The Black Scholar

Journal of Black Studies and Research

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The Erotics of Mourning in Recent Experimental

Black Poetry

Anthony Reed

To cite this article: Anthony Reed (2017) The Erotics of Mourning in Recent Experimental Black
Poetry, The Black Scholar, 47:1, 23-37, DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2017.1264851

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The Erotics of Mourning in
Recent Experimental Black
Poetry
ANTHONY REED
An unsettled feeling keeps the body front
and center.
– Claudia Rankine, Citizen
he last few decades, in part aided by a host
T of formal and informal writers’ collectives,
has seen a veritable renaissance of new and
revived approaches to poetics, especially
among black writers. This experimentation—
bending and rethinking existing forms or
inventing new forms—responds to and indi-
cates historically emergent forms of desire
and attachment. It responds to the need for
replenished social and political imaginations
adequate to what in a previous generation
would have been called the demand for
freedom. They also respond to the racist
sedimentations that permeate received
forms. As M. NourbeSe Philip argues, colonial
institutions—she singles out language, but I
would include literature itself—are “not only
experientially foreign, but also etymologically
hostile and expressive of the non-being of
the African.”1 To be experimental in this
sense does not refer merely to a particular
set of discursive techniques and strategies
defined in opposition to convention, but
seeking modes of writing and thinking
adequate to the black experience of
modernity. It addresses and reworks the
latent, unresolved conflicts encoded within
even the most apparently neutral literary
conventions.
© 2017 The Black World Foundation
The Black Scholar 2017
Vol. 47, No. 1, 23–37, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2017.1264851
In this essay, I outline the contours of a
recent poetic mode that establishes and pro-
blematizes an intimate scale, a poetry of and
between bodies, through experiment with
one of the most fundamental, if contested,
modes of modern poetry: the lyric. In the
sense first popularized by William Words-
worth and developed by subsequent poets
and critics such as J.S. Mill, T.S. Eliot and
Northrop Frye, the lyric concerns itself with
recollecting and transmitting events constitu-
tive of the individual psyche. Necessarily,
some events and happenings, because of
their scale or kind, remain unintelligible. In
that interstitial zone of partial unintelligibility
lies the framework for rethinking the kinds of
black selves that are imaginable or desirable,
and the ways one might value the erotic in the
most general sense, including the pleasures
and discomforts of the rub between sensual-
ity, sensibility, and sense-making, and the
possibilities for “we” remain unexplored.
I derive my sense of the erotic from Audre
Lorde’s powerful framing of it as “a measure
between the beginnings of our sense of self
and the chaos of our strongest feelings,”2
and Sharon P. Holland’s argument that the
erotic names “the personal and political
dimension of desire—at the threshold of
ideas about quotidian racist practice.”3
Taken as a conduit between public and
private selves, the erotic can function as a
general term for those illicit, taboo, or
unthinkable forms of desire and intimacy, or
for those forms of desire that lie beyond
current organizing rubrics. It is a name for
those pleasures and desires that emerge from
the inevitable rubbing together and intertwi-
nement of life and life, of oppressor and
oppressed, but lie beyond our current
 organizing rubrics. It might name the desire,
and its disavowal, produced as surplus from
the notion of race as that through which
bodies come to be legible and through
which the human species self-perpetuates. It
is a name for those imagined and tangible
places where race, gender and sexuality
mutually co-constitute and complicate.
The erotic pervades the commonsense ver-
naculars and imaginative parameters of racial
difference. This, too, is historical: as Hortense
Spillers suggests, in the transatlantic slave
trade and its continuing wake, gender and
race are co-constitutive sites of difference.4
A poetry rooted in this sense of the erotic,
linked to mourning in its insistence on the
chaos of not-yet-organized feelings, is not
concerned with describing or depicting acts
or longing, but with the transmission of embo-
died, or somatic experiences intending some-
thing broader and more upsetting than
titillation.
One of this essays’ ambitions, then, is to
offer the erotic as an epistemological frame
through which to interrogate the emphasis
on desire, the body’s vulnerabilities and plea-
sures, and somaticized affect. I have pre-
viously considered such work on the rubric
of the “post-lyric,”5 and here I want to both
expand and historicize those arguments,
with particular attention to the work of
Dawn Lundy Martin and Claudia Rankine’s
recent Citizen. By “post-lyric,” I wanted to
suggest a poetics invested not only in convey-
ing forms of experience and social life not
typically addressed by white authors, but
also a canny working through and playing
on the interaction of rhetoric and tropes that
outline the genre’s conventions. “Post” does
not mean supersession or refusal; as advised
24 TBS • Volume 47 • Number 1 • Spring 2017
by Douglas Kearney, it refers to “an addled
aftermath of something that hasn’t passed,”
but whose limits now might be interrogated.6
From this perspective, one might better substi-
tute “late” for “post.”
In public rhetoric, openly racist or white
supremacist politics have come to be, nomin-
ally, residual. Explicit bigotry is sure to be
“called out,” bigots shamed and, again rhet-
orically, excluded from a collective sense of
accepted politics. In a “post–Civil Rights”
moment, keeping in mind Kearney’s gloss,
the dominant ideological strain is perhaps
multiculturalism, recoded following the elec-
tion of Barack Obama as “post-racialism.”
That framing, of course, represents the adap-
tation of putatively residual white supremacist
elements, working simply to make it easier to
name and ostracize individual racists, but
harder to see that the problem with overt
racism is its overtness, not its being racist.
