Yellow Rabbits Review #29: Mannish Tongues by jayy dodd

Mannish Tongues by jayy dodd (@deyblxk) (Platypus Press, 2017)
Review by Greg Bem (@gregbem)

“jayy dodd is a blxk question mark from los angeles, california, based on the internet. they are a writer & editor & performance artist. antagonistically queer & unapologetically blxk, they were raised to be a preaching cowboy—this is the next best thing. their first collection of poems, [sugar in the tank], was released on Pizza Pi Press.”
 
The words we molted between each other,
pleasant & unpleasant offerings, regifting
                unpackaged clutters we know as limbs.
How extremities betray—being the first to numb.

from “An Excavation”

The words of jayy dodd stipulate excitement through arousal. They are fiery words. They flicker brightly. Smoothly. They warm, heat, and burn. These are the words of an edge that knows retribution, satisfaction, and consolation. These words represent prosperity through elevation. Through mind. They molt through the aches of transformation and the quakes of oppression. They move through and beyond to a space of universal care: the gift of the art of being alive is aroused in dodd’s fantastically straightforward, yet brutal, and yet even further ecstatic new book of poems, Mannish Tongues.

“Trading Lunacy” is a poem as much about cycles as about the pull of the eyes on flesh, the heart on mind. On love.

Their words move through familiar but electrifyingly personal contexts. The names of the sections found within the book are: Confessions, Prayers, Interrogations, Testimonies, Myths, Eulogies. Anchoring through but remaining unpossessed by the concepts of organized belief appears exquisite in dodd’s greater, autobiographical context. These sets of knowing, these bodies of knowledge, these reference points to morality and to reflection and to truth are to be reconfigured by a poet who has seen, and continues to see, where the fire will recreate.

my mouth be a reminder,
how saltwater suppose to stop the tongue from swelling,
how teeth be bones too,
how my voice sounds of needed haunting.
if this body be a land,
its language be howl & debris.

from “Eloquent”

I’m sitting here in Seattle, reading Mannish Tongues at a wooden desk with a window filled with gray clouds. I read “scene: waking up next to John Keats after a pleasant evening” and flag lines about body, taste, and awareness. I’m reminded of Baldwin half a century prior, am reminded of the queer black experience being incredibly mindful, extraordinarily flexible, and carrying relentless energies. I’m reminded of Frank O’Hara and the responsiveness toward that burning love dormant within or bursting from us all. There is that responsiveness. There is a blend of respect and cynicism. There is critique and there is praise and the swollen merge bridges each poem and its particularity. “speak louder” evaluates flesh. “Black Philosophy #3” finds the conflict of solace between beauty, Blackness, and death. There are words. Energies. Responses. Engagements.

If we think of it as “energies of engagement,” then these poems that inform dodd’s craft, from form to tone, also inform their grander, splayed and displayed, poetics. This is a poetics that startles, reared on the page but leads to perform upon the page shortly after, words upturned to sit upright. The result is a smuggle of form, a shatter of the reader’s perceptions, an enlightenment by way of doing. I think of the act of poetry involving the act of reading, an intentional sounding and an application as individual as it is swallowed by the collective. I think of what dodd would want their readers to read. And then I think: to read Mannish Tongues expresses the fulcrum of dodd’s representation, the beauty of their intersecting identities.

“When Momma Was God” as a poem I read as the profound subtext of the mother, the profound instillation that must be distilled.

Whispers: try to find the symbol. Whispering: try to find the metaphor in this Seattle-lit bedroom. Let’s try: Mannish Tongues is a multidimensional mirror, available to be held at multiple angles at the same time, by the same reader. Though it comes out of dodd’s own incredibly courageous mind and voice, this is a book that features an open, impeccable, interpretable design. The experience of this book is an experience that will challenge and also complement its experience in the hands of any other. It is a book about unity as it is a book about education. Most poetry, it could be argued, serves to provide unity to its readers through accessibility, openness, relatable qualities. Most poetry, it could be argued, serves to provide education to its readers through the mere act of an author’s freshest language placed into a publishable format.

