Thread by @PBW_Poet

Craft part 2: picking back up with the Eve Ewing "sonnet," another reading is that this is a ritual that continues our of love and is accepted each time by nature of the speaker always returning to this generosity. The poem ending with 2 and not 4 lines a kind of to be continued.

"I saved some cornbread for you in the skillet on the stove," becomes a chant, a love song ("sonnet" meaning "little song" in Italian), that is endless, capacious, warm, and deeply intelligent about holding another.

"African american literature" by Nate Marshall works a bit differently, is more slippery to get a sense of. The line repeated here is "i like your poems because they seem so real." There's something to say about the lower-case "american." Something defiant, subtly slick-mouthed.

The repetition here follows the division of stanzas that Ewing's poem uses, so again we are offered several room containing the same information and being left as readers to interpret however we can.

I think the "i" here is a non-Black reader of African American lit. Their amazement ("they seem so real") that the poems "seem" real points towards a disbelief in the reality of Black life. "i like your poems" because they are magical, the prestige being living itself.

Each room then is another live-audience reading, another Zoom reading, another random reader on the street, another student, colleague...another library, university, etc with someone life this who cannot help but share their bemused like of the unbelievable performed believable.

Unlike the prior two poems, I do not believe the lines's accumulate into larger meaning. This form is founded solely in exhaustion, the redundancy being the point, the annoyance of it all, the onslaught, the boredom.

Much like the lower-case "a" in "american," peep the small "i." Connect these three with the ending, the only line different from the previous "f'sho, good look, this is also a sonnet," and the snark completely takes over.

"African american literature," then is completely disinterested in being a poem, a sonnet, beautiful in a canonical understanding of the form, and complexity that if present would be misread in the first place. The poet is dialing it in to save energy, to save himself.

As the reader/listener simultaneously makes the poems tangible while also erasing their reality with assumed speculation, the poet documents and capitalizes of their obsession with mis-reading, their intellectual laziness and lack of imagination for Black life (un)writing them.

About the first two poems I wonder: who are the speakers speaking to? Is Hayes's speaker speaking to a benevolent or oppressive force? Is Ewing's speaker speaking to the living or the dead? In Marshall's poem, though, I don't have the question. The recipient is transparent.

If repetition of a word or phrase has the power to revise meaning by obsessing over its materials across space and time, I'm willing to believe that when *everything* is repeated, that revision is heightened to total narrative un/redoing, where the entire poem shifts on its axis.

When thinking about Black life, I consider call-and-response, the sonar calling the a Blackly knowledgeable reader, and the response echoing back into a loop that expands meaning and understanding.

The history and violence and hope in a watermelon is important to Black life. Cornbread in a skillet (gotta be cast iron) is important to Black life. And defiance of expectation in the face of dehumanizing audiences is important to Black life. A Black call beckons Black response.

This isn't to say that the sonar form cannot be used by other cultures. On the contrary, its potential is maximized when the poet magnifies a specific cultural understanding in a single line that builds in ambivalent feeling via conversation between poem and reader.

Anyway, I'll save the rest for the essay. A lot to say about these poems and others like them. I am sure there are a few nuances that I've missed just in my freestyling here, but there's not need to rush understanding a poem. Imo it takes years to really know a poem.

This sonar form is not easy to do and is hardly going to find universal understanding or enjoyment. Truth is, that is also the power of these and other poems. They touch whom they touch, who allows the poem in, and in that way art and flesh make homes of each other. Take care!