National Book Award Poetry Finalist to speak at Black Poetry Day

Oct. 13—PLATTSBURGH — Hear Roger Reeves, Ph.D., a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry for his collection, "Best Barbarian," (W.W. Norton) at Black Poetry Day at SUNY Plattsburgh.

The free event will be held at 7 pm., Monday, Oct. 17, in the Krinovitz Recital Hall located inside Hawkins Hall on campus.

UT PROF

In "Best Barbarian, the Whiting Award — winning poet "probes the apocalypses and raptures of humanity—climate change, anti-Black racism, familial and erotic love, ecstasy and loss."

"There's a poem called 'Rich Black or Best Barbarian,' and in that poem I say, 'you best put on your best barbarian,'" Reeves, an associate professor of poetry in the English Department at the University of Texas, Austin, said.

"What I mean by that is I say that fugitivity is the original human form. There's always this be 'normal, be normal.' I don't think there is any such thing as normalcy in people.

"I actually think that we're constantly sort of aberrations of priors. I think about the blues. I think about jazz, and how we're always riffing off of the form, riffing off the melody, moving away from the melody. That seems to be the standard."

"NOT ACTING RIGHT'

Reeves, 42, thought about Nathaniel Mackey's Andoumboulou, which he writes about in 'Splay Anthem."

'In that book, Mackey talks about how the Andoumboulou were believed to be by the Dogon a sort of first draft of the human," he said.

"I think that we're always kind of drafting the human or drafting this notion of what it means to be a person. We're always in drafts, so there is always revision. That appeals to me as a writer.

"The title, the Best Barbarian, is some ways the barbarian is what the colonizer, the metropole or the oppressor calls those who that won't act right. I think the not acting right is exactly that of freedom. I think that is the way in which the spirit announces other possibilities. So the idea of the 'Best Barbarian' is best put on your best barbarian as in it's best to be as ungovernable as possible."

METAPHOR BUILT

In this poetry collection, Reeves riffs off jazz songs, jazz solos, and the ideas of a jazz solo.

"The first section is 20 poems, and the last section is 20 poems," he said.

"What I imagine is in jazz you have your A section, right, that's your melody. That's the first 20 poems. Then, you have the two longer poems, 'Domestic Violence' and 'Something About John Coltrane, and those to me are two versions of a jazz solo.

"What I mean is when you're taught to play jazz solos or anything you might hear someone say to you, tell a story. Your solo is a story.

"In 'Domestic Violence,' what I'm interested in is telling a story, a narrative poem. A lot folks aren't writing narrative poems these days."

"Something About John Coltrane" is a more avant-garde solo.

"It's like let's take the key changes from the first section, but let's depart in this Ornette Coleman sort of fashion," he said.

"We are moving rhythmically away. We are moving melodically away from the original tune, the original tune that I set up in those first 20 poems. Then, we go back in the last section, and it's like we are returning to that A. That has 20 poems in there, and even formally and thematically, they sort of return."

Formally, there is an incomplete abecedarian in the first section.

"And, there's a completed abecedarian in the last section," he said.

"Grendel comes up in the first section, and then Grendel's mother comes up in the last section. A dead father comes up in the first section, and the dead father comes back.

"In jazz, you can sort of replay the original melody again, and there's been these other ideas introduced. In other other words, you're hearing sounds and rhythms that have been introduced in the solos, and then when we reconvene that melody that we heard before in the last section, right, it sounds different than when we first heard it."

'BOOK INSTRUCTION'

Jazz and jazz solos are metaphors, a design device he learned from Jericho Brown, who won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for "The Tradition" published by Copper Canyon.

"Jericho used to always say, you have to have a metaphor for your book instruction. You have to have way of thinking about its design. I think like when you're making a poem that is craftsmanship. That is building a table.

"When you're talking about the architecture of the book, that is interior designing. That's where does the table fit in the room? Those are two different ways of thinking about aesthetics."

Reeves was looking for a way in which he could construct an architecture that he could really lean into.

"That I really have been thinking about for years that could help me create a really interesting arc or architecture for the book," he said.

"I love jazz, played it, think about it often. I look at it a lot, so I think about its structures, what it does melodically, harmonically, and rhythmically, and I was able to use that to make a book."

PRAYERS/LAYERS

"Best Barbarian" begins with a prayer, a poem in the form of a prayer.

"Prayer was so central to growing up, not only to the Pentecostal Church, but to my family," he said.

"My grandmother prayed a lot, and my mother prayed a lot. What I noticed about prayer is it's improvisational. It's not read out of a book. It's not just written down. It's sort of created in the moment for what the need of the moment is right then.

