Nobody Here But Us Ghosts

Over the last two decades, Douglas Kearney has cut an inimitable profile in American poetry, both on the page and on the stage. His typographically dynamic poems have the rambunctious exactitude of a lightning strike, while his kinetic performance is like that percussive thunder that brings the boom for real and leaves you measuring out your life in one-Mississippis. This spring, a new volume by Kearney, Sho (Wave Books, 2021), and a new LP, Fodder (Fonograf Editions, 2021), arrive almost simultaneously, with the blast of a door thrown open by a clap of wind in the night—nobody’s out there except everybody, a wash of past, present, and future ghosts coaxing, harmonizing, joking, ventriloquizing, pleading, litanizing, improvising, mourning, cursing, groaning, showing off, praying, laughing, and, especially, singing, all through the stormy weather of history’s dark and stormy night.

This volatile chorus calls to mind Louis Jordan’s 1946 refrain “Ain’t nobody here but us chickens / ain’t nobody here at all / ain’t nobody here but us”—a triple negative in which Black humanity is the B-side of racist caricature, Black audibility the B-side of racist erasure, and Black affirmation the B-side of racist negation. In his punning, fugacious, lit-up, synaptic work, Kearney constantly spins this complex record and flips the script. But he doesn’t pretend to know—or grant his audience the false comfort of knowing—when or if history’s script will stop flipping, and, if so, which side will be up.

Sho is Kearney’s seventh book, while Fodder, recorded live in Portland, Oregon, in 2019, is a collaboration with Haitian Afro-electronica composer and polymath Val Jeanty. Together, these works manifest Kearney’s vexed and ecstatic engagement with the complexities of Black performance, whether on the street, on the page, on the stage, or in various states of spectral and disembodied media. Sho and Fodder remind us that audial technology was developed in the last three centuries for reasons utilitarian and extractive (to capture, play back, disseminate, and monetize sound), as well as occult and sentimental (to reanimate the past as present, pull off hoaxes, contact the dead). A live performance record such as Fodder has the further multiplier effect of disembodying the audience, who hover around this recording at once past, present, and future, identical and nonidentical to their once-and-future selves, a ghost-audience for a shoal of ghosts.

The inter-ecology of Sho and Fodder is critical for another important reason: Sho is a distinct and, frankly, alarming departure from Kearney’s books heretofore, in that it eschews the intensively worked, expressively typographical style that has characterized his publications to date. Since his debut Fear, Some (2006), Kearney has dazzled and disarmed readers with work in which the visual conventions of poetry vie with the typographies of advertising, liner notes, wanted posters, contractual fine print, tax forms, bible commentaries, and protest placards to cacophonously occupy and over-animate the page. Kearney has called this visual design “eye weather”—“100% black type under 100% black type,” coming at you live from 360 radical degrees, over and over again. Eye weather carries visual influences from Marinetti to Glenn Ligon to over-Xeroxed concert fliers and missing person bulletins disintegrating in the rain. In this sense, eye weather both represents Kearney’s vision and reflects the plurality of his readers, as well as a pluralized version of time. Kearney suggests that eye weather registers simultaneity, repetitions, and “agains.” This model of nonlinear, fungible, collective hyper-time is also de-hierarchized and participatory. In an essay in his indispensable Mess and Mess and (2015), Kearney writes:

I’d argue that the reader’s optical speakerbox is actually better equipped to mentally “sound” out such a poem than the poet can manage in live performance because of the pervasive simultaneity. The mind can process the Eye Weather as a kind of noise pattern, a static hissing through the poem, and then, with a kind of rack focus, draw its sense to the fore in juxtaposition with the overlapping/overlapped text. The solo voice and body of the performer makes such audience agency more difficult.

Eye weather, like world weather, is complex. It challenges the reader to move synesthetically between sight and sound, to use a paradoxically synesthetic “optical speakerbox” to “sound out” a textually playful poem. When I encounter Kearney’s eye weather, I feel less like I’m reading it than hovering above it, forming a conjoined dissonant climate, generating all sorts of special sonic and semantic effects. I’ve attended Kearney’s performances several times, and have even read with him. It’s true what he says: his own charisma in performing these works can be a kind of lightning rod that organizes the storm. But that’s not the whole story because, when Kearney performs, so many tones and registers and likenesses and counter-voices are simultaneously summoned and dismissed that the performance propagates its own ballistic, relentless, sonic “mess.”