What I hope to outline here is the sense of
an emergent form, itself containing some of
the residual forms of radical thought—
especially from feminist and black liberation
struggles—within poetry itself, seeking to
redefine the contours of what has been the
dominant strain of poetic production for at
least the last century, and especially the
period that overlaps the end of legal
segregation.
In the case of the lyric, what is the “some-
thing that hasn’t passed”? One answer has to
do with contests over the status of lyric
poetry in the wake of “lyricization,” which I
will discuss below, and contests between pre-
dominantly white writers identified with a
self-styled “avant-garde” and those identified,
often by those self-proclaimed “avant-garde”
writers, as overly invested in the expressive
lyric7—a mode of writing thought to be
naïvely invested in the contract between
writer and reader whereby modes of poetic
expression are grouped under the sign of
voice, expressive of a singular consciousness
referred to as “speaker.” One good example
of this (inadvertently?) developmental and
thus condescending argument is Ron Silli-
man’s claim that straight, white, male “pro-
gressive poets” are “apt to challenge all that
is supposedly ‘natural’ about the formation
of their own subjectivity,” while “marginal”
writers “have a manifest political need to
have their stories told” and thus favor more
“conventional” forms “with the notable differ-
ence as to whom is the subject of these
conventions.”8
Feminist writers and writers of color, of
course, have long challenged the value of
simply telling one’s story and have chafed at
the strictures of conventional form, endeavor-
ing to revise those structures, create new con-
ventions, and establish new aesthetic criteria
for their work. One thinks of the opening
lines of Audre Lorde’s “There Are No Honest
Poems about Dead Women”: “What do we
want from each other / after we have told
our stories.”9 Silliman’s claims, including
those about the nature of poetic subjectivity,
belong to a long history of what literary
critic Virginia Jackson has called “lyriciza-
tion”—a process beginning in the eighteenth
century by which, she argues, all the different
modes and techniques of poetic expression
would come, are retrospectively, to be read
as lyric. Over time, thanks to the nature of cri-
ticism and pedagogy (and, I would add, the
necessity of producing subjects fit for liberal,
capitalist societies), most poetry has come to
be read as the documentary expression,
fictional or autobiographical, of personal
experience and feeling, presented in
compact, harmoniously arranged form, and
indirectly addressing a private reader. One
reads for the other as a model for the self
and, so instructed, produces work according
to those conventions. Lyricization corre-
sponds with the emergence of the modern,
bourgeois subject—a private individual
expressing himself to other private individuals
who read in quiet contemplation.
In William Wordsworth’s canonical formu-
lation, lyric poetry (which he simply calls
“poetry”) is supposed to be a process of distil-
ling and refining the “spontaneous overflow
of powerful feelings … recollected in tranqui-
lity” contemplated and refined, by poetic
technique (especially meter), until “by a
species of reaction the tranquility disappears
and an emotion, kindred to that which was
before the subject of contemplation, is gradu-
ally produced, and it does itself actually exist
in the mind.”10 Silliman’s argument has
obvious racial content, wanting to explain a
wide variety of poetic production in terms
that assert and define the “avant-garde”
nature of his cadre of white, male writers
without interrogating deeply, save in a brief
gesture regarding Nathaniel Mackey’s work,
what other traditions those writers might be
coming out of that do not adhere to the con-
ventions of the subject he had in mind.11
At stake in Wordsworth’s description is a
broader set of convergences and conden-
sations that take shape around his emphasis
on particular habits of mind, modes of experi-
ence, and sensibility. Earlier in the preface,
Wordsworth defines the poet as “a man
speaking to men … delighting to contem-
plate similar passions as manifested in the
Anthony Reed 25
 goings-on of the Universe, and habitually
impelled to create them where he does not
find them.”12 If one considers Wordsworth
in a broader eighteenth-century context that
includes the rise of capital fueled by slavery
and Indian removal, then one can more
clearly see the resonances of the phrase
“man speaking to men” and what novelist
and theorist Sylvia Wynter has termed the
“now globally hegemonic ethnoclass world
of ‘Man,’” the synecdoche that makes a
subset of people the image of the human as
such.13 Lyricization corresponds with and
provides an aesthetic basis—that is, a set of
common norms of beauty and harmonious
form—for the emergence of Man.
From this historical perspective, it is not
mere coincidence that Wordsworth produced
the preface to his Lyrical Ballads, from which
that definition is drawn, 15 years after
Thomas Jefferson had famously dismissed
Phillis Wheatley, asserting that:
Misery is often the parent of the most affect-
ing touches in poetry.—Among the blacks is
misery enough, God knows, but no poetry.
Love is the peculiar œstrum of the poet.
Their love is ardent, but it kindles the
senses only, not the imagination. Religion
indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately
[sic]; but it could not produce a poet. The
compositions published under her name
are below the dignity of criticism.14
Jefferson misspells Wheatley’s name, subtly
challenges her authorship (“the compositions
published under her name” rather than “her
compositions”), and excludes her from the
community of poets—i.e., of “men speaking
to men,” or of Man. Not as often discussed,
26 TBS • Volume 47 • Number 1 • Spring 2017
he similarly dismisses Ignatius Sancho,
holding him to be “first place among those
of his own colour who have presented them-
selves to the public judgment,” but “at the
bottom of the column” when compared with
white writers.15 Wheatley is doubly excluded:
as a woman, and as black. Let us pause here to
ask whether the enslaved or their descendants
—one might say their legatees—can receive
the full benefits of supposed lyric subjectivity,
and with it belonging to a broader community
of poets.16 With all historical caveats, and
underscoring the difference in their inten-
tions, Silliman’s is a liberal (despite his
claims to radicalness) antiracist variation on
Jefferson’s liberal, racist project, cordoning
off some writers and modes of expression on
tendentiously formal grounds, re-marking lyr-
icization as a race project concerned with
establishing and maintaining the boundaries
of the human, shareable experience, author-
ship, and legitimate expression.
