By Richard Hamilton
Phenomenology happens along a continuum at the crossroad between chaos and the cosmos. By one account, it is characterized as “the structure of various types of experience,” a first-person engagement with “perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, and desire.” It is tied to the concept of free will, “embodied action, social, and linguistic activity.” To feeling subjects, today’s trauma is held by memory and the often-inescapable embodiment that winks aware at us vis-à-vis an excess, capital’s doodads, the blinding light of dangling gold carrots, shiny baubles, and screen-lit gizmos, as the world heats up at breakneck speed. The lyric poem becomes its own vehicle and quagmire, as we amble about linguistically in search of appropriate forms to express our truths, our grief. If I can enlist the cliché, what does it mean to be stuck between a rock and hard place? How, as poets, do we deal with the icky and often deplorable spill that is war, its aftermath, both private and public, the booby trap that is race and gender and sex, representation, or, dare I say, those seemingly “safe” hiding places?
I am green all over. Reading Object 7 ( ,a spirit loosely, ,bundled in a frame, ), Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough’s latest book of poetry, a life, the lives of young black men, mortal human lives bearing art as weapon and witness, as anti-witness, as trenchant dispatch from the great VOID, are exhumed. They are dug up because inevitably they have been buried, as one writer noted, “deep beneath the surface of American life.” Readers soon learn that “The Future of a Yung Man (black, 23 yrs old)” has been cancelled, made “(0) [NULL],” as the title states. Black is identified, if only parenthetically, perhaps to suggest that the infamous color line coined by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk is but one tightrope the speaker traverses. What follows is a narration in third-person, diaristic in its blunt confessions about personal disillusionment at being back on the plantation, at his parent’s place, located in a comfortingly disturbing suburb of Richmond, VA. At the root of it all is the existential. This quandary would not be unheard of. A recent study has it that, due to a housing affordability crisis, approximately twenty-five million young adults under the age of thirty-five are living at home with their parents. The irony of the speaker listening to early morning episodes of Home & Garden is both sad and starkly ominous. In the poem “(0) [NULL],” the speaker is obsessed with the notion of what it means to be alive in an environment marked by “shiny appliances and material comforts” amid “the vulgarity of the quotidian” all while grappling with an encroaching sense of dread.
This impending sense of worry is best dealt with in the context of the speaker’s profane rituals. He writes: “I sink into feeling / before a monument to ‘the practice of Life,’ / performing the profane ritual /relativizing Time w/ a sacrifice of my own manufacture.” Often conducted outdoors, the speaker upcycles found objects as props in a host of rites. We turn to magic as the speaker in Object 7 does repeatedly. The book opens with a near-courtly announcement of a by-gone era: “BEHOLD // Take part in the Great Work.” Winding “through a quiet wood in a private park,” one sees how nature has been co-opted, so that the Romantic-era sublime is singed to a commodified landscape where the speaker moves to stave-off depression and “fill-up” the “genial-blank face of The Void.” The title of the poem, this object, this brand—“Jacqueline Tomatencremesuppe Aschenbecher” (aschenbecher means ‘ashtray’ in German)—is repurposed as “The Great & / or Holy urn.” What unfurls in the opening scene is a ceremony (presumably in Germany) at a “picnic table with five wooden folding chairs” all covered in “moss” and “bird droppings.” The ashtray, fished from the garbage, becomes the primordial cosmic egg, the “Ovum Philosophicum,” a container in which “a sensuous being,” having rubbed against eternity, “stores the fruit of his labor towards Being-In.” If you’re overcome by all things base and hedonistic, think again. The speaker invokes all this in service of metamorphosis and self-realization. Life in the speaker’s world, in a reality marked by the detritus of hyper-consumption, is confounding, at best; it rests at the crux of these self-enacted divinations. Prometheus, a kind of Greek-legend Robin Hood, disciplined as he was by Olympus for stealing fire to aid all of humanity, is part of the four ritualistic elements, “the never-ending ember … burned to black.”