"I think that influenced my perspective of like what a lyric poem is, what do we need right now in the moment to get us from this moment to the next. To me, that's the sort of risk and the tension in poetry. And, so for me, that comes very much out of the church and seeing people pray for other folks that needed healing or needed something or needed some relief in that moment, and the prayer was the beginning of that relief. Not the answer, but very much the beginning."

In terms of layers, the Bible is a huge text.

"If we're reading about Job, we're thinking about how Job can teach us about us own lives," he said.

"So that sort of moves to my allusion, my reference practice, my exegesis practice, my practice of allusions. These people weren't just like something far off. They were now and present."

His allusions mix with contemporary life because they are ever present.

"In some ways, the struggles that they struggled with, we struggle with," he said.

"We are constantly sort of looking back and looking forward simultaneously.

"I think that's exactly the position of the poem and the lyric, right. If we think about the poem, it's a four-, five thousand-year-old tradition. There's nothing new about writing a poem, but what is new is where we enter into the poem, which is now, and where we enter into the large tradition of making a poem."

LAYERING OF SOUND

Reeves attributes his sensibility from sermons, and his mother, Claudette Reeves, a Sunday School teacher.

"Then in terms of the layering of sound, I think that to me is really interesting because of these poly-rhythms," he said.

"We think of that as Pentecostalism or the Christian church, but that's very African. I think about like house music, right, why that is a secular form of that or even jazz and blues, right, the multiple rhythmic ideas that can happen within one song. So that's where that comes from. I think that layering is actually what we do when we speak. So there's a way in which we're always layering. The poem takes it cue from grammar, takes it cue from conversation."

In this rhythmic and textural layering, Reeves sought to write the blackest book he could write.

"Best Barbarian" riffs off of his reading about Black folks throughout time, and thinking about Black people, and his own experiences.

"When I think about also the cultures that this ranges from, Black people we've been around as long as the lyric has been around," he said.

"There's a way in which I'm trying to reach back to many places because all of those places contribute to where I am right now sitting in Austin, Texas."

'SOMEWHAT LIKE A BIRD'

"After the Funeral," which was originally "One from Another," is a poem in the first section of the book.

"I was originally going to name the book, 'One From Another,' thinking about how one thing comes out of another thing," he said.

"I was somewhat like a bird. If we think about a bird or animal that flies, the animal stitches the realm of sky with realm of the land. Those are two different realms, right.

"There's a way where my father is in the realm of the sky now, the realm of the Ancestors. They are sort of in the middle space, and I'm somewhere between, and my daughter is very much of this earth because she was just born. I feel like there's a way in which I'm the bird in between. I'm both sort of moving skyward toward the ancestral plane and simultaneously of this earth. I felt like that kind of describes the bridge, like I felt very sort of in the middle, kind of like a door."

Reeves starting writing the book as his daughter, Naima, was being born in 2015.

"In 2017, I think I really started in earnest," he said.

"I had another book I had written, but I didn't think it was good enough. The truth of the matter is that I didn't know how to edit that other book. You just write poems because you love poems, and I love being in the process of writing. It's such a beautiful process.

ENSLAVED AND THINKING ABOUT BEAUTY

Reeves' literary self emerged with his musicianship.

"My mother was a choir director as well, so I grew up singing," he said.

"I sang in the choir, playing piano and trumpet. I love music. Always being around music, my mother really getting us to think about music. Music was all around us, and it was how we thought during the day, how to hear key changes, you know pitch. Even though we were Pentecostal, we didn't listen to secular music but we were allowed to listen to classical. In middle school, I played in an orchestra."

As a first grader, Reeves wrote and illustrated poems for birthday gifts.

"I would write little acrostic poems like for Josh or Eric. E is for ... R is for ..., and I would illustrate them," he said.

"As a kid, I would just build things and make things for people. It was just the way it was. I wrote poems. Sometimes, I remember getting up on Sundays, and my mother would be preparing for church and I would write. We lived with my grandmother, and she had this big coffee can full of pens. I would just take a pen out, take a piece of paper and start making poems."

Reeves thinks about Jupiter Hammond (1711-ca. 1806), the first published Black male poet, and George Moses Horton (1798-1883), the first African-American man to publish a book in the South, Horton in tandem — their enslavement, their literary resistance and resilience.

Plattsburgh resident Stan Ransom founded Black Poetry Day to honor Hammon, who was enslaved at Henry Lloyd's estate on Lloyd Neck, Long Island.

"It is an amazing feat to write and be enslaved and be thinking about beauty but also thinking about critique," Reeves said.

"That's the tradition we both come out of, this tradition of writing in the darkest of moments. So I think of Jupiter Hammon, I'm not possible without him."

Email: rcaudell@pressrepublican.com

Twitter@RobinCaudell