The
power of language today has been lost in a fetish. Our post-industrial, globalized
culture that is busy making the entire world into a parking lot has also sold
the word for a dime. Here and there, however, weeds take root in the post-industrial
cement, transform toxicity into chicory-blue, hide pheasants, frame rain in green
and shout a silent "om" skyward. And here and there, amidst the mud, old griot
voices emerge new and wet, wrap tooth around taunt, lip language fresh, and whisper
like the first cry of crow. Spirit has never yet found an easy home in the flesh.
Incarcerated in the "body" of the 10-second commercial, it begins to choke. It
labors to breathe. But given a sensual body to gather in, it can still break open
the wall between the worlds. Indeed, life can breed like infinity in the merest
of cracks between a few spoken words. Listen to a piece entitled "Revelation,"
by Detroit poet Ron Allen:
open
the
head
walk
up
the
neck
look
in
the
cortex
read
the
bones
fly
But of course, you who read this can't "listen." You are not present for the performance. You can only read and imagine, through the medium of dead tree. Yet it is precisely imagination that Allen seeks to open here. Since you cannot hear the tone or see the motion, background and "breakdown" have to go bail for the body.
In fact, Allen is a former drug user and schizophrenic who wrote his way out of a different kind of breakdown 20 years ago and is now a renowned poet-playwright on the arts scene in Motown. More accurately, Allen has not attempted to escape his struggle with his pen, but rather has transfigured "breakdown" into "breakthrough" by doing art on pain. If queried, he equates his writing with his spirituality and talks about both as necessary to becoming "human" in a culture of triviality. In a society dominated by advertising, capable of instantly commodifying every new impulse of creativity and selling political resistance like an "X" on a T-shirt, poetry is prayer. But Allen is very sophisticated in what he means by "poetry."
Poetry taken seriously as spirituality means resistance to the form. Domination takes in the contemporary moment. Not just content is at stake in such a practice, but modality. It is possible to lose the spiritual battle even while speaking against the forces of violence if the form of one's speech itself partakes of violence. In a culture of the sound bite, where political discourse is dominated by trivialized perceptions and complex issues are reduced to comic-book-level reflections, resistance requires a new grammar. It is not enough just to get the content right. The very way one speaks through one's body must itself "break" with convention, if "Spirit" is not going to end up as a Budweiser commercial.
"Rhythm," in this grasp of spirituality, is the first word of creation. It precedes "meaning." It is the womb of meaning. The word of revelation defies repetition. Vision that is vital demands an ever new wineskin. Allen supplies that skin as a "skein" of syncopation. The "thread," the "yarn" of mere narrative -- proceeding prosaically from beginning, through middle, to the end -- is understood as itself suspect. It invites to predictability and routine. It promises the fiction of "control." It is easily taken over by the intention to dominate. Poetry that refuses the clear clichés of narrative, that works at the edge of surreality while remaining close to the passion of the street, can function as antidote. This is exactly what Allen's poetry does. "Listen" again (this time to an excerpt written for a benefit for imprisoned American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier):
The city village of aboriginal
angst
The repressed fervor of exploded poetry
Blue black steel rhythms exploding funk
Absolute, absolute funk of blood
The blood of the struggle
Frozen in commerce
The mission of a transformed people
Bleeding poems through
The drum ...
... The deep drum drama of tree and soil
Drum speak time walking fist
Like arias and chants
Speak a new blues
A blues of octave drum riot time
change the riot of my nerves
Inside rain cement
and iron fences
The tongue is a bullet
Rippin, lyric media passion time
Speak like guru of kaleidoscope dreams
Round moon time ...
... Aboriginal lookin, for bullets
Lookin, for a new sky
Lookin, for sentences hung in space ...
By putting together images that "normally" are not allowed to dwell together, this kind of poetry incarnates contradiction. But it also "practices" in speech the possibility of something like different cultures dwelling together in the same neighborhood or warring "races" on the same street. It practices -- immediately and spontaneously in a spiritual discipline of the present moment! -- the old dream-vision of the "lamb dwelling with the lion." It does not pretend the world is pretty, but puts harshness and gentleness side-by-side in the same raw incantation. When words are used as much for their sound-effects as for their "pictures" of meaning, the result is new experience, a plumbing of the depths of experience, where it has not yet been colonized by conventional categories. Sight is here crossed with hearing. Words "tense up" in proximity to each other. Complexity is offered as the new "vessel" of identity.
Poetry performers like Allen push their audiences to stop settling for a narrow representation of themselves, in the typical images offered by commercials, and instead invite them to descend into the depths of their psyches and bodies where paradox lies. Schizophrenia, in this pilgrimage, becomes a matter of inhabiting parallel universes, of embodying multiple ways of being human. Rather than being banished as "disease," it becomes the dangerous ground of a transcendence that all human beings stand close to and are called to honor.