In the poem “non-repeatable_moment_19-10-2013.mov FKA talking 2 myself,” The Great Ziggurat of Café Bustelo appears. The speaker moves like a sorcerer, staging a ritual that entails memory of the temple-like Sumerian structure in present-day Iraq; this building whose meaning translates into “house whose foundation creates terror” is incanted at the site of a recycled Café Bustelo can, peppered with the dried, “dandruff-like” petals of an aged sunflower and loose-leaf “tabak” (tobacco). They are enjoined by a “pile of Korean take-out napkins, papa john’s coupons, & an uneaten kinder bueno.” These rites are brilliant. I am reminded of CA Conrad’s Soma(tic) Ritual Workshops. Goldsborough’s rites resemble DIY rituals and mediums to other worlds. Non-repeatable is true to the extent that this entire book is a collection of ritual improvisations. Uneasy with reductionist concepts of representation, the speaker embraces a near-indeterminate description of himself: “black skin german engineering emotive post-hardcore history making event.” “A Kid Called Jimmy,” who happens to be a girl, goes on “a brief safari through The Green Room: a private park” at the top of a hill, where she, along with the speaker, ponder man and the universe through nature’s prism. Jimmy reveres “The Green Room’s imperfection, its inability to provide her with The Ideal Experience©.” To make matters worse, Jimmy’s mom, a philosopher who often drools in her sleep, who “forgets that ppl find it hard 2 ‘keep up w’ the speed @ which” she draws disparate connections, has encouraged Jimmy to gaze upon the night’s “New Moon,” to go “Wander for a bit & absorb,” before reporting back with her findings. I am reminded of the pastorally rich and deeply perturbing poem “Lucy Gray” by Williams Wordsworth, written circa 1799, in that the father issues a directive to Lucy to brave a snowstorm at the height of a day-moon, on behalf of her mother; Lucy, so enamored of nature and spurred on by the moon, leaves but never returns.
Is the concept of impermanence (death) and indeterminacy an apt way to deal with pain and depression, two outcomes of life which we sometimes experience as life among the ill-adjusted? Could magic—what author Alejo Carpentier refers to in The Kingdom of This World as “lo real maravilloso,” the marvelous real—forge a pathway toward self-healing, out of the ruins of despair? The antithesis of naturalism or realism, the marvelous real is germane to life in the Americas among “the lives of people who inscribed their dates on the history of the continent,” complicated “heroes” (many unsung) whose “lives became the stuff of myth”: Ezili Dantor, François Mackandal, Henri Cristophe, Francisco Menéndez. From the struggles waged throughout the Global South, among the oppressed (human and non-human subjects alike), Carpentier reminds us, that the “marvelous” flowed freely from “the unsung riches of reality,” a celebration of the spirit, that when amplified, “leads to a heightened state.” It takes the incredulous, those who do not believe in saints, as one-trick ponies, imposters whose surrealist habit is beholden to vapid wordplay, “nothing more than literary ruse.”
What curative powers have they who don’t believe, asks Carpentier? Goldsborough invokes these divine oracles, which give way to an oppositional poetics. Whether tabernacled on the “ancestral homestead” or “wandering an unknown orbit” down a residential block, readers are forced to contend with eye-opening, speculative pursuits that often defy standard logics, even eschewing standardized English through speech that populates his verse with people and places, voices (often satirical and disembodied) of the likely least heard. In the poem “sth or other,” the speaker proclaims:
i feel the need to get lost in conscious positive rituals as sth seems to be lacking in The Spirit.
Write gooder things n you’ll find the path to happiness.
What follows is a treatise on the difference between happiness and fulfillment. Whether semantics or a highly subjective point-of-view, the speaker associates happiness with court jesters or being viewed as comic-relief. He writes:
being happy will not make you fulfilled
cause after awhile you feel silly
grinning like the village idiot @ passersby.
I just wanna show n prove that I’m Non-Threatening
w/ my teeth & glasses
but idk what to do w/ my face _
I think it is ‘noticeably depressed’
but i’m not sure
idk what I look like most of the time.
