Come Bless'd, Go Lost

Few things age more poorly than a culture war discourse. One particularly cringeworthy example dates from the 1990s fervor around the so-called Western canon. In 1994, Charlie Rose interviewed the critic Harold Bloom about The Western Canon, a book in which Bloom buoys the idea of the canon by championing mostly male, mostly English-language writers. Rose asks Bloom whether he saw any value in acknowledging the literary heritage of specific ethnic groups. “I give a great deal of ground on that,” says Bloom, who, upon his death in 2019, ascended to the pantheon of Dead White Males that he so assiduously defended. However, Bloom contends, “It is by no means the best, the strongest, the most interesting writers of such groups who are being studied and exalted.” To elucidate this conundrum for Black writers, Bloom holds up the great (and greatly underrated) poet Jay Wright. “[Wright is] the best African American poet by light years,” according to Bloom, yet the density of his work renders him “too difficult for Afro American specialists to bother with.”

Bloom’s argument—that literary scholarship rooted in identity is concerned with politics, not aesthetics—has been worked over to death. When conservative-leaning intellectuals in the humanities decry wokeness, this is in part what they are getting at. In light of such a dogged misperception, there is something revelatory about John Keene knowing exactly what to do with Jay Wright in Punks: New and Selected Poems (The Song Cave, 2021). As a Black man who reached the pinnacle of success in a historically white institution, Wright’s achievement is really comparable only to that of, say, Hank Aaron in baseball, an analogy that Keene implicitly makes in “Hammering,” (April 18, 1974):

like mercury in his bones,
his heart rocketing into his throat,
his hands trembling so imperceptibly
 
he nearly jimmies the bat into the stands;
and after delivering Downing’s fastball
to the bullpen and the fans
 
explode like 50,000 Roman candles,
Hank begins his run, the cheers filling
the clearing between the walls, above the diamond—
 
first base, second base, third—
his shoulders never so light before, his heavy calves
so supple, the acid of every slight and
 
threat
 
no sweat as he remembers the pitch, his first
swing, this last, best one, these forty-year-old ankles—
home plate!—touching softly, triumphantly down.

The poem, dedicated to Wright, narrates the moment Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s home run record. It seems to suggest that Wright’s accomplishments (MacArthur Fellowship in 1986, Bollingen Prize from Yale University in 2005) are as equally iconoclastic and impressive as Aaron’s (former all-time home run king, RBI leader, top three all-time hits leader). The comparison feels fresh—and also like an inadvertent challenge to traditionalists’ dismissal of Black studies as a slovenly investigation of the self, insofar as the poem draws parallels between seemingly disparate fields to pinpoint a thematic congruence.

That latter point on thematic consistency is a constant throughout Punks. Keene, a MacArthur fellow himself, has written fiction, poetry, and art collaborations and has worked as a literary translator. At 56, he has a lot of writing life left, and the marvel of Punks is compounded by the fact that despite being a Cave Canem fellow and a member of the Dark Room Collective, he is more widely acknowledged for his prose writing, particularly his award-winning fictional works Counternarratives (2015) and Annotations (1995). He has expressed a goal of using narrative to ameliorate the lack of representation in literature while addressing larger ideas of race, class, and sexual orientation. (That is to say, promoting a certain politics of inclusion.) More than any other artistic choices that Keene makes, this focus on narrative distinguishes his current work.

Keene himself is often the subject of these poems. In “Playland,” Punks’ first section, he ricochets between Boston, where he attended Harvard University as an undergraduate, and Chicago (he taught for many years in the English and African American studies department at Northwestern), assessing his life as a Black gay man in two cities notorious for racism. Whether deliberate or not, the similarities between locales, or Keene’s perception of the similarities, blur into a horny malaise with the author bouncing in and out of casual relationships satiated but never truly satisfied. The title of “Western Avenue,” a poem from the first section, refers to a major thoroughfare in both cities, although the connection is made only circuitously via a mention of Colonel Abrams, a musician born in Detroit in 1949 who wound up in New York City singing house music, the electronic dance genre invented in Chicago. The club feeling “new as a gift, alive, dangerous” riddled with “ragged married lives, or the shadows / that only grew rattier in the club’s corners when you drank / too much, or danced too much, or learned that someone else / you liked and hoped to hook up with had passed” is what blends the two locales, yet even in specificity Keene reaches toward universality.

