My New Black Magazine - NYU Black Renaissance Noire BRN-FALL-206 ISSUE RELEASE | Page 51

50

With his use of enjambment and the
music of qualifier-based sentences, he
has developed a kind of expectation
in our ears. We begin to expect the
music of qualifying, the music of
the list, but there are also surprises,
moments of the sonic juke or stutter
step. (The radical change of one body
of sound or phrasing breaking into
another). We get the quick sentence of
“I love my big hands.” All on one line,
started and end-stopped. This moment
throws a swagger or trouble into the
music. Surprises the list. Amplifies the
sound. Then the following sentence,
regains, again, the poem’s earlier music.
Another striking move: the switch
from the plural of “big hands” to the
singularity of the body again with
the use of the word “it”. “I love my big
hands./ I love it clear down…” The
“it” seems to refer to the body of the
first sentence. A quick and subtle
change —it simultaneously follows the
pattern of repetition (I love, I love,
I love—) while departing from pattern,
as we see in the move from “big hands”
to “it”. Plurality to singularity.
Again: reaching from one body or
pronoun-orientation, to another.

The quality of this poem’s music is also
achieved by Komunyakaa’s masterful
use of enjambment. If we remember,
the term “enjambment” is directly
borrowed from the French “enjamber”
which literally means “to straddle or
bestride” or “crossing over.” In this
poem, enjambment is where the
surprise lives! It imbues in the music
a sense of in-betweenness and we find
ourselves straddling the worlds of the
beginning and ending of syntactical
units and, essentially, the worlds of
sentences and meaning. The assonance
(“brain” and “raised”, “fish” and
“hyacinth”, “rapture” and “first”, “regret”
and “breath”, and so on) create another
kind of sonic reconciliation that works
to inform the music, a counterpoint to
the forward motion of the enjambed
lines, thus creating a multi-dimensional,
textured sonic experience. Both tight
and surprisingly capacious. Many
musics are at work at once here. And it
is this masterful enjambment that
we find in so much of Komunyakaa’s
work that creates a space conducive
to improvisation or possession.
Enjambment allows the reader or speaker
of the poem a small window or breath
within which to play, to consider the
various possible meanings conjured
by musical rest and activity. We hear
Lorca here, “All the arts are capable of
duende, but where it naturally creates
most space, as in music, dance and
spoken poetry, the living flesh is needed
to interpret them, since they have
forms that are born and die, perpetually,
and raise their contours above the
precise present.” He later goes on to
describe the power in finding something
new (in these artistic expressions) that
no one had seen before, something new
that could give life and knowledge. If
we think of enjambment in these terms
— the space between the lines becomes
a potentially performative space, a
space within which a speaker is invited
to improvise, imagine, co-author the
emotional, sonic, and conceptual
meanings of the piece.

Turning, now, to the work of the
imagery in relation to enjambment,
I’d like to offer up a metaphor.
I am thinking of the gorgeous cover of
Komunyakaa’s Neon Vernacular.
A collage entitled “Uptown Looking
Downtown” by Romare Bearden.

“Uptown Looking Downtown.”
Romare Bearden

In collage, and in this one in
particular, a new thing is made from an
assemblage of forms. In Bearden’s
collage, a giant city clock is made out
of a human eye; the eyelashes seem to
be minute markers. A man’s ice cream
cone might be made out of yellow,
scrap paper. Hard to tell. What one
might traditionally think of as
belonging to one body or set of bodies,
is exploded in collage. And I think, too,
this is what’s happening in “Anodyne.”
Images are stretched over several lines.
We witness the process of assemblage,
or shapeshifting. Skin “is” a sac of
dung. And joy! The spleen is a spleen
floating in that sack and, too, it is a
compass needle inside of the body.
The enjambment allows for both truths.
Just as the enjambment allows us to
see the compass-needle spleen floating
both inside of the body and inside
nighttime — thus showing us that
there is nighttime inside of the body
and that being inside of nighttime
is being inside of a larger body. And
what the compass needle-spleen is/are
divining is West Africa’s horizon.