The “man” and “men” who form the two
nodes of discursive circuit and reconstituted
experience in Wordsworth’s definition of the
poet, then, correspond to and overlap the his-
torical emergence of Man. What constitutes
“speaking,” correspondingly, is that which
Man could hear/understand, making the
poem thereafter teeter on the verge of collapse
into reified self-understanding. Lyricization,
then, must also mean excluding those forms
of poetry rooted in the rituals, norms, and com-
munal needs and aesthetics of Others, particu-
larly the enslaved, except to the extent that
they can be assimilated or “refined”—usually
by whites—into the regime of Man. This
process also introduces the history-less, fea-
tureless, disinterested textual processor
known as “the” reader, thought reliably to
experience the objective text in roughly the
same ways. I would underscore that not
every black writer is invested, or invested in
the same way, in this lyric tradition; but none
has escaped the larger project of lyricization
understood as a race project. Writing of
Gwendolyn Brooks, one critic declared (in
terms also reminiscent of Jefferson), “I am not
sure it is possible for a Negro to write well
without making us aware he [sic] is a Negro;
on the other hand, if being a Negro is the
only subject, the writing is not important.”17
Race again excluded her, an enthusiastic and
brilliant innovator within English literary tra-
ditions including the lyric, from the larger
community of poets.
Now, there are heterodox traditions of
lyric poetry (including Brooks’) that, as
Nathaniel Mackey argues, “go counter to
and are contrary to the very rationalist
Cartesian order” of the version upheld or
chastised within contemporary discussions
of poetry and poetics, historical and other-
wise.18 While certain habits of thinking
about the interplay of rhetoric and tropes to
produce “voice” as the sign of a speaking
subject and her interiority are prevalent,
there is no “the” lyric. Rather, the status of
that interplay, and the interiority it is thought
to designate, are subject to contestation. Sim-
ultaneously, those heterodox traditions of
lyric poetry, considered from the perspective
of circulation, pedagogy, and the norms of
professional criticism means that even if one
is, as one must be, unfaithful to this genre
it’s not avoidable as a point of reference,
even if it just signifies a rejected gatekeeping
mechanism of literary culture. The “post-
lyric” names one heterodox way of belonging
to that misnamed genre, “the” lyric. It is a
critical intervention into the broader pro-
cesses of lyricization.
But if the lyric, for a certain tradition of cri-
ticism, continually undoes the fiction of a
unified speaking subject, the tradition I’m
after continually chafes at the confidence
that the other is a surrogate self, “the”
reader, reliably thinking and feeling in ways
identical or even “kindred” to the self in the
poem. The displacements involved—from
experience to contemplation, and from con-
templation back to refined, “kindred” feeling
whose production is the event of literature—
become thematic material for this emergent,
experimental poetics. Wordsworth attempted
to resolve the problem of relating the mind of
the poet to an audience of strangers (and of
the mind to itself across time through recollec-
tion) through the experience of kindred
feeling. His understanding of that relation-
ship, however, assumes a notion of subjectiv-
ity and time that Claudia Rankine’s work, for
example, challenges. More importantly, they
disagree on the function of words: given his
presumption of Man as normative writer and
“the” reader as one who might take control
of the process of signification in order to
create a reflection of himself where he does
not find it. For Rankine, the value of feeling
comes not from the contemplation of the
event that inspired it but from the sharpness
of its articulation; not from identification
with the event or the speaker, but from recog-
nition “that a life can not matter.”19
Externalizing the lyric’s contemplative
subject into the structure of the poem, both
by attaching consciousness to figures who
describe experiences of quotidian racism
that don’t so much generate strong emotions
as numb the senses, the alchemy through
Anthony Reed 27
 which kindred emotion is produced is beside
the point of the need for new forms of social
connection and community. I am thinking of
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004), and especially
Citizen (2015), both subtitled An American
Lyric. Both poems explore other senses and
uses of verbal expression, and a new compli-
cation of the lyric present—the time of lyric
enunciation that allows us to understand
that lines like “you awake, justly terrified of
this world”20 or “my job is to revise and
revise this bristling list / hourly”21 not as
descriptions of past (or present) events, but
as literary events in their own right. Insisting
on the location of utterance complicates
matters by yoking that lyric time to terrestrial
or historical time as something other than
the representation of a saying. Particularly in
Citizen, taken as a document of racism in its
most quotidian, embodied and lived forms,
emphasis falls less on individual experiences
or understandings. Instead, poems like these
ask us to “recall” from a place where there is
no tranquility, even in the injunction for racia-
lized subjects to “forget” or “get over” or “not
make such a big deal of” the accumulation of
anti-cathartic non-events now commonly
referred to as “microaggressions.”
Keguro Macharia, in his meditation on Citi-
zen’s circulation “as an aesthetic object that
documents microaggressions,”22 reminds us
that psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce coined the
term to consider, in Macharia’s terms, “the
pause where the cumulative takes hold.”