But with Sho shorn of its eye weather and presenting its poems with something mostly compliant with typographical convention (with a few crucial departures, of which more soon), Fodder ends up being the host body for that ravening and radiant storm. The record is a continuously reanimated present tense of performance that both emanates from the past and deploys an array of uncapturable futures. Kearney’s distinctive visual style can be seen on the album sleeve and on the insert, a poster of Kearney’s eye-weather poem “That Loud-Assed Colored Silence: SCAT,” from his excellent collection Buck Studies (2016). Physically speaking, Fodder is also a delicate, anachronistic, and somewhat anxietous object for those of us not used to trafficking in physical records anymore. It feels like a ritualistic conveyance, not black but transparent, a pane to let the light pass through—or the ghosts.

To listen to a recording of a live performance is to be disoriented. One cannot use cues such as houselights or seating arrangements or one’s own anonymity in a crowd to locate oneself in the power structure of the event. Yet, even so, power structures do not dissolve; they are carried over on the terms the performer has activated. Listening to Fodder, I found myself “captivated” by Kearney, then felt this dead metaphor uneasily enlivened by Kearney’s performance, which persistently conjures the specter of racist captivity, its negations and inversions. In Kearney’s opening patter, a strategic “stammer” that delays the extractive expectations of a paying crowd, he presents the audience with a friendly quandary: how should he, an artist of color, introduce innovation in a space that implies entertainment? He announces that he will call upon the age-old strategy by which artists of color disguise works of innovation as entertainment, as “brand new dances.” He then twists the figure one more time, reasoning that members of the Black diaspora were once themselves the new and novel products being introduced to the market.

Having evoked centuries of Black captivity, both via enslavement and its legacies in racial capitalism, Kearney then launches into his opening performance, a “brand new dance” called “Do the Deep Blue Boogie!” His performance itself is radical and elastic, swooping in and out of tonal gesture phrase by hincty phrase, thrashing until it’s subsumed into a rising triple syllable: “sea-ea-ea.” It is impossible not to hear this as an agonized space, doubly saturated by the trauma of the Middle Passage and by the fact that Blackness did and does radiantly survive despite every attempt by anti-Blackness to kill it. As this refrain of sea-ea-ea repeats, the sea is crooned to and through, appealed to and through; the sea is oblivion, it is relentless, it is restless. It might be best to drown in it, or to go underground. But the tide may also turn; there may be no choice but to rise. Meanwhile, Jeanty’s co-composition complicates the tones of the vocal performance, counterpointing Kearney’s jaggedness and tenderness with a reef of tinkling grace notes. Even Kearney’s breath, and something that sounds like the audience’s nervous laughter, are gathered into this tonic, ductile composition.

The push of Fodder as a whole, in which Kearney’s vocalized eye weather meets the lustrous, fibrous tensility of Jeanty’s oceanic assemblage, invokes a counter-storm that propagates itself in the wake of chattel slavery and within the “total climate of antiblackness,” to borrow a phrase from the theorist Christina Sharpe. This counter-storm feels inexhaustible. Subsequent tracks entail different strategies, mobilizing the eye weather of Kearney’s “That Loud-Ass Colored Silence” series into an almost impossibly abundant arsenal of slangy, sing-y, moan-y, rap-y, supercharged vocal gestures while historicizing and mobilizing a counter-articulation of grunts, moans, and scat.