“Lakeview Sojourn,” also from the first section, reflects on the poet’s experiences in Boystown, Chicago’s historically gay neighborhood-within-a-neighborhood. “[L]istening to rappers stretching melodies” (in this case, “Umi Says” by Yasiin Bey, the artist formerly known by the stage name Mos Def) leads Keene to a paradox. He wonders if the lyrics encompass his identity as a gay man but also acknowledges that Boystown “leaves little room for blackness as I live it.” It’s doubtful that “the same tunes / blaring from every doorway” are hip-hop, but his longing causes him to channel Bey’s chorus in an italicized wisp of an exit: “Liberating body and soul will never be easy / I want my people to be free, to be free.” The actual line in Bey’s song is “I want Black people to be free,” though the ambiguity of whom Keene means by “my people” ties the work together.

Keene’s “Angel” poems, a loose quartet in the first section that narrates Keene’s interpretation of the psyches of a few men he has encountered, stand out for their deliberate formalism. “The Angel of Indifference,” a knotty sheet of text, depicts a man Keene met while cruising in the park, who remonstrates him “with each kiss, tipped with / cold disinterest.” The Angel of Desolation, meanwhile, beguiles Keene “by invoking a youth they have never truly let go”; Keene knows “there is something terrible” the man wants to share, but he doesn’t force the issue, merely leaves the man with a simple, austere sentence—“Funny no one notices we are gone”—that counters the density of the previous stanzas while complicating who is actually desolate, Keene or his companion. The Angel of Necessity appears on the PATH train with “gray thickets / braided in a code of knots I intend to ravel.” Keene’s impassioned refrains of “See me, brother,” “Hear me, brother,” “Show me, brother,” and “Feel us, brother” appear every two stanzas like a quickened pulse amid an otherwise expository poem. And the Angel of Improvisation is introduced as a mini choose-your-own adventure, with the words COME, BLESS’D, GO, and LOST surrounding a plus sign, giving readers the choice of which two to pair, with all the attendant implications.

That Keene nestles so many well-developed through lines under this narrative umbrella is remarkable, but this quality isn’t exclusive to the book’s first section. A freewheeling and digressive approach to poetic order is a constant throughout. Sometimes the poems are similar conceptually, as in the “Angel” poems, and sometimes they are not. Sometimes he leans on the rhythmic security of stanzas; at other times he works with proselike blocks of text in which readers must find their bearings wherever the punctuation lands or make do if there isn’t any. Selected works are usually sequenced in a manner that acknowledges poems’ previous appearances in a collection or that situates poems in chronological order. But with the exception of “Trees,” a series of collaborative lyrics with the late poet Cynthia Gray that appear here in toto, Keene isn’t burdened by any of the conventions associated with selected works. Rather, the poems are ordered in a manner that allows them to shine thematically. “A Sonnet to Tyson Beckford,” for example, appears in the “Playland” section, ostensibly out of place for its lack of personal narrative. Except that the image of Beckford—for years the single Black male model in luxury fashion campaigns—is deeply personal in context and congruent with Keene’s aforementioned political ideals. (“[E]ven beauty has its role / on the trading floor of moral reckoning […] like daydreams or a lover’s arms / can satisfy a certain quality of hunger.”)

The previously mentioned “Hammering” is from Punks’ sixth section, “Dark to Themselves,” which features Jackie Robinson, Miles Davis, George Washington Carver, and Alain Locke as protagonists alongside lesser-known Black men such as Martin de Porres, a Peruvian lay brother of the Dominican Order who became the patron saint of mixed-race people (and anyone seeking racial harmony) after being canonized by Pope John XXIII in 1962, and Denmark Vesey, a former slave who founded South Carolina’s African Methodist Episcopal chapter in Charleston and who was executed after fomenting a failed slave rebellion in that city in 1822. Keene is interested in figures who successively carved dignity out of their bleak circumstances or who, in the figurative language of progressivism, crawled so that later generations could sprint. The section “Manzanita” serves as a nod to Keene’s genealogy, and the book’s concluding section is simply titled “Words” and stretches phrases and concepts to their near-breaking points:

When you said people did you mean punish?
           When you said friend did you mean fraud?
When you said thought did you mean terror?
           When you said connection did you mean con?
When you said God did you mean greed?
           When you said faith did you mean fanatic?
When you said hope did you mean hype?
           When you said unity did you mean enmity?
When you said freedom did you mean forfeit?
           When you said law did you mean lie?
When you said truth did you mean treason?
           When you said feeling did you mean fool?
When you said together did you mean token?

This is the section’s titular poem, though the repetition could just as easily apply to “Pulse,” a poem in which Keene uses the first-person plural to memorialize the 2016 massacre at the eponymous gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in which 49 people were murdered. “We are the quiet street hours before doors open / We are the first words, and the parting ones,” Keene writes, winnowing down to “the closing doors, the bolted locks” and a bitter last line that’s both a never-forget and an expression of exasperation at such senseless violence: “We are the song that never ends.”