Such nominally minor aggressions accrete,
become a part of the body’s memory; they
remake the quotidian as a string of real or
anticipated arrested moments—anticipated,
now happening, or just having happened—
whose non-eventfulness seems to preclude
28 TBS • Volume 47 • Number 1 • Spring 2017
catharsis. They accumulate, for Rankine and
others, as a kind of somatic archive, a reper-
toire of repeated gestures and affective dispo-
sitions accompanied by a dulling of memory
that makes it difficult to mark the beginning
and end of events because they never quite
seem to happen—one continually questions
one’s own experience—but also never quite
seem to stop happening.
Such arrested moments create gaps,
lacunae in the lived experience of the “I”
and “my own” experience, gaps in the flow
of the everyday around which bodies
develop new reflexes, new affective and libi-
dinal investments. These, then, form the
emotionally intense experiences—non-spon-
taneous accretions of powerful feelings
that rarely reach overflow, and that deny tran-
quil recollection—upon which the “post” or
non-cathartic lyric is predicated. This mode
takes as its point of departure race as exces-
sive embodiment, and displaced erotic or
affective investment in both civic and inter-
personal relationships. The form draws on
moments that fail to be moments, subjects
whose interiority is denied normative status
except to the extent to which they reinforce
the ideological presuppositions that shape
“Man,” as discussed above. Finally, though I
can only touch on it briefly in this essay, this
is a contemporary form, emerging after it
becomes impossible to think of “the” black
community as a fixed form, or of black
people as easily sharing a common history.
In my reading, this form responds to the limit-
ations of integration (and the limited ways it
has happened, substituting “diversity” for
more thoroughgoing re-imagination of
public life), which in part has to do with
avoidance of the erotic, save through
occasional vague notions that interracial
couples and mixed-race children will,
somehow, unmake systems of oppression
upon which our social and Symbolic order
is founded. Not surprisingly, then, such re-
imagination is one of its hallmarks. One
characteristic is what I referred to above as a
mournful tone.
In psychoanalysis, and other traditions, the
work of mourning requires that the lost object
be ontologized, incarnated in another object,
which exists in ambiguous state of exceeding
its own self-identity for the mourner. But what
happens when loss is anticipated, and
the thing to be lost—the animate body—
becomes its own replacement object? I use
the term “mourning” to underscore the unti-
meliness of the raced body as body, and the
untimeliness in erotic attachment to the body.
Such untimely mourning also indicates
something about the lived experience of
black life in racist societies. Ruth Wilson
Gilmore has defined racism as “group differ-
entiated exposure to state sanctioned, prema-
ture death,” through violent means, whether
that be a hail of police bullets of lead-poisoned
water.23 Rinaldo Walcott, arguing in a similar
vein, makes the point in starker terms: “Death
is not ahead of blackness as a future shared
with other humans; death is our life, lived in
the present.”24 Claudia Rankine’s formulation
is yet starker, inscribing black death within the
texture of the quotidian. Writing in the wake of
attack on a prayer meeting at the Emanuel
African Methodist Episcopal Church in Char-
leston, SC, she argues:
We live in a country where Americans
assimilate corpses in their daily comings
and goings. Dead blacks are a part of
normal life here. Dying in ship hulls, tossed
into the Atlantic, hanging from trees,
beaten, shot in churches, gunned down by
the police or warehoused in prisons: Histori-
cally, there is no quotidian without the
enslaved, chained or dead black body to
gaze upon or to hear about or to position a
self against.25
Such framing, accounting for “black death”
as “a different sort of dying,”26 helps to rethink
the temporality of recollection and experi-
ence itself, both of which are central to tra-
ditional conceptions of the lyric. One may
celebrate, with Lucille Clifton, another day
that something has tried to kill her and
failed, but the manner of celebration, re-
marking the vulnerability of the body along-
side its pleasures, its durability alongside its
fragility, is what I am calling mournful here.
Such celebration is about the rites of
keeping and maintaining the body, localizing
race in the specific contours of a life, its parti-
cularity and singularity, what’s most often
missed or obscured in the statistical account-
ing through which blackness is considered.
Such celebration asks that we reconsider the
discontinuities that comprise any moment
for the black subject, and that we consider
the continuous anticipation or experience of
violence that shapes black realities.
What, then, constitutes the tone and
technique of mourning in this recent work?
One hallmark is language rigorously stripped
of adornment, amounting to a sense of
something withheld. Another is resigned
abstraction (e.g., reference to “the body”),
which denies itself the comfort of transcen-
dence and attempts to deny figuration itself.
It presents itself not just as anti-catharsis, but
Anthony Reed 29
 as anti-technique. Not only the body’s vulner-
ability, but the limits of a certain dream of
integration—the conditions and everyday
practices of life in urban and suburban
spaces following the replacement of official
racist state policies (i.e., the end of restrictive
housing covenants, the increased use of
racial code words)—is mourned. The spaces
of allowable spontaneous civility tend now
to be commercially delineated by ad hoc,
carefully policed “cosmopolitan canopies,”
the better to preclude less controllable forms
of community or kinship.
