures would suggest. The work of Giovanni Singleton innocuously poses as chance-operation, but it is not all that dicey in actuality. It sits before us AS IF it were a collection of ink blots or tarot cards or hexagrams, mesmeric, evoking a depth of understanding about our own situations, and a curiosity about what is happening in the world right now, the world of our own participation and perhaps most importantly for this work, interpretation and re-interpretation. And Singleton’s graphic images (likened to leaves, cards, runes) really do sit at the center of the concentric circles of concentration and rumination, which is akin to the energy of “pray pray pray,” the ever-outward reverb as presence seeks awareness. And yet, this is not just presence seeking awareness in an ashram with Alice Coltrane at the Wurlitzer (though it includes that, in an affectionately joyous and respectful way). It is more importantly presence seeking awareness in the stressed space of US poetry and poetics, where certain kinds of vulnerability (vulnerability of racial inequality, especially) struggle to be seen clearly against “white spaces” that are devoid of these particular kinds of vulnerability, and often oblivious to them.
*Establishing African-American / diasporic lineage of experimental writing.
*Challenging notions of legibilty by hybridizing word art with graphic arts.
*Championing a lineage of improvisation by crafting devotional icons of past masters.
*Employing sortilege & aleatory methods that prize indeterminacy. Generating a sense that each reading is a new performance where context makes new meanings. But in actuality, constellating very precise and targeted critiques of certain concepts.
*Sparking off new meanings at the intersection of symbol (cross, flag, clock, cow, trees, honeycomb), plus code for creative lineage in writing and music (“wilson harris, nathanael mackey, charlie parker, lucille clifton, alice coltrane, wanda coleman, jayne cortez, sun ra, nina simone, bob kaufman”), plus songs made of words (lyricism).
*Employing the strategies of surrealism and dadaism to provoke around images of racialized police violence (gun=camera, permutations of chalk outlines on granite countertops) and especially triads of symbols juxtaposed to generate meaning according to the nature of their relation to each other (i.e. flag, cross, blank space (13-15); horizontal line, circle, “Aaaaah.” (24); circle, triangle, square (45); olive branch, human heart, fish, all presented as “olive branches,” perhaps progressively more efficacious forms of reparation? (58-60). There is an inquiry here, not just about how things are related, but how they are EQUATED (falsely).
I was especially attracted to Pg. 45 as a dense and mysterious presence in the work (part of the sequence called “CHAPTER 5 / illustrated equations”). This poem is entitled “illustrated equation no. 2 / something about a look… the shape of things…” It presents three shapes on the left side of a bisected field. This side is labelled “blk,” whereas the empty, “shapeless” side of the field is labelled “white.” Does “blk” mean “black?” Why not spell it out? This figure on pg. 45 echoes the constellation of the presence and absence of shapes (or symbols) in the first chapter of the book (“exhibits,” pgs. 13-15), where the works of black-identified writers are obliquely employed as materials from which the symbols of god and country can be constructed and juxtaposed with the emptiness of a white space. In “the shape of things…” this figure of shapes against shapelessness is juxtaposed against a handwritten text: “there a boat. there a pair of oars for moving to and from shore. // blue breaks down. Ghosts emerge from the river. manifest as fever and fear.” I would like to discuss in more detail the relation of this text to the figure above. It makes me think of a flight to safety, happening at twilight as “blue breaks down,” in a context of terror and poverty. It reminds me of the flight of black slaves in this country, whose loved ones perhaps previously died in this same river, seeking an exit to a life elsewhere where there might be more freedom, more physical well-being, more mattering, more equality. Or is this just the leaves, the dice, the cards, the runes, laid down for us to read into without determinacy?
