On Spec
Tyrone Williams
Omnidawn Publishing, 2008
$14.95
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Fuse People
In the introduction to Blues People, Amiri Baraka identifies the acquisition of English as "one beginning of the Negro's conscious appearance on the American scene" (xii). Linguistic based formations of identity, such as Baraka's, provide one linage for the excess of speculation Tyrone Williams embodies in his most recent book, On Spec. It is no surprise that Williams' latest effort - a recovery of historical African American outsiders like Thomas Green Bethune, Thomas Fuller and Sam "Boonie" Walton - occasions Baraka's mapping of blues ontology. However, if a serviceable comparison is to made it lies less in the racially relevant findings that both men bring to the table and more in the pressurized negotiation they stamp upon their respective expressions. Baraka - caught between two conflicting histories: white intellectualism and the origins of American Black culture - envisions the moment when the slave decided America was "important enough" to be passed on in some kind of hyphenated language. In so doing, he becomes the dialogic "man [from his own introduction] who looked up in some anonymous field and shouted, 'Oh, Ahm tired a dis mess, / Oh, yes, Ahm so tired a dis mess'" (xii). Likewise, Williams enacts - by way of indefinite embeddings, non-recoverable deletions and ellipses - the incongruity of post-structural literary theory and the vernacular history of black speaking subjects.
The object, then, for the reader of a Williams' poem is to face this incongruity, without underestimating the importance of its departure. These are not strict observations on racial and ethnic identity; rather, their observations on racial and ethnic identity are not confined to their content. From poems that engage the doublespeak of mathematics, eugenics and professional sports, Williams concentrates on prosodic possibilities, abolishing the knee-jerk pedagogy of What is this poem about? His title forecasts as much, privileging inclusive speculation over foregone conclusion and pure aesthetism. In the poem "Other Wards at the Hospice," Williams references his penchant for redirecting grammatical assumptions of the definite: "standards at an angle" (113). And, through ludic embellishments, he renews the disquieting state of our union, felling the court system in "Is He Still Black Qua Charged;" the school system in "No Child: The Blockbuster Success of Left Behind;" and capital hill in "Chabotcropping."
His is a poetics of approach - as in setting out on an approach but also as in an approaching storm. In "Outsourced Corrections Facility" the poet affirms as much. Rooting his utterance in a history as it unfolds, Williams recites "the alphabet in media, in res" (36). Subsequently, the entire collection wavers between well-wrought approach and the approach of an outlying, unconscious system of signification.
The book's opening poem, "Written by H'self," speaks to this crossroads between lapidary control and flagrant open association. His "catch-as-catch-can" approach to Eliot, "Individual talent / divides tradition," and Dubois, "into tithes, tenths" (17), destabilizes what he will later call "the old cliché of American history: the individual a part of, and apart from, a community" (63). Rather than become representative of insularity, Williams' experiment questions his own affiliation with the coterie of conceptual poetry.
The signature public
the only avant-garde
behind invention (17)
Williams resists aligning himself strictly inside or outside the avant-garde. He occupies both, qualifying aestheticism with an indictment of the discriminatory history of the avant-garde, while paradoxically putting avant-garde's practicum to use. In the above poem, one might read "behind," not as in the cause of but as in outmoded, i.e. behind the times. Likewise, the word "signature" initiates Williams' book-spanning collaboration with Jaques Derrida. "Signature public," an allusion to the essay "Signature, Event, Context," intimates Derridean considerations of speech as not subordinate to writing. Intellectual currency such as this enriches Williams' heckling of socially constructed notions of illiteracy, endowing it with a sharply honed attack on the sometimes-illiterate advancers of the avant-garde.