No doubt Mannish Tongues succeeds in both of these statements as it represents a poet’s craft that is indeed accessible and indeed fresh; however, dodd’s poems are drastic in a contemporary culture of division, a culture of a country that is (and has been) on the verge of dipping (again) into the rift of abuse and silence. Their drastic qualities are those that cause shaking, that cause reverberations through the proximity of the poet’s life and livelihood. What strikes me is where dodd’s own words touch angles of that mirror I never knew could exist, new understood did exist despite how different I am from dodd.

And this is that moment where I digress, that moment where I acknowledge that difference. As a cisgendered white male, there are aspects of the writing I identify with and aspects I do not. Of course, that is how difference, not necessarily a binary, works. The curiosity aroused is a curiosity of partiality. There is a schism between the work here, the poet and their collection of ideas, and the liminality and limitation of my perception. There is a desire to know all, a courageous voracity to understand, and yet the fullness will never be able to fill my cup, will never be able to be contained. This effect is magnificent, only uplifts the voracity to idealist proportions. A scrape of expectation stings to know that there can be more: that there can be growth. This sweet sting is exactly what is needed in this era of poetry. An era of discourse bridging the gaps between similar but unaware voracities, hungers, desires to express and love the expression wholly, knowing fully those paths, following the relative respite of emergence from own isolations.

Each day begins with burning, with
sacrifice. Such as dawn breaks,
the sky opens for toxic testimony.
Begin the offering, release vile sacrament--
fleeting pleasure. If ritual is morning,
is ceremony: the cloudy eye, the kindled throat,
it is discipline & sabotage & elixir.

from “Habit”
​
dodd’s reverence towards the swells, swoons, swallows, and swelters of life are utterly imperishable. The aesthetics of these poems forms, cloak-like and distinct, in my inspection of them. All readers and writers differ. How often are they given the opportunity to discern so much beauty and uplift of the proximity through such difference? An intimacy in the learned words shared. A living tenderness in the opportunity to explore this gift.

I’m thinking of the age of authority. Authoritarians. I’m thinking of the era of a plateau of exquisite voices. Or a constellation. Or an archipelago. What is the best image? What is the best way to describe this inverted chamber, not of echoes but of explosions?

The age we live in brings the writing of Mannish Tongues into greater, more significant relevance for all. Like much of the population of the United Sates, new levels of awareness over the last 24 months have surged through all medias and information sources. Topics that expand the narrative of our hideous past and present include systemic marginalization and oppression, white nationalism and supremacy movements, a sequence of actions by local and federal governments capable of taking an already-false democracy and further pushing away equity, and the divisions that exist between and within communities. For many individuals, myself included, the language of the United States today is a language that causes conflict but is representative of growth. For many individuals too, that language has been told for decades, and it is not new to those who have suffered significantly in their lives here.

I am reminded of the fire of dodd’s verse. I am reminded of the fiery mirror being held by all of us together and separate at once.

I was born between earthquake & riot / of a goddess called mother who forged me like sweet cornbread from the warmth in her hips / she say I widen her / say eighteen hours of labor / say my head split her body / say black clouds of nappy hair & eyes of fire in her arms / this is not a mythology

from “An Origin Story”

It is fortunate and deserving of gratefulness that the worlds of the lives of many who, in our culture, had previously had to hide, were repressed, and silenced, can become symbols of power, growth, and extraordinary resilience. These new symbols, these new heroines and heroes (and perhaps we need new vocabulary for these gendered terms?), are the new mirrors with the new angles that all of us can peer into, learn from, and transform the world thanks to; new visions as expressively born as flesh from the flesh of poetry.

dodd and their art of recognition is an art that contributes homage and tribute through, it is one that understands that closer degree of permanence through the act of language, and it is an art that can allow what is otherwise overwhelming in the world—to those who have historically known overwhelming and those who have not—to better understand, be ready, be structured in interception.

Some Black boys wake especially feeling you mourning,
feeling birth & grave & concrete & fresh air
wake their own bones, their own tongues, their own fists,
especially the docile, the slight, the soft.

from “Some mornings you wake feeling especially Black boy”