My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 49

I am interested in the way Horton
points to his genius or his impulse to
create art by pointing to the nonhuman
world — the fluttering of a bird.
We notice that he uses the feminine
pronoun (she) to describe his genius.
“My genius from a boy,/ has fluttered
like a bird within my heart… She
like a restless bird…” The speaker
articulates his desire: the ability to
move through and across worlds.
As we might gather from Horton’s
biography, this need to create was
urgent and not separate from the
work and quest of his own liberation.
We see this same work and quest
in the above description of the bird,
her power, her desire.

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Metrically, the poem moves, quite
consistently, from iambic tetrameter
to pentameter and back. The poem is
neatly composed of five quatrains. But!
There is a break in the metrical system.
We find it in the penultimate line,
“And let her songs be loudly heard…”
A line of iambic tetrameter where our
ear expected pentameter. Structurally
the poem is engaged with confinement
and freedom, the construction of
form and the breaking of form. These
priorities are also reflected in the
narrative. Genius is fluttering “within”
a heart and cannot employ her powers
because of this confinement. The last
stanza is an articulation of the poem’s
(and Horton’s) freedom dream: genius
dressed as bird spreading her wing(s),
unfurling her power and power to
be, singing and flying, from world to
world. Freedom is the ability, not
just to sing, but to let one’s songs be
heard — and to “dart” or move through
and between worlds. But what I find
profoundly surprising in this last stanza,
is the phrase “her power to be unfurl’d.”

If I read the phrase very literally, the
lines suggest that the powers will be
unfurled. The words “to be” place us
in time, in the process of unfurling.
Another interpretation: the speaker
equates the power of being with
freedom, expressing that we are, in our
natural state, to our marrow, meant
to be free. The power to be is unfurled.
And it is that essence of beingness, a
kind of natural state of the self, that
is unfurling in the poem’s last stanza.
An alternate reading that ghosts this
phrase for me is the idea that there is
power in the ability to be unfurled, by
oneself or by another.
For those who have read Garcia Lorca’s
“Play and Theory of Duende,” you might
remember the story of the Andalusian
flamenco singer, Pastora Pavón, who
sings a brilliantly crafted song in a
tavern in Cadiz. And though her voice
is technically impressive, it lacks
duende — that indefinable quality of
soulfulness and depth of expression
that changes the body’s texture, rides
the heart, makes the hair on your arms
stand up. Eventually, in Lorca’s story,
Pavón manages “to tear down the
scaffolding of the song, but allow
through a furious, burning duende.”
Lorca writes,
[she] had to tear apart her voice
because she knew experts were
listening, who demanded not just
form but the marrow of form…
she had to rob herself of skill
and safety: that is to say, banish
her Muse, and be helpless, so her
duende might come, and deign to
struggle with her at close quarters.
And how she sang! Her voice
no longer at play, her voice a jet
of blood, worthy of her pain
and her sincerity, opened like a
ten-fingered hand as in the feet,
nailed there but storm-filled…
The arrival of duende presupposes
a radical change to all the old
kinds of form.

In the Lorca, as in the Horton, we see
an attention to form, and a break
or radical change in the form. What is
prioritized in this tavern is, perhaps, a
depth of presence and being, her power
to be and to be unfurled, opened,
expanded — changed. In a sense, both
Lorca’s description of Pavón and
Horton’s description of the genius-bird
are portraits of hybridity, doubleworldedness. Pavón’s feet are both
nailed and storm-filled. The genius-bird
is both Horton and separate from
Horton — both male and female.
Captive and unfurling.
I propose that Komunyakaa’s work is
engaged with this unfurling or opening
into, and across worlds of sound and
imagery. Not just movement between
worlds, but the reaching toward worlds.
The sound of reaching. (Once, I heard
the poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi say that
her poems were informed by the sound
of trying to play saxophone and that
phrase, “the sound of trying,” seems
useful here.) It is the sound of both
saying and trying, a music built
on insinuation and the straddling of
worlds, that Komunyakaa conjures
in his work. We see these qualities in
the historical subjects Komunyakaa
chooses to investigate, among them the
sculptor Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907),
an internationally renowned sculptor;
Arthur (1747-1768), a literate “slave”
who was executed in Worcester,
Massachusetts for sleeping with a white
woman, and who was, as Komunyakaa
writes in his libretto about Arthur,
“almost free”; and DeWitt White
(1980-1997), a Bronx-born piano
prodigy whose short life was shaped by
aids, homelessness, drugs, violence,
and music.