Three tracks from Fodder—“sho,” “Manesology,” and “Eulogy for an Afropick”—are also included in Sho. On the page, “Eulogy for an Afropick” begins as a playful yet constrained litany that riffs on accessories, brands, supplies, lingos, and names associated with Black hairstyles:

is over my Billie is over my Dee
is over my locs is over my Bantu Knots
is over my corn is over my row
is over my Let’s is over my Jam
is over my Just is over my For Me
is over my Quo is over my Vadis
is over my Caez is over my freeze
is over my Indian over in me

As text, the riffing is so resourceful and flexible, the allusion to the formal wordplay of Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002) so direct, that one can almost miss the epigraph from Q-tip: “Don’t hit me in the head.” But this epigraph sounds out where the poem is going: by its end, the syncopated structure of the litany beats back against the line as the beat-down breaks the poem’s Black life apart: “my beautiful black o it’s over o head / no over it’s over don’t o no it’s over / my hair no it’s over—"

In performance, this readerly progress is short-circuited and intensified; it is not the riffing in the second half of the phrases but the continual repetition of “over” that rises in pitch and volume, supercharging the single word with tonal saturation, with complaint, with the refusal to comply, with the cosmic scope of total grief accompanied by Jeanty’s laser beam or videogame-like percussion. The em dash that ends the textual poem indicates fatality, but the recorded track ends even more shockingly, seeming to conclude on the shallowest possible intake of breath. The brevity of this breath is devastating as a gesture toward the life extracted from Black people over the past five centuries, but it also seems (im)possibly capacious in its reference to Black-breath-as-Black-life, -Black-speech, and -Black-singing, the crux at which Kearney’s universe is continually reborn. This barely audible inhalation might be the last breath—but it might be the next.

Similarly, the 24 intricately braided tercets of the text version of the poem “Sho,” with its 12 cycling end-words, are melted down on Fodder into dazzling repetitions and phrasal gestures, an avid echolocation of crossing, harmonizing, synching, and dissonant wave forms. It is on this track, as well as the final track, “I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always,” that Jeanty’s microcosmic compositions fractal outward from Kearney’s vocals, opening cosmic, Afrofuturist dimensions, harnessing the totality of past and future sonic events to stage a horizon of syncopated arrivals and departures. As “Sho” concludes,

I, on that bloody
rise of sweet Body;
there you is, too. Sweat
 
it, let’s. They clap— “Rig
ht?” some ask, post. Spit
tile-lipped: I said: “Sho.”

This ending performs a circular torsion, as this muscular, monumental poem twists around to its title to begin again. This sinuous form enacts the ambivalence of Black embodiment in Kearney’s work, rising and falling, pivoting between exploitation and intimacy, resistant to performing as a Body for a “they,” desirous of being a Body with a “you.” The final syllable, Sho, echoes the serial yes that ends Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the close of Ulysses, but Kearney’s poem tonally torques Molly’s feminine commitment to blooming. In “Sho,” and in Sho, the “show” of performing the Black body feels compulsory. It must go on.

On the other hand, the ambivalent harnessing of opposites in this poem calls to mind the closing of that great epic of Négritude, Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land (1939), in which rising and falling become inseparable, inertia and momentum form a continuous roundelay, and the entire twisting motion of the poem proposes a subversive and sublime engine of Blackness that can both end the world and start it over again.

The intricate visual circuitry of the textual version of “Sho” confirms that, even without his signature typography, Kearney’s poetry is visually alert and alight. The tercet form with its score-like measure and its hyper-punctuation of colons, em dashes, and line breaks creates a visual music only the eye can “sound.” Sho is awash in sonics, especially portmanteaux, homophonics, and punning, which, Kearney has held, entail a “double-jointed literacy.” These double-jointed sonics also double the tones of the poems, loading one gesture inside another and flooding the whole affair with the bristling tides of what Kearney calls, in the second section of the book, “A Negrocious Show of Feels.” The neologism Negrocious seems to evoke the white supremacist logic that renders Blackness hyper-visible and “atrocious,” yet this section gathers some of the tenderest and most intimate work in the volume. That’s the double rub of Kearney’s work, attuned both to the mandatory visibility and erasure, the scripting and silence, of Blackness under white supremacy, while at the same time sustained by the persistence of Black abundance in the wake. Sho may operate at a relatively low visual volume compared to Kearney’s previous books, but circuited to Fodder, it smuggles sound into text, resistance into compliance, opening all its assonantal “Os” like so many ghost-mouths, breathing in, warning, mourning, laughing, holding forth, and singing. Because these strategies are by nature fugitive, no one medium, form, book, or text can hold the whole of them. In this sense, Sho and Fodder form not just a fortuitous but an entirely necessary and uncanny double-body—audible, tactile, stormy, oceanic, profound.