Odes are Janus-faced things. Keats praises that “light-winged Dryad of the trees,” the nightingale. But he also envies the bird (never mind that he says he doesn’t), wishing that he too could escape from the “weariness, the fever, and the fret” of human existence. In his “Intimations Ode,” Wordsworth rhapsodizes over childhood even while he bitterly regrets its passing. In odes, celebration dances with lamentation, the exultant song giving way to, and mixing with, the harrowing cry.
Joshua Bennett’s second poetry collection, Owed (Penguin Books, $20, 96 pp.), works all the notes on the odal scale. The title is a pun (odes point to those we owe fealty or love or respect to) and Bennett’s poems often pay homage: to Black writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston; to Black rappers like Juelz Santana; to Black athletes like LeBron James; to Black institutions like the barbershop. In Bennett’s telling, the barber, that “[p]ostmodern blackness black / -smith,” offers lessons in verbal invention: “Speak, / & entire phrases abandon / Standard American / Etymology; hence, you liberate / waves from the sea, cornrows / from the cornfield, reclaim fade / so I now hear the word & imagine / only abundance.”
A current of joy runs through Bennett’s book; it is as much praise-song as poetry. In “Owed to Pedagogy,” Bennett sings of his disciplinarian sister. She kept him studying inside during “the dead center of summer,” the two “poring over formulae: / divisors & dividends, quotient / the first synonym for resolution / I ever learned, & would later / come to love for its sound alone.” An early lesson in mathematics becomes a first lesson in poetics, in language’s music and pliancy. The word “quotient,” he writes, “reminded me, even then, / of words like quantum & quotation / mark, both ways of saying nothing / means what you think it means / all the time.” That line break after “nothing” displays Bennett’s excellent touch: what seems like saying nothing, linguistic emptiness, can in fact become a way of saying many things at once, linguistic plenitude.
Elsewhere, the speaker remembers his grandmother’s plastic-covered couch, “[w]hich could almost be said / to glisten, or glow, / like the weaponry / in heaven.” In an example of what Hurston calls the “will to adorn,” Bennett suggests that preserving beauty is a way of preserving life:
Ain’t no equal
& opposite reaction
to the everyday brawl
blackness in America is,
no body so beloved
it cannot be destroyed.
So we hold on to what
we cannot hold.
Adorn it
in Vaseline, or gold,
or polyurethane wrapping.
Call it ours
& don’t mean owned.
Call it just like new,
mean alive.
These are odes about who Bennett owes things to. But they’re also odes about how much Black Americans are owed and how that debt might be repaid. In “Mike Brown Is a Type of Christ,” Bennett “gaze[s] upon the boy / & all of our fallen return to us, their wounds unhealed / & howling.” Sonic echoes—all/fallen, unhealed/howling—hammer and hurt. Police violence continues; Black boys keep dying; and “who says the dead don’t think, don’t shake / the weight of marrow & slip, quiet as fire, back / into whatever partition binds this life / to its grand black Epilogue?” The first in a series of poems entitled “Reparation” recasts what freed slaves were once promised: “Forty acres & a jewel-encrusted orchid crown / for each & every living baby girl / growing up the way we did.” Not forty acres and a mule but forty acres and a jewel: true reparation requires not just necessity, but gratuity, beauty, adornment. Owed shows how much reparative work Black poets and communities continue to do, giving even when they should be receiving.
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