In traditional cultures, the break that modernity labels as "breakdown" was elevated as the sign of spiritual possibility. The community gathered around whoever was being so "disturbed" and provided a cultural idiom and a social intimacy that was poised to receive the "crazy communication" as "spiritual revelation" relevant for the whole community. The "possessed ones" were embraced as dramatizing alternative "possibilities of being" for the sane ones. Spirituality meant leaving "safe form" behind, and venturing into the chaotic waters of creation from which form first emerged.
And interestingly, when thus embraced, "craziness" in fact became craft. What appeared at first blush as aberration was disciplined into re-creation -- of the entire community! Our own "recreation" industry is anything but that. Passive consumption of seductive images hardly re-vitalizes. It rather enervates. It inculcates resignation and atrophy. Real re-creation means re-visiting the primal stuff that predates the management power of control. What is "life"? Where does it come from? Who am I really? Who am I still "becoming"? If these questions ever cease exercising us in wonder or pushing us into innovation and risk-taking, we are already dead. Poetry that throws off the constraints of conventional communication and gives free rein to sound-associations and syncopated, "jazz scat-like" juxtapositions of words, may indeed open one's head to "flying." It becomes the very grammar of transformation. After all, isn't that what spirit does in the flesh? And inevitably such an "up-welling" proliferates.
In recent years, under such untamed influences, I, too, have become a poet. My own homage would be something like this:
preacher preaches flung notes of sun
foot in the grave-thump of dead rising
pelvic ground round world
gyrating limb of fruit
slice the plumb of night
bite the apple
peel the shadow
open the eyeball
climb inside the light and down
idea-root of raised hair
rib-walk of ancestor ta
talking my name
shouting cemeteries of summons
singing europe back to africa
singing america under water
singing me below the ground
singing unrepentant!
this! is the bliss of burn!
But we can say more. This kind of poetry promises not only the "breakthrough" of re-creation, but portends the break-up of oppression. It not only exorcises at the individual level, it "prophesies" politically. In our day, after learning from the likes of Martin King and Mahatma Gandhi, who themselves learned from sibyls like Sojourner Truth and Gauri Ma, prophecy has finally begun to come clear. It is less a matter of clairvoyant "foretelling" than confrontational "forth-telling." The Jewish nabi'im ("prophets") from whom we take the term were gurus gripped by the agony that was relentlessly quarantined at the bottom levels of their society. They were ordinary folk assailed by the unordinary anguish of the poor of their day who did all they could to carry that anguish into the public sphere as a cry of judgment upon the whole body politic. Their voices did not offer coherent narrative, but molten lava. Image tumbled upon image in a tumult of tears and anger and sudden blushes of raging affection. The Spirit that possessed them did not bother with beginnings and ends when the little ones were being raped continuously, but leapt straight into the middle of a hot verb.
In the history of violence that is our history, the tremor that is the ghost of spirit in the flesh is first of all a broken torrent, a meaning bent in two, a force of groaning, a cry full of night and blood and the tremors of too much feeling locked up in too small a space. Its first word is necessarily poetry, not story.
Poetry in its most ardent attempts to give expression to what has not yet been clearly "experienced" is poetry in the mode of prophecy. Offered as an uncertain probe of one's humanity rather than a "nice" effort to sound "beautiful," it leaves behind both clarity and security. Instead, it opts to explore what is still so fresh and "bloody" it may appear as "ugly." In such a moment, poetry serves the "underground" agenda of the community, the unfinished business, the needs that have not yet been met, the freedoms that have not yet been given flesh to live in. Here, poetry -- along with other art forms and mysticism and shamanism and interestingly enough, in our time, science fiction -- represents a first attempt to articulate the future. The drive of human beings to "speak" themselves into being, to make meaning out of longing, to shape aspiration into satisfaction, to transform pain into a power to change, is primordial. It also gives rise to "tomorrow." Poetry that is willing to break open the conventions and codes of the present for the sake of what has not yet been "birthed" in speech or gestured in a body, is augury. It is pointing toward the aching frontier from whence hope arises and toward which responsibility acts. In this function, poetry is pronouncing a pox on all of our compromises with injustice and saying, in effect, "You have not yet emerged as a full human being. As long as any person anywhere is still suffering unjustly, all meaning everywhere, all sense of yourself as living a coherent life in a secure narrative is false. Your narrative is not yet big enough. You must try to speak what still hasn't been said. You are not yet you. Say more! Say it more deeply! Speak your word with a greater body, with a more complex resonance, with more rhythmic room in it for the 'other' impulses -- all the other words and desires and persons and communities and cultural codes of meaning and vibrations of Life -- that are still trying to become 'you'! The real you has not yet found a home in language. Break the bread of speech open and give yourself away in new fragments of experimental meaning, that awaken new soundings of truth in those who are still locked away in prison. You will discover it is not just 'them' you are freeing, but yourself. Truth is a polyrhythm that is still trying to happen in history. And 'everything' is what it is saying. And 'god' is who is speaking."
Detroiter Jim Perkinson teaches courses on world religions, African diaspora philosophy, liberation theology, colonialism and racism, death and dying, and social ethics through a joint appointment at Marygrove College and Ecumenical Theological Seminary. He is also a performance poet who regularly reads around the city.