Optic Subwoof

Douglas Kearney’s Optic Subwoof collects four talks given by the interdisciplinary poet, performer, and opera librettist as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. In “You Better Hush: Blacktracking a Visual Poetics,” Kearney calls collage “a methodology, a praxis,” and wonders about “[h]umanity’s first encounter with collage,” which he conceives of as a “sense of place,” recognizing that “[t]he history of the African diaspora is one in which brutal decontextualization [was] followed by violent recontextualization.” Where Blackness is surveilled and redistricted, Kearney’s original mapping of language creates what Katherine McKittrick calls “black geographies,” which, she explains, “are located within and outside the boundaries of traditional spaces and places,” and in turn “locate and speak back to the geographies of modernity, transatlantic slavery, and colonialism.” The refusal of some of Kearney’s collaged poems to be read, even by him, becomes “a loud-assed colored silence” against these systems.

In another lecture, Kearney revisits his childhood practice of encouraging his body to transform into a werewolf, and provides images and exercises with which to place “person” and “wolf” in various modes of relationality. He explains: “words are a spell, a trigger, but not the thing itself, not the memory in your hands of what you’ve never been able to make them do.” 

Elsewhere, the poet considers what it means to record violence in poems by putting in print and saying aloud the names George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, and Daoyou Feng. Kearney analyzes how poets including Layli Long Soldier, Aurielle Marie, and Harryette Mullen engage with such questions in their work, and examines the violence of performance, particularly in his readings of Patter, his collection mourning miscarriage. 

Kearney is known for his bold and sometimes comic readings. This book moves behind the scenes, discussing, for example, how the timing and assemblage of his banter around his “miscarriage poems,”—made “to kill audiences” (“funny smacks of combat”)—created internal furies and confusions. In Kearney’s nonfiction, as in his poetry, the violences of language are many and changing.