Glossa after Amiri Baraka
Adonis Isaac Huff
“Poems are bullshit unless they are
teeth or trees or lemons piled
on a step. Or black ladies dying
of men leaving nickel hearts,
beating them down.”
- Black Art, Amiri Baraka
In his 1963 play Dutchman, Baraka writes of this:
young middle-class Black man caught,
psychosocial vice of racial terror. Administering:
a terribly stylish & entitled white woman of ill-intent.
In his penultimate monologue, our beleaguered hero
denotes the insanity at the heart
of all Black Art: songs of lovelorn longing pour
from Bessie’s throat because she cannot cut yours.
Poems are bullshit / we should just kill you.
To craft is to dull the knife’s point.
Yet the blade still lands in his gut, not hers.
Young woman’s flaxen wrist flexes
Lily-white flash flippant as ever.
Surrounding train car empties & sways,
Vestigial eyes flittering away from his blood;
it is useless to them. Splintering, wasted life
& times of the young Black intellectual:
Vengeances sublimated, accumulate like
teeth or trees or lemons piled / on a step.
His body disposed of / her scene resets itself:
Banal grotesque, another Black man sits next to her.
Remembered pains slide against windowpane
through mind. Echoes of songs for
Bushwick gentry dollhouses. Why bother
explaining Hell to one who only understands
Luxury? Black widowed open-mouthed wailing
mothers wading willow weed, the sound
Or Black ladies dying.
Nickel-hearts of men already turned to stone.
Colossus of a credit to the race. No credit earned
For open-palmed patience while wooden
stake bites captive flesh. No credit earned for
Unruly tongues clipped or fists unloosed slack
Black on both sides. No credit earned for
retrograde world-making Motherfuck abyss
of bullshit words, open air slave-market poetics.
No credits earned for harsh-noise stylings of local
subcultural House Negro. Sub-bass abolishes all sense
Of time, history, beating us down.
INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR
(1) What diasporas do you write into, and what diasporas do you write to create?
I write towards a poetic continuity of a Black diaspora-in-exile linked through time—surviving dispossession, discarded, and disoriented by the historical forces of white supremacist statecraft. Poems are immaterial, of course, but I believe in poetic craft as a tool, a spiritual technology that can help sustain the living transnational struggle for Black and Indigenous liberation, as our beloved dead walk alongside us.
(2) Where does this piece land within the greater history, body, and/or evolution of your work?
“Glossa…” is largely inspired by Amiri Baraka’s transitional period writings from 1963-1965. A lucid reflection of his intellectual, personal, and political evolution, responding directly to his work from this period provided me with profound creative insight in regards to contextualizing my own artistic practice within a greater Black literary and political tradition. To quote Baraka, "What is the artist's job? To make war. The artist's job is unrelenting war on evil."
(3) How do "xenolithic edges” show up in your piece?
I'd argue that the ‘xenolithic edge’ of this piece—through its stark language and fragmentary structure—is its display of the underlying strata of ‘impersonal’ violence that forms the bedrock of social relations between a white consumptive public and a captive Black artistic subjectivity. The tone and contours of the poem's voice are formed by the ensuing tensions that occur from within and without that gaze, the throes of a Black subject's objection to being rendered into unfeeling flesh, forever resisting the concretization of History.
ADONIS ISAAC HUFF IS AN ARTIST, POET, & NOISE MUSICIAN FROM NEW YORK CITY.