While a “model of civility” blooms in “cos-
mopolitan canopies that may well have a
chance to sprout elsewhere in the city,” “sep-
aration from the surrounding streetscapes”
circumscribes those contingent, temporary
spaces.27 It is a situation at once familiar
and new: in such a situation, bodies are
mutually visible, but some bodies, especially
those that are racially marked, retain a
surplus visibility. Post-lyric poetry does not
necessarily represent such street scenes, but,
following the argumentative logic of much
affect-oriented cultural studies, it registers
this shift in its transformation and abstraction
of conventional lyric subjectivity, and the lyr-
icization that subtends it. Insofar as critics and
readers alike align “lyric” poetry with self-dis-
closure and a metonymic structure that makes
my “I” generically substitutable with yours,
transforming that “I” into something abstract
(though not “impersonal”) seems significant.
Following Lauren Berlant’s thinking on
affect, one might say that such poetry registers
a structure of everyday life, and interacting
with the world that destabilizes the position
of the self-identical “sovereign subject. ” For
Berlant, one feels before knowing, and
30 TBS • Volume 47 • Number 1 • Spring 2017
literature, along with other narrative arts,
becomes a privileged domain for the enregis-
tration (or “entextualization”—making
legible, with all the possibilities for misread-
ing and mistranslation such a process of tran-
scription implies) of those feelings. Still more
broadly, Sianne Ngai has argued (citing
Adorno) that literature, because of its self-
reflexivity and “reflexive preoccupation with
its own ‘powerlessness and superfluity in the
empirical world’” uniquely positions it to
theorize “social powerlessness” and problems
“beyond the aesthetic per se.”28 This leads,
however, to something of an impasse
around exemplarity (why some texts, but not
others; a question that, unattended to,
encourages critics to retrace the historical pat-
terns named by lyricization) and literary
history more generally.
But what are the techniques through which
we interpret affects, subjectivity, or interper-
sonal relations? Ngai suggests tone: “the
formal aspect of a literary work that makes it
possible for critics to describe a text as, say,
‘euphoric’ or ‘melancholic’” (UF 28). Tone,
she argues, “is the dialectic of objective and
subjective feeling that our aesthetic encoun-
ters inevitably produce” so that in essence
tone is an effect of historically situated
reading rather than an intrinsic quality (UF
30). Tone is the result of the interaction of his-
torical and genetic contexts, and thus is a way
of retrospectively “entextualizing” affects,
which is a way, Berlant argues, of indexing a
“collective memory about a ‘time.’”29 Think-
ing about genre historically, Berlant con-
tinues, “bridges the historiography of an
entextualized moment and the affectivity”
that the text, taken as an index of the animat-
ing situation, “gathers up” (67). Attention to
the historical contours of the interaction
between genre and a thick historical context
makes literature, perhaps especially exper-
imental literature with the pressure it puts on
literary convention and the forms of collectiv-
ity, collective experience, and public affect
those conventions encode, an especially
compelling field from which to think the inter-
actions of time, place and power beyond offi-
cial archives, whose function is to normalize
the violence of the time.
If black life, as many have argued (the cita-
tions above are a small sample), is definitively
framed by untimely violence, if the lived
experience of blackness is one of untimeliness
(and, given recent history, one can specify this
as the temporality of waiting, in that interval
between optimism and resignation, for the
announcement absolving of legal culpability
those who perpetuate such violence), with
each pleasure and desire informed by the
imminent possibility of departure and the
sense of having survived someone who is no
longer present, then the archive is a display
of violated, wounded, dead and violent
bodies, along with the excuses and falsehoods
that can make a life—now just a body—not
matter. To retrace it, to recall the names of
the dead, to insist on “humanizing” or “perso-
nalizing” the victimized or to insist that discre-
pant representation of exemplary black
humanity is “resistant” rather than part of the
reproduction of black death is to participate
in black death’s normalization. Here, then,
one can see the importance of the tonal shift
in the lyric mode not as simply expanding
the representative purview of a form shaped
by a long history of lyricization as the normal-
izing of bourgeois white men as acme of the
human. (And if one hears in the word
“acme” the whistle of the anvil fated to fall
on the coyote’s head to upset his schemes,
then surely the joke seems to be on those
black people who invest without hope in the
salvific promise of the institutions of Man.)
The tone of mourning resides in the inter-
play between the objective-historical and
the personal-untimely, marking a historical
inadequacy of unified lyric subjectivity as
practice and ideal. Thematically and formally,
such works are informed by what Walter Ben-
jamin called the “comprehensive seculariza-
tion of the historical,” by which in this case I
refer to the absence of a common desire for
or fulfillment of some fuller justice in our life-
times. “History merges into the setting,” he
continues, standing as the contemplation of
things appreciated in their non-transcenden-
tal transience.30 “Mourning,” he continues,
“is the state of mind in which feeling revives
the empty world in the form of a mask, and
derives an enigmatic satisfaction in contem-
plating it” (139). Mourning invests the world
where stable structures of meaning are in
question, where the self—“immers[ed] in the
life of creaturely things,” immersed, in other
words, in non-transcendence—exists in a
determinate relation to other selves and to
history, without the guarantees of fixed
meaning.
The idea of “history merg[ing] into the
setting” aptly describes Dawn Lundy
Martin’s work, which participates in the lyric
mode without fully belonging to it. Lyric
becomes another mask, an enigmatic
medium of contemplation whose object is
“the unforgiving, inchoate world.”31 Most
generally, her work is concerned with forms
of excess—what exceeds signifying practices
without transcending them, and the forms of
Anthony Reed 31
 excessive embodiment through which the
raced subject experiences her world, and
through which the world experiences her.