This is, at face value, a gesture of vulnerability and openness. It could be the existential vulnerability of the human spirit, or it could be the vulnerability of intersectional and structural oppression (emotional experience of helplessness) in particular social locations. I think that this ideogrammatic poem on pg. 27, this pictogram, in which the text quoted above drills five layers deep in concentric circles, presents a misdirection of Giovanni Singleton’s approach to her work. It verbally articulates a straw-woman methodology, and pictorially articulates it by evoking things like archery targets, or ripples of water expanding across the water’s surface around a point of entry, or annular marks of growth in a tree-trunk, things which imply qualities of slow growth, or centering, or focus, or taking aim, or outward reverberations of impact. Certainly Singleton does gather the symbolic materials, bring them into the field, and then drop them before us, so we can see what they will reveal about our present situation. But the implications of her “sortilege” are rather more calculated than such procedures would suggest. The work of Giovanni Singleton innocuously poses as chance-operation, but it is not all that dicey in actuality. It sits before us AS IF it were a collection of ink blots or tarot cards or hexagrams, mesmeric, evoking a depth of understanding about our own situations, and a curiosity about what is happening in the world right now, the world of our own participation and perhaps most importantly for this work, interpretation and re-interpretation. And Singleton’s graphic images (likened to leaves, cards, runes) really do sit at the center of the concentric circles of concentration and rumination, which is akin to the energy of “pray pray pray,” the ever-outward reverb as presence seeks awareness. And yet, this is not just presence seeking awareness in an ashram with Alice Coltrane at the Wurlitzer (though it includes that, in an affectionately joyous and respectful way). It is more importantly presence seeking awareness in the stressed space of US poetry and poetics, where certain kinds of vulnerability (vulnerability of racial inequality, especially) struggle to be seen clearly against “white spaces” that are devoid of these particular kinds of vulnerability, and often oblivious to them.
*Establishing African-American / diasporic lineage of experimental writing.
*Challenging notions of legibilty by hybridizing word art with graphic arts.
*Championing a lineage of improvisation by crafting devotional icons of past masters.
*Employing sortilege & aleatory methods that prize indeterminacy. Generating a sense that each reading is a new performance where context makes new meanings. But in actuality, constellating very precise and targeted critiques of certain concepts.
*Sparking off new meanings at the intersection of symbol (cross, flag, clock, cow, trees, honeycomb), plus code for creative lineage in writing and music (“wilson harris, nathanael mackey, charlie parker, lucille clifton, alice coltrane, wanda coleman, jayne cortez, sun ra, nina simone, bob kaufman”), plus songs made of words (lyricism).
*Employing the strategies of surrealism and dadaism to provoke around images of racialized police violence (gun=camera, permutations of chalk outlines on granite countertops) and especially triads of symbols juxtaposed to generate meaning according to the nature of their relation to each other (i.e. flag, cross, blank space (13-15); horizontal line, circle, “Aaaaah.” (24); circle, triangle, square (45); olive branch, human heart, fish, all presented as “olive branches,” perhaps progressively more efficacious forms of reparation? (58-60). There is an inquiry here, not just about how things are related, but how they are EQUATED (falsely).
I was especially attracted to Pg. 45 as a dense and mysterious presence in the work (part of the sequence called “CHAPTER 5 / illustrated equations”). This poem is entitled “illustrated equation no. 2 / something about a look… the shape of things…” It presents three shapes on the left side of a bisected field. This side is labelled “blk,” whereas the empty, “shapeless” side of the field is labelled “white.” Does “blk” mean “black?” Why not spell it out? This figure on pg. 45 echoes the constellation of the presence and absence of shapes (or symbols) in the first chapter of the book (“exhibits,” pgs. 13-15), where the works of black-identified writers are obliquely employed as materials from which the symbols of god and country can be constructed and juxtaposed with the emptiness of a white space. In “the shape of things…” this figure of shapes against shapelessness is juxtaposed against a handwritten text: “there a boat. there a pair of oars for moving to and from shore. // blue breaks down. Ghosts emerge from the river. manifest as fever and fear.” I would like to discuss in more detail the relation of this text to the figure above. It makes me think of a flight to safety, happening at twilight as “blue breaks down,” in a context of terror and poverty. It reminds me of the flight of black slaves in this country, whose loved ones perhaps previously died in this same river, seeking an exit to a life elsewhere where there might be more freedom, more physical well-being, more mattering, more equality. Or is this just the leaves, the dice, the cards, the runes, laid down for us to read into without determinacy?
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