In the period immediately following spectacular violence, a poem will often go viral on social media. It makes sense that poetry might offer a way out from that space of unrepresentable trauma—a path back to a social form where the true work of redress can take place. Sometimes, though, the turn to poetry feels both embarrassing and dangerous, like a child with a plastic stethoscope trying to treat a woman with a real heart attack. “A poem is not burning down a police station,” the poet Wendy Xu says. “Burning down a police station is burning down a police station.” A poem can point toward other modes of action without the pretense of standing in for those other modes. But on social media—and in the late capitalist economies it metonymizes—where circulation is itself a form of capital, a rallying cry can be alchemized into a narcotic.
Momtaza Mehri’s “A TABLEAU OF ASPIRATION OR FRANKLIN SITTING ON THE SOLITARY GARDEN DECK CHAIR IN 1973’s A CHARLIE BROWN THANKSGIVING” contests these necrophilic representational economies, indicting the Black poets who profit from Black death and the white poets who allocate those profits. Mehri’s poem—which includes lines taken from “Mosaic Harlem” by Henry Dumas, a writer active in the Black Power movement who was murdered by a New York City transit police officer in 1968—does not depict the dead; rather, the dead animate Mehri’s poem. “A TABLEAU OF ASPIRATION” practices inclusion not in the liberal sense of optical adornment in lieu of structural transformation, but as a haunting, an agitation. Mehri doesn’t cede poetry to the performance of “narcoticized rage” in the face of Black death. At the poem’s end, a jarring conflation casts poetry as an open question, a terrain of struggle—unlocatable according to the coordinates of liberal power.
—Claire Schwartz
A TABLEAU OF ASPIRATION OR FRANKLIN SITTING ON THE SOLITARY GARDEN DECK CHAIR IN 1973’s A CHARLIE BROWN THANKSGIVING
black poets strain around table / not any table / the Table
the table in the head / the table in the courtyard
all flat expanse / natural oak blend / baby / the whole nine yards
finest linen / unfurls / a lolling tongue
all nine lives needed / to survive this napkined jurisdiction / of personalized
cutlery / there aren’t enough chairs / this is expected
maybe even desired / black poets dip / long / stainless / spoons
into anadalusian gazpacho / grief is as elegant
as soup stains / blotting the sanctity of cloth / & canon
palette cleanser for the dulled soul / narcotized rage
is all the rage / eat / enumerate / black poets are sick
of watching black people die on glitchy screens
are sick of being reminded / of all the ways / we are not
the black people dying on glitchy screens
are sicker still / of pretending not to know the difference / dumas begs
to differ / what news from the black bastille?
reporting from the trenches / to the warmongers / yes sir / yes sir
what news from the bottom? / three bags full
pretence keeps fridges well-stocked / the landlord’s incoming
messages / at a minimum / black poets want
bigger tables / this is the bare minimum / want more / seats
plusher cushions / we deserve snuff films
with better resolution / we say / the dining room is a swamp
of monomania / leaving the room / is never an option
when the room is in your head / you can never leave / court moth-balled
microclimates of microaggressions / lament
narrow hallways / laugh at bad jokes / mourn choices made
even as we repeat them / we are who
we break bread with / we are who we break ourselves for
jaws unhinge at the feet of luminaries / collect
whatever / left / whatever / falls from / tables / of renowned / award-winning
cowardice / look up to get the chance
to look down / black poets cannot convince ourselves / cannot forgive
ourselves / for what we are about to do
become sloppy / ancestral ventriloquists / trained provocateurs
please understand / black poets are big fans
of rights given / of frothy righteousness / of rewriting faithless accounts
of who we are / of what we can be
gaseous / with impotent fury / we flail upwards / don’t ask us
for better excuses / we are hungry too
for what / we are undecided / meanwhile / the white poets
have finally discovered / they are white
throw petaled confetti / jobs / second chances / at black poets
who remind them / that they are white
that they / too / are gorgeous martyrs / outside / other black poets flee
bright lights / receive no invitations / corner
stop / stoop / black poets of dubious allegiances / spree
converge / into shattered mist / welcome dissolution
show out / show us up / what news from the bureau?
for once / no one cares / about our place settings
the virtues of irrelevance / are lost on us / our dreams too slight
for those black poets who want / no part of this
want every part / of everything / want more than heaving
tables / than well-paid contortion / powdered
paranoia / hallowed hall / hallucinations / we envy
this vox populi / of unlit alleyways / their captive audiences
of chattering millions / even their enemies are worthier / than ours
chalk fades / dividing lines / redrawn
hot summers clarify / which black poets survive poetry
& which write it /
Momtaza Mehri is a poet and independent researcher. Her latest pamphlet is Doing the Most with the Least, published by Goldsmiths Press.
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