neckbone: visual verses

"Terrance Hayes told me about neckbone . I asked a bunch of people ‘What was your favorite book this year? What comes to mind?’ and Terrance said neckbone , and I thought, ‘I’ve never heard of this!’ I’m not surprised, because it’s an excellent book. He also published a terrific book with Wave last year, To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight (2018). That’s another critical memoir in a similar vein to Kunin’s Love Three . It was gorgeous. Avery Young’s neckbone was great; Benjamin Krusling’s I have too much to hide (which is forthcoming) is excellent. Stephanie Young’s Pet Sounds , which is a book that’s really engaged with popular music, was terrific—it’s one of the books that made me smile this year. And lastly, this anthology that came out this year, Letters to the Future: Black Women, Radical Writing , was really terrific and the first of its kind. (Full disclosure, I have a poem in it.) There are many writers who really are unknown to most people in this book. It’s edited by Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin, who are well known to people who follow contemporary American poetry. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Letters to the Future ’s got a little bit of everything in it. I’m just going to read you some of the folks who appear in here: Octavia Butler, Betsy Fagin, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Robin Coste Lewis, Lillian Yvonne Bertram, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, r. erica doyle, Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, Duriel E. Harris, Harryette Mullen, giovanni singleton, Evie Shockley, Khadijah Queen, Wendy S. Walters, Adrian Piper, Yona Harvey, Harmony Holiday, Tracie Morris, Claudia Rankine, Deborah Richards, Metta Sáma, Kara Walker, Renee Gladman, Tonya Foster, Julie Patton, Akilah Oliver . . . and the poems of the editors, too! I just love that. I think Ben Krusling’s digital book I have too much to hide is on the cutting edge of what poetry is going to do the next 10 years. Young poets who might not have yet published their first books are thinking about art and performance in a way that is unwilling to separate the two. (Asiya Wadud and Okwui Okpokwasil’s book is one example of this. Although it’s pretty contextually confined, I think performances of the work would make clear what this connection is or can be.) “We’re going to see more and more multimedia poetry” We’re going to see more and more multimedia poetry, and I don’t mean ‘multimedia’ like ‘Oh, there’s also a video.’ I mean people who are thinking deeply about the connections between what the generative nature of language is, what poetry does in terms of its rearrangement and re-constitutive properties, and how other arts (visual and digital) and other institutions (like the art world) will affect the capacity of poetry to know itself. What is the technology of poetry today, especially institutional technology? Benjamin Krusling’s work is an important harbinger of what is coming. The same is true of neckbone . You look at it and think, this is a book that primarily deals in black vernacular. But does it? It’s so deeply fixed in a visual tradition that it really troubles the connection between orality and visuality. It asks those questions directly: what’s the connection between hearing and seeing? When you hear a black person speak, does it also mean you can see them? It’s introduced by Theaster Gates, who works out of Chicago. He’s a major public artist who comes from architecture. I thought it was interesting that he would make an appearance as an endorser of this book. It’s also another one that made me laugh—it has jokes and it’s very funny; one of its epigraphs is a Richard Pryor quote. Poetry for me is not about orthodoxy; it’s not about meeting people’s expectations. What poets today who I think are interesting are doing is raising questions about why poetry continues to be relevant to us. What is it that poetry does that we cannot do without as a society? Socially and intellectually, what does it do for us that cannot be done in other places? That’s where the action is in poetry. For me, I’m a poet, I’m not a literary critic and I don’t run a magazine. So in a way, whether people read the poetry is secondary to me. It has always been the case, at least in the United States, that poetry does not have a large readership. “Poetry for me is not about orthodoxy; it’s not about meeting people’s expectations” When you ask why it’s slow to catch on—it’s because it’s art. It’s hard to challenge anyone’s expectations about anything. And I don’t mean because the language is difficult; like I said, sometimes it’s super simple. I can open any of these books and find words that are not hard to understand. What’s difficult is related to the actual experience of what difficulty is. It is not affirming the ease that ideology tells us life ought to be: it’s what life really is. For me, I don’t think of myself in a conceptual camp at all. I don’t think of myself as interested in testing people’s capacity to bear the presentation. I actually want people to bear the presentation so that we can have a conversation about it. I want people to be able to engage with the works as emotionally as I do. These things make me cry; they make me laugh; they make me want to throw the book across the room. Those are the experiences of reading I want to convey to everybody else. It’s not, ‘Oh, it’s obscure’; this actually looks like the texture of real life to me. And encountering anyone’s mind is so rewarding. The thing about a book like Civil Bound that’s so terrific is that you are obviously in the presence of someone whose imagination is singular. When I sat down to read it for the first time, I could hear Myung’s voice speaking the words of the poem to me. I thought, ‘This is a voice I would like to know more about.’ I realize it’s my professional job to read poems and to help other people understand why they should. But I’ve taught poetry both to people who are in remedial composition classes and also graduate students, and those people do not have different experiences of the poem. Everybody is able to reach into the poem emotionally and to understand the words. And that’s all there is."