This is a new edition of a book previously published in 1999, the first of only two by Akilah Oliver before her death in 2011. But the she said dialogues: flesh memory is not your usual debut collection and maybe that’s because it is the work of an already mature poet, in her late thirties, and embodies a fully realized and distinctive aesthetic. In particular, her reconception of the poetic line is what gives the work its power. Here are the last two lines of “it doesn’t matter how you fall into light, she said”:
look ma. no hands.
bodies jump overboard. taste is addiction enough. when horny think of sexuality & gods. less than 100 identified in l.a. county. a bell tinkles on a ice cream truck. i shouldn’t be no ways tired. tell me it’s saturday. reason to wear something new. it’s all right. breathe their air. the urge to kiss. all this time i thought i should have done something else.
The line is inclusive of potentially anything and indefinitely extensible or contractable (up to almost a whole page down to a single word). As the line gets longer, as for instance in the second one just quoted, it comes to resemble a prose paragraph—but it never functions like a paragraph. It’s always a line, a single overarching rhythmic (rather than discursive) sequence. It can have many segments, each marked by a full stop like a sentence, though most often they are not full grammatical sentences, and not even, exactly, I think, self-contained phrases: They feel more like extracts from an ongoing conversation. This has to do with the eschewal of upper case letters. The use of the full stop seems to call for the word following it, nominally commencing a new sentence, to open with a capital letter. That this is not forthcoming gives the sense that one has picked up a thought in midstream—a kind of fade-in, followed by the sharp ending marked by the next period. It’s the sequencing of such units within each line that gives Oliver’s best poems their serendipitous capaciousness, their unhistrionic emotional frankness, and their urgent rhythm—a distinctive sense of measure that reminds me of no one else’s. These poems are absolutely replete, even though their existence as concatenations of excerpts means that among the things they are full of are gaps, blanks, voids, interruptions, caesurae. Most of the poems are, according to their titles, “said” by a “she,” but the logic or dialogic of the poetry does not enjoin the reader to decide if “she” is the poet or the one the poet desires or both (“two women in a dance of connective tissue”) or someone else altogether. In her eloquent Foreword, Tracie Morris writes, and it’s no exaggeration, “Every poem is always truthful, and the body is the fullness of truth.” I would like to turn that sentence around: Every body is truthful, and the poem is the fullness of truth—a truth like Crazy Jane’s, “Learned in bodily lowliness / And in the heart's pride.” Ok, Yeats may be the opposite of an obligatory reference with poetry written by someone who was defiantly (as Morris says) “womanist, queer, and Afrocentric,” but here comes another one: Strangely—because Oliver’s poems resemble Frank O’Hara’s not at all—they put me in mind of his “personism” in being “so totally opposed to…abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry”: language that’s so real and physical—at times desolate, at times blissful, always quotidian—that it bypasses its own representationality or referentiality through its very concreteness to prove that “freedom is more than just some people talking.”
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Akilah Oliver, the she said dialogues: flesh memory, Foreword by Tracie Morris, is published by Nightboat Books, New York, 2021.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.