“The Lost World,” the section that follows “Playland,” extends Keene’s focus on commemoration. It’s essentially a series of remembrances of people and things past, such as the South African man “who insisted on being called ‘Coloured’” or another man from an undisclosed country, “Ripe, as / if he hasn’t bathed in a few days, a week, a while,” whom Keene must seduce into taking a shower because they don’t speak the same language. The section’s tone ranges from sexy to funny to deeply sad, as in “Folks Are Right, My Nose Was Wide Open,” in which Keene tries to cultivate professional poetic distance in spite of heartbreak, in the mold of “Essex Hemphill or / Neruda or Celan” only to be bombarded by his counterpart Kevin describing “last night’s fight with his girlfriend.” A few poems later, “After What Seems Like an Eternity, He Reappears” memorializes a white man obsessed with classical music who disappears as a customer at the store Keene used to work at, only to return later stricken with AIDS:

[...] a hello slips weakly from his lips like the gasp
of a closing door. It is obvious to everyone what’s up and I can barely
conceal my sadness. Where have you been, I ask, unthinkingly, adding
to cover myself, we really missed you. His nose is visibly blue, his teeth
have turned to slate. I really missed you. Thanks for letting me know
that, he croaks, sliding his credit card across the counter. I ring up the
final three CDs I’ll ever sell him.

There is a bildungsromanesque tension between the “Playland” section and the “The Lost World,” a stark cut from a young Keene to a less-young Keene. The material in the latter section is still tinged with sexual desire, but read sequentially, the poems are tempered by Keene’s centering his subjects’ humanity over his own. (Angels visit only the blessed, after all.) The narratives here are complex, more subdued, and mature because Keene is—at least theoretically. The three most erotic poems in “Lost World”—“From One End of the Room to the Other,” “On Their Knees in the Whispering Grottoes,” and “You Have Smallish Hands for a Brother”—respectively tell the stories of Keene trying to work through envy at a friend who jettisons his usual type (blondes) to fuck a Black sailor, Keene getting a friend to acknowledge that he shows up  at the local cruising spot more often than he’d like to admit, and Keene describing the feeling of fisting someone, “two men / rendered utterly as one on a mattress of trust and total surrender.” Although markedly different, each poem ends with bemusement—the speaker back on his heels and unable to expound further beyond categorizing his sense of wonder. Keene consistently scrapes up against the revelatory, and his learned experience, either through conversation or through action, results in the net gain of teaching these experiences to readers. Advocacy might not be the overt goal, but the cumulative effect of being exposed to such a broad range of situational narratives is a deeper understanding of humanity, with the added benefit of freeing Black gay life from the twin specters of stereotype and parody.

Readers ruminating over this might be caught off guard by “Ten Things I Do Every Day,” a section consisting primarily of prose poems. Although a narrative eventually emerges in “Tú No Lo Recuerdas,” (Spanish for “you don’t remember it”), the poem, and the ones that resemble it in the same section, are, at least in part, grammatical exercises, the colons propelling Keene’s clauses into constant motion:

Atocha, together: wearing the gaze of a spectator who has just seen: nights, swifts crisscrossing the square where the white-stockinged woman, moaning: athletically, palms upturned: altogether now, as presence itself, with both eyes, one motion: and offered these words—am from, my little, because of—six tiny English flags: before a bracing Spanish wind: headlights, battering the bedroom wall like track marks: in Catalan: yet our language has a different way of demonstrating, presence : a third: but would you like to?: as a gift, petite, weighing no more than a rabbit’s foot and silken to the throat: manifests, itself: yes that, token: later stroked me on my windbreaker sleeve as we sat, studying the television: like this, a show horse: so how much did that cost?: because he was willing to pay for what they valued from Massachusetts and so forth, a state just north of: essence itself, taken, by numbers: afterwards, pale haze rode the restaurant tables where the Africans: in theory, a deferral: and that one? the other: tires, India ink, the declaration rudely stamped on your passport: was from the older sector of this city, near the port and graffitied seawall: forgotten, my little, nothings:

This syntactical mastery is further proof of Keene’s range. To spend so much time within a quasi-confessional space only to decenter that in the name of perpetually churning phrases and clauses is a brave move. One might wonder what to do with all of this, but one benefit to not being pinned down is that you can’t be pigeonholed.

In the hands of a lesser artist, this book’s arrangement would surely fall apart. But the collection draws immense energy from how Keene frames his work. However it’s labeled—a decentralized retrospective or poetry collection as collage—Punks strikes me as a singular achievement, though one wonders how many poems were left on the cutting room floor to get the various effects achieved. It should inspire writers and critics to reassess what poetry collections are capable of, akin to Keene’s vision in “Carver, One Evening, in Tuskegee”: “as compelled by a greater power, / searching always wherever imagination, this need, this mystery / of our presence, and creation’s divine lights must lead me.”