Her poems tend to draw attention to—and
deny—the normative frames, narrative and
sociological, through which we ordinarily
read black texts, making those frames
another component that must itself be
“read.” For example “After Drowning,” from
her first collection A Gathering of Matter, A
Matter of Gathering, is focalized and oriented
around the pronouns “she,” “I,” and “them.”
The poem asks, “What is it like to feel
female? Explicitly? A body that feeds. Is
food. Is gnawed on. One that kneels. A facili-
tator. Organized joy. A corporeal caving in,
arranging the joist. Cooing” (GM 15).
This passage ends a prose paragraph, and
conveys a sense of being “penned in,” of
bodily restriction and exhaustion, a meager
“organized joy. ” There is no single key or
master code through which to organize the
poem’s effects and references, only a surplus
of text. It is not clear who or how many
voices answer the initial question, or how
the question is motivated. The line preceding
it refers to “The one absolution from the
designed body. As if one could locate, here
in the barnyard, a logic, a wonder, a stabbing
toward datum, corpus” (GM 15). The
“answer” to the question “What is it like to
feel … ?” is a non-hierarchically arranged set
of responses that in Lundy Martin’s poem
suggests a series of voices or attempts to
answer. The passage suggests, but refuses the
organizing conventions of, dialogue, with
each sentence fragment perhaps that of a
different woman.
One might, however, take the organization
of the prose paragraph as the semantic unit,
32 TBS • Volume 47 • Number 1 • Spring 2017
and understand all of these to be the free indir-
ect representation of the subject—“she”—and
the clauses and fragments as elaborations of
the question itself—What is it like to feel
[like] a body that feels, to touch a body that
also touches you? As is typical of her poetry,
there is the optional availability of multiple
frames of reading that ultimately foreground
the experience of reading as an organization
of joy. Yet, lingering over the word “absolu-
tion” in the phrase “absolution from the
designed body,” one finds embodiment
associated with a peculiar guilt for which
the only remission is, in the previous sen-
tence, “dereliction”: “Dereliction impossible,
yet the thing” that might, subjunctively (“as
if”) locate some key or balm that might lead
the “she” from the “kraal” in which she
“curdles.” Working backwards through the
paragraph in this way, I mean to emphasize
the extent to which an overarching meaning
or sense—a semantic grounding to justify
the affective one—is a retrospective oper-
ation, but even reading this way the
“cooing” harmonizes with the “kraal,” and
“she” still “curdles,” a metonymic description
that unites “she” with the milk she provides.
“Drowning” relates ambiguously to the
affective associations with lactation. Drown-
ing thus is no simple matter. It refers equally
to something that happens to bodies, the
metaphoric sense of being in over one’s
head, and to the process of the poem as a
“flood” of data lacking a master key through
which to organize it. Simultaneously, “drown-
ing” retains its most literal meaning: “There
once was a time when the bridge ended and
the girl leapt.” Deploying the gestures of story-
telling (“There was a time,” “Once upon the
unsung,”) and protest (“breathes and hears
black bitch and black ass in the literal field of
the carnivorous”), surplus textuality becomes
a mournful modality of living: a body on
display, misnamed, vulnerable, without the
possibility of transcendence.
This poem, then, is excessive insofar as it is
difficult to know how to unite its disparate
elements into a cohesive statement about
drowning or feeling female. It also conjoins
three different formal registers: prose para-
graphs, semi-autonomous lines that don’t
quite comprise stanzas, and irregular stanzas
placed along the right margin, opening with
an example of this last:
To part pinprick, pry back
kind resistance, develop it, and
say something
incomprehensible. (GM 14)
To “say something / incomprehensible” rubs
against the presumed communication func-
tion of the lyric, that by which one can
imagine the poem to have a “speaker”
whose “voice” is a potential surrogate for
one’s own. This and other poems continually
self-create and annihilate in apparent inco-
herence, responding to the bracketed—self-
effacing—sentiment with which the collec-
tion closes: “[I wanted silence in the flowers,
not to not say, but to not have the impulse of
saying.]” (GM 51). The wariness toward the
verbal makes tone—the unstable “dialectic
of objective and subjective feeling” under-
stood as a proxy for lived experience—the
very content of the poem. As with the later
work Discipline, the “condensed system” of
“the I” becomes a mournful mask, a “fissure
recklessly yearning for its whole self sense of
wholeness like a potato.”32 Where written
language breaks down, it touches the world
—forgetting as a way of misremembering the
present and the givenness of the world—less
as politics than a new aesthetics rooted
around the fissures of the living present. In
the fissures of that present, where the body
does not already know its place, history
begins.
Dawn Lundy Martin’s 2011 Discipline, a
long poem primarily in prose, similarly avails
itself of narrative markers—readers may
sense and attempt to reconstruct an apparent
sequence of events and try to understand the
relationships between its seemingly fixed
and recurrent personae—without the guaran-
tees or closures of fiction. After an introductory
verse section, labeled “excreta,” that reads as
an overture to the longer work, and as that
which, having processed something more
substantial, it has excluded, the poem opens
with a scene where meaning is actively
unfixed: “Not so much a name, but the result
of a name. […] Heritage as fantasy. That the
seer looks toward a past—markers of it—in
food and location, in wrecked bodies, flesh
strung, etc.” This paragraph’s conclusion
introduces an abstraction familiar to partici-
pants in writing workshops—“the father”—
who jumps or “threatens to jump, in the
name of something believed” (D 4). The
body, another literary abstraction, hovers
“Near not being. Precisely what the body
resists the body is” (D 7).