Poems like "Incant ®x," "Little x Little," and "Planet X," reinforce signature's pertinence to the dialectic of literate/illiterate. Each attends to those who initial their name with the x's anonymous mark. In "Incant ®x," we see the symbiosis between abject poverty and illiteracy, "there are many crosses in the lean-to" (19). And, in "Planet X," Williams crates the Platonic notion that written speech seems to speak, but only succeeds in repeating itself:
You do -
or can -
or will -
not repeat my selves (111)
"Little x Little" alludes to the autodidactic inmate turned black leader, Malcolm Little, and his eventual substitution of x for a surname. In this, Williams renders one of the text most cogent appellations for illiteracy
...Gated ghettoes:
know from know-how?
Went west (boys to BoyZ)
Mature :: castrati - as reading is to (25)
Surprisingly, On Spec only briefly gestures to Jean Toomer. Perhaps one possible reason may be that Cane constitutes a secret Williams secrets in the open. From dynamic forces that evolve into errata notices, short theatrical scripts and prose block essays, On Spec repossesses Toomer's fusion of poetry, narrative and chant. Intertextuality of this sort is nothing new for Williams. His earlier sonnet sequence, published in c.c., entitled "I Am Not Proud To Be Black," is so admittedly shaped by quotations from the likes of Charles Bernstein, Ralph Dickey and Anne Spencer, that Williams attaches a Works Cited page. Likewise, On Spec becomes the "city of recommended summer reading," which Williams makes mention of in his poem "P.P.S (am)" (118). "Everything," as he states in "Other Wards of the Hospice," "hinges.../ on the necessity of quotation marks" (113). Reminiscent of Susan Howe, Williams' trace invites the reader to discover their own interconnectedness with the library. In facing these other texts, the true difficulty of On Spec begins. Wise to the bibliographic subject/object dilemma, Williams ends his poem "No Contessas" with the lines from Siri Hustvedt's novel The Blindfold, "Every day, I sat in the library, staring at a great work of literature that I could not read. My head was in the way..." (34).
Comprised of page-length prose blocks, the section entitled "Four Dialogues," centralizes this issue of where one's head belongs in relation to both literature and cultural phenomenon. These essays tackle, among other things, the absence of a lead article in Ellison's titling of Invisible Man and Richard Pryor's defamed usage of racial epithets. Beneath each of these paragraphs, Williams strings along a detailed synopsis of Derrida's The Gift of Death. What immediately resonates about this section, besides the passing off of eloquent academic prose as poetry, is the clear applicability of the theoretical considerations to the passages they postscript. And, yet, Williams evades sublimating them, reinforcing On Spec's unconcealed relationship with difficulty. The white space between the two paragraphs compels the reader to view their content as distinct, even as we read William's examination of deconstruction in "Preface 2", "Not-x is incorporated within x. Indeed x could not function as x without not-x" (65). Another effect borrowed from the history of literary theory is the routine appearance of graphs, variables and charts, as exemplified in the works of Freud, Saussure and Lacan. Of all of these, Williams seems most related to Lacan, whose repetitive, nonstandard usage of variables and mathematical figures function as rebus, rather than quantitative formula.
As alluded to in my title, Williams' On Spec - in its intermingling of extracts - might best be viewed as the poet's own personal attempt at canon-making. But, Williams' cannon, a pool of vocal tics, draws more from the anxiety of affluence than influence. Few, if any, contemporary poets rival Williams in his ability to address the enormous tragedy of a dream deferred without breaking the sanctimonious bow: "Moses, Mohammed and Jesus huddle in a smoke-filled room...Finally, after thousands of years, they come to an agreement: a synopsis with an interchangeable title (Bible, Torah, Ou'ran, Terry Schiavo, etc" (59). Just as his poems fuse together MicK Jagger with Jesse Jackson, and Harriet Beecher Stowe with Stephen Sondheim; they also function as that strip of wire that melts and breaks an electric circuit if the current exceeds a safe level. With Williams, we are given an utterance that is not about (to) collapse, nor is it about (to) pick up the pieces; it is a line, a line of thinking, a line of sight, a line of duty. And most of all, it is a time line exploding into "Doo wah doo wah."