What I love about the writing in Object 7 is that while flat language evidences shifts in mood, the speaker does not entirely succumb to the feeling but instead uses these lull moments as catalyst to reflect on the existential cul-de-sac they and so many others find themselves in. In this collection, that rut becomes the source of magic, pushes at and at times sparks the imagination. The speaker finds a way to his “happy” place, using ceremony, in pursuit of the “as-of-yet-unnamed sth,” such that being broke and living at home with his parents, does not break his will. Esteemed poet and UCLA professor Harryette Mullen’s examination of Ntozake Shange’s “Spell #7,” an amazing choreopoem, might be one of the best touchstones when thinking about the reach of Goldsborough’s writing. Mullen argues that Shange offers “protective incantations for people of color,” and, in so doing, “magic might be equated with therapeutic tools that reinforce psychological well-being.”
Undergirded by what Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant refers to as the notion of the right to opacity, Goldsborough demonstrates the grammar of evocative thought striations that are irreducible, peppered with moments of clarity. “Opacity,” Glissant argues in Poetics of Relation, “is that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence.” Some might read Goldsborough’s comma placements and other seemingly erratic uses of punctuation like the underscore, the ampersand, the pilcrow, and the “at” symbol as typographical errors. Their usage is designed to register anxiety, and are in keeping with the book’s content, a spirit that can only be held loosely, if at all. If the poems are to be read as examples of spontaneous omnipotent dictations, then alteration of the “errata” would necessarily interfere with or impede discovery.
Deprivations of the kind this book lays claim to are both materially troublesome but also strangely freeing. Troubling because I think that emotional deprivation, feeling numb, is one outcome of precarity, societal conformity, and the ways we are all socialized to “grow up.” In growing up, many of us, I believe, suffer extreme forms of psychological repression, such that many people squeeze small acts of freedom into their hard-earned vacation hours spent doing perverse (if satiating) things in the allotted time, if they are so lucky. Consider the deeply rich description of the speaker on amphetamines:
pupils constricted to pinpricks of black,
eyes darting from the floor to the ceiling,
along with the rest of my body
eyes are a delicacy in some parts.
mine taste of brown and black hole.
everything brown is actually orange:
ain’t I something else?
The writing lends itself to a more textured phenotypic description, rather than the staid and predictable ways we might be expected to describe ourselves. Not to glorify drug usage, but the speaker, on amphetamines—maybe not unlike those engaged in forms of divination that include the consumption of trace amounts of psychotropic substances like datura or peyote—is surprised by what the hallucination reveals.
Prometheus, Dante, Osiris, Orpheus, Heracles, Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, Detroit Red (Malcolm X), Marcuse, Borges, Kierkegaard, and so many other figures make cameo appearances or are indirectly referenced in this book. This is a poet who wants to return poetry to one of its time-honored roots, philosophy.
How to unpack the potential significance of the number 7? I know little of Dante’s seven circles of Hell. Described as “a prime number in a series of positive integers,” the number 7 is often associated with religion, mythology, the supernatural, and philosophy; it is the astrological number of the 7 classical planets: the Sun, the Moon, Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, and Saturn. To be made an object is to be made something tangible or material; it is also to be objectified, to be made the focus of someone else’s unwanted attention. From The Void comes a speaker that just wants to be viewed as “Non-Threatening.” In alignment with the astral planes, attempting to slip from beneath the yoke of implicit bias and static representations, this collection leaves readers with much to contemplate.
The poems in Object 7 ( ,a spirit loosely, ,bundled in a frame, ) read like coming-of-age, deep space, non-linear narratives because the author (loosely) captures, with a deft hand, the anxieties that many in his generation may feel. Rituals are exit ramps, if you will, ways of dealing with that budding sense of alienation. The last line of the collection is particularly cunning. A face in a sea of faces, “another moment in the creation of eternity,” the speaker is heard mouthing “quotes of a dream 2 a crowd of none.”