Discipline focuses on situations—between
place and circumstance—where bodies
appear as bodies, animated beyond but with
reference to the fates of persons: crowded
urban spaces, hospitals, mortuaries, whore-
houses. The poem suggests connections—a
man, dying or who will die, and his daughter
Anthony Reed 33
 connected through being seen and mis-seen on
the streets, a woman from within the whore-
house the man frequents where she exists as
something other than woman, places of work
and convalescence where the body’s value is
in it, and its subparts’, ability to produce. Along-
side those thematic elements there is a poem
concerned with “cuts of time,” and “the here
of now” opposing “a philosophy of once and
then not.” It is a poem about making literature
with and against abstraction, especially the
use of definite articles to produce both generic
universality and irreducible singularity: “the
body,” “the here.” In this abstraction, one
starts to get a glimpse of something beyond
poetry as “man speaking to men” that also
avoids the self-satisfied claims to faddish
avant-gardism: a poetry that asks us to think of
experience not as what happens between
sovereign subjects, but as what happens
between bodies.
Reading itself becomes an interaction
between bodies, repeatedly pressing on
those places where written language breaks
down, making language break into “the
black marks that make up letters” (GM 42).
Between the opening overture and the first
paragraph just discussed, readers confront
this (D 3):
011000010111010101110100011011110
110001001101001011011110110011101
1100100110000101110000011010000110
1001011001010111001100100000011011
110110011000100000011000010010000
001100010011011110110010001111001
Binary code such as this implies and requires a
non-human reader. As far as I have been able to
determine, however, they do not translate into
34 TBS • Volume 47 • Number 1 • Spring 2017
text or instruction. Three such interpolations
divide the text, symbolizing both the processes
and failures of communication. In structuralist
terms, binary is effectively a langue (language)
without parole (speech)—or, by extension, an
image of thought without a (human) body, or
language without history. The appearance of
language that should be meaningful but isn’t
—like the “fantasy” of heritage—reads as a
parody of the much-discussed malleability of
identity in the internet age (especially insofar
as it recalls the embodied human labor that
writes the code, or that produces the machines
and raw materials for the machines that
decodes it). It may also function as a critique
of the strange non-site of the virtual that
remains linked to lived environments shaped
and deformed by race. “There is this place
where the I is am now and there is the no
place,” a speaker says at one point. As allegory
for the material basis of networked communi-
cation is here shown in its failure, in its
attempted reach beyond itself, binary—like
the binaries that shape our lives (male/female,
parent/child, black/white), human after all.
Taken together, the effect is the sense of unti-
meliness characteristic of mourning: the erosion
of the stable markers of experience that creates
discrepancies in what is supposed to be “my
own” experience. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen,
like Discipline and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely
(2004) before it, continually plays on the dou-
bleness of ordinary (and ordinarily non-share-
able) moments. These poems play on the
multiplicity of a moment—as it happens, as
it’s recalled, as it’s related, as it’s differentially
experienced—as a kind of temporal aporia.
The question “What did you say?” becomes a
motif, signaling a moment at once singular, a
rupture in the fabric of the quotidian, and
exemplary, recurrent, familiarly estranging.
And in its more transgressive moments, it pro-
duces such temporal disorientation.
Many commentators have noted the use of
the second person, a formal decision made a
theme in the poem’s fifth section. The
second person’s intimacy and distance, its
ability to be simultaneously “commanding,
accusative, or adoring”33—indeed, its ability
to implicate those three and other modes of
address—help construct the atmosphere of
embodied memory and imposed forgetting
that defines its concept of citizenship as
project (“Yes, and this is how you are a
citizen: Come on. Let it go. Move on.”).34
Rather than recalling and sharing powerful
feeling, the call is to suppress it.
Section 5 is the least amenable to straight-
forward readings of the poem’s interpolated
scenes of microaggression, stressing instead
the assumptions and limitations of first-
person reportage, or at least the limitations
of believing one fully inhabits the first
person, the “I,” which “is supposed to hold
what is not there until it is” (C 71). This
section also structurally plays out the unti-
mely nature of racial violence, which “micro-
aggression,” if the emphasis is on the “micro”
rather than the “aggression,” misnames. As
Rankine writes at an earlier moment, “[e]ach
moment is like this—before it can be
known, categorized as similar to another
thing and dismissed, it has to be experienced,
it has to be seen” (C 9). In section 5, the
moment experienced before being narrated
in the script to “Stop-and-Frisk.” In terms of
the poem’s structure, section 5 is foreshadow-
ing, but in its thematic logic, where the discre-
pancy between what one knows “in one’s
bones,” so to speak, and what one has
experienced. This discrepancy, constructing
what testimony can be accepted as true or
false, which events “really happened” and
which suggest bodies that are “too sensitive,”
lies at the heart of lyricization as well.
Memory and anticipation, including antici-
pation of how the scene will play out. In that
time-space, the “spontaneous overflow of
powerful feeling” becomes “the excess
emotion” that can spur memory of “the Atlan-
tic ocean breaking on our heads” (73).
I have only begun to tease out some of the
implications of this section for the reading of
Citizen as a whole. Its imagining of modes of
address and relating experience beyond the
“life study of a monumental first person”
implicitly announces a project straining past
the epistemological and aesthetic parameters
of the lyric as historically produced through
the race project of lyricization. What modes
of expression, of the personal, lie beyond the
lyric? Above, I referred to mourning as requiring
a body—or “the body,” “the I,” a textual or sig-
nifying tradition interrogated as a corpus rather
than revered as a canon—and to that, I would
add: it’s a way of dealing with remains, localiz-
ing loss, when what has animated a certain
conception of the body no longer seems ade-
quate. In literary terms, it reactivates “the
chaos of our strongest feelings” and requires
that they be rearticulated, re-cognized, in
forms not yet invented or named. Like Disci-
pline, Citizen confronts readers with the con-
temporary world where dreams of liberation
through integration have come up against the
social and political limits of a society structured
around economic exploitation propped up by
white supremacy. That notion of citizenship,
rooted in the interaction of sovereign subjects
equally recognized before the law, emerges
Anthony Reed 35
 alongside lyricization. To ask what lies beyond
the lyric is thus also to ask what political possi-
bilities are there beyond or other than citizen-
ship. The value of this experimental mode,
insisting on the historically situated black
body as its basis, is not the answers it poses,
but the insistence of the question through
which it calls its “we,” its community of
readers, into being.
Notes
1. Philip, “The Absence of Writing, or, How
I Almost Became a Spy,” in A Genealogy of
Resistance and Other Essays (Toronto: Mercury
Press, 1997), 46.
2. Marlene NourbeSe Philip, “Uses of the
Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider:
Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley,
CA: Crossing Press, 1997), 54.
3. The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2012).
4. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American
Grammar Book,” in Black, White, and in Color:
Essays on American Literature and Culture, ed. Hor-
tense J. Spillers (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003), 203–29.
5. I refer in particular to the third chapter of
Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black
Experimental Writing (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2014).
6. Mess and Mess and (Las Cruces, NM:
Noemi Press, 2015).
7. Amiri Baraka, by contrast, did not sneer at
the “expressive” writer so much as at the overly
“academic” one—that is, the one too invested in
approval by mainstream publishing houses and
university tenure committees.
8. “Poetry and the Politics of the Subject,”
Socialist Review 88 (1988): 63, original emphasis.
Others, not worth mentioning here, continue to
36 TBS • Volume 47 • Number 1 • Spring 2017
peddle Silliman’s flawed argument as polemic
rather than myopic description.
9. Audre Lorde, The Collected Poems of
Audre Lorde (New York: W. W. Norton and
Company, 1997).
10. William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical
Ballads,” in The Major Works, ed. Stephen
Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008),
611.
11. He refers to “Irritable Mystic: ‘mu-’ fifth
part,” as “aggressively musical” in ways that
remind “the reader that improvisation is a pro-
foundly collaborative, and therefore social,
activity” (66). Improvisation only features in the
poem to the extent that one knows Mackey’s race
or the full range of his critical and poetic output
to that point.
12. Wordsworth, “Preface,” 603.
13. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/
Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, its
Overrepresentation,” CR: The New Centennial
Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 262.
14. Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson
(New York: Library of America, 1984), 266–7.
15. Ibid., 267.
16. I am indebted to Keguro Macharia for this
formulation, and for helping me to sharpen this
argument.
17. Louis Simpson, “Taking the Poem by the
Horn,” reprinted in On Gwendolyn Brooks:
Reliant Contemplation, ed. Stephen Caldwell
Wright (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2001), 23.
18. The Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks,
Notes, Interviews (Madison, WI: University of Wis-
consin Press, 2005).
19. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
(St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004), 23. Hereafter
cited as Lonely.
20. Evie Shockley, a half-red sea (Durham, NC:
Carolina Wren Press), 2006.
21. Dionne Brand, Inventory (Toronto, ON:
McClelland & Stewart, 2006).
 22. Macharia, “Microaggressions,” https://
gukira.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/
microaggressions/.
23. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and
Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007), 28.
24. “Black Queer Studies, Freedom and Other
Human Possibilities,” in Understanding Blackness
Through Performance: Contemporary Arts and
the Representation of Identity, ed. Anne Crémieux,
Xavier Lemoine, and Jean-Paul Rocchi (New York:
Palgrave, 2013), 144.
25. “The Condition of Black Life is One of
Mourning,” http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/
magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one-of-
mourning.html?_r=0.
26. Walcott, “Black Queer Studies.”
27. Elijah Anderson, The Cosmopolitan
Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2014), 279.
28. Ugly Feelings (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2007), 2. Hereafter cited parenthetically
as UF.
29. Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2012), 67.
30. The Origins of German Tragic Drama, 92.
Hereafter cited parenthetically as OGT.
31. Dawn Lundy Martin, “Negrotizing;
or, How to Write a Black Poem,” in A Gath-
ering of Matter, A Matter of Dawn Lundy
Martin, Gathering (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2007), 11. Hereafter cited par-
enthetically as GM.
32. Discipline (Callicoon, NY: Nightboat Books,
2011), 21, 47. Hereafter cited parenthetically as D.
33. Erica Hunt, “All About You,” https://
lareviewofbooks.org/article/all-about-you/.
34. Citizen: An American Lyric (St. Paul, MN:
Graywolf Press, 2015), 151. Hereafter cited
as C.

Anthony Reed is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Yale University. His
essays interrogate connections between aesthetics and politics in African American and African dia-
spora culture. He recently published Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental
Writing (Johns Hopkins, 2014), and is currently writing about the recorded collaborations between
poets and musicians.

Anthony Reed 37