Patricia Smith, Black Mourning, and Elegy’s Others

If Claudia Rankine is right that “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,” how do you write a poem that does justice to the ongoingness of that condition, the changing same of Black grief and death, from the Middle Passage to Black Lives Matter?[1] Rankine’s celebrated mixed-media, didactic Citizen: An American Lyric, which includes elegiac prose poems for Trayvon Martin, James Craig Anderson, and others, represents one way to meet the challenge.[2] For another Black American poet who also mixes genres, Chicago-born Patricia Smith, elegy is still more fundamental to chronicling, witnessing, and grieving the deep history and immediate reality of violent death. Critical essays in Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era and elsewhere elucidate Smith’s poems as elegiac, including those in her collections Blood Dazzler, which mourns the victims of Hurricane Katrina, and Incendiary Art, which grieves racist killings from Tulsa in 1921 to Money, Mississippi, in 1955, and Ferguson in 2014.[3] Less noticed is Smith’s bold hybridization of elegy with other genres and forms. Acclaimed for her deft crafting and powerful adaptation of various fixed and unfixed forms and poetic genres, Smith has played a significant role in remapping elegy’s place in the ecosystem of literary kinds. Her work can help refine our understanding of key aspects of contemporary elegy, including its mourning recent and intergenerational Black trauma and death, its intersections with adjacent forms and genres, and its renovation of lyric devices such as apostrophe and address.

While there are many elegies in Smith’s oeuvre, her “Salutations in Search Of,” an elegy of especially large ambition and wide historical scope, deserves special attention.[4] It expands the boundaries of elegy until it seems a kind of uber-genre that encompasses various poetic modes. In “Salutations in Search Of,” Smith seizes on the capabilities of elegy—apostrophe to the dead, figuration of the sun, incantatory repetition, and so forth—but she also repurposes the affordances of other genres and forms for the poetry of mourning. Initially published less than two months after George Floyd’s murder, the poem has the capaciousness of epic, placing recent killings in the context of the long history of Black American experience, from the Middle Passage to the Great Migration. A sequence in thirteen sonnets and a fragment, it also reworks the sonnet crown, condensing the massive history of Black loss within a tight formal structure. And it redeploys and stretches epistolary address, issuing salutations to the numberless Black dead and their mourners across the centuries. Smith and other poets from Langston Hughes and Robert Hayden to M. NourbeSe Philip, Kevin Young, and Evie Shockley hybridize elegy with genres such as song, ballad, the blues, ekphrasis, testimony, legal document, drawing, villanelle, requiem, obituary, essay, photography, autopsy, video, newswriting, psychiatric report, anthology, and dictionary. Deploying the discrepant capacities of multiple genres, Smith elaborates elegy’s intergeneric proclivities in an epic-sonnet-epistolary-elegiac poem energized by its multiple generic crossings. Her sequence highlights the elasticity and porosity of elegy, and it helps make visible elegy’s self-renewal through its interaction with, and absorption of, other genres.[5]

Picking up where Smith’s elegy-packed Incendiary Art left off, “Salutations in Search Of” versifies the final sentence of that book’s acknowledgments as a grimly punning, alliterative salutation, “Dear someone who woke up without a son, / Dear damn the dawning,” further recast in the poem’s moving final line, “Dear anyone who wakes without a sun” (311, 313).[6] Like elegists since Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, and Langston Hughes, Smith skeptically inverts the traditional elegy’s consolatory image of the risen sun, addressing the parents of Black children, disproportionately burdened with melancholic grief.[7] But as we consider Smith’s poetry in its vertical relation to the long and evolving history of elegy, it’s important also to bring into view the horizontal axis of its dialogic engagements with its generic others.

Although elegy is often associated with grief occasioned by a specific death or deaths, Smith’s “Salutations” dramatically expands elegy’s historical scope by crossing it with epic, “a poem containing history,” in Ezra Pound’s phrase.[8] In accordance with epic, the poem begins in medias res, with Middle Passage “leapers . . . / . . . elegant in flight” (307); memorializes a long history, from enslavement to lynching to police brutality; and totalizes a collective experience, as in Georg Lukács’s theory of epic.[9] But, as in her adaptation of other genres, Smith vigorously remakes key features of epic to evoke the enormity and relentlessness of Black grief—a history she narrated earlier in prose in Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery (1998).[10] She devotes most of the poem to katabasis (descent) or nekyia (summoning of ghosts) but dispenses with heroic action, and she addresses the dead and their mourners but without epic’s clamorous shades or its third-person narrative framing. Today’s police killings are grieved in the wake, to borrow Christina Sharpe’s polyvalent metaphor, of atrocity and death since the Middle Passage.[11] Each new death is singular (“Your child’s been scraped up off the boulevard”) but reverberates with the traumatic postmemory of these earlier historical deaths (312). Smith’s elegy enacts what I theorize elsewhere as postmourning in the context of an unrelenting history of Black loss.[12]

Each of the epic elegy’s first seven sonnets focuses on a chapter of Black American history that poets have usually memorialized in a separate poem: the Middle Passage (e.g., Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage”), the slave market (Frances Harper’s “The Slave Auction”), enslavement (Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Douglass”), lynching (Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till”), the Great Migration (Sterling A. Brown’s “Migration Blues”), and Jim Crow (Langston Hughes’s “Ballad of the Landlord”), with an interlude addressing the creators of the Harlem Renaissance. Instead of narrating, in epic fashion, one or more episodes objectified in the past, the poem conjures them as an array of subjects fervently addressed in the lyric present, the poet “in search of,” as the title has it, immediate connection with this history.[13] She addresses the Middle Passage dead (“Dear floaters, bloated kin”) and new arrivals taken to market (“Dear going to market, beauty on the block”) (307); the enslaved “drudge” and the victim of lynching (“Dear blackened reckoning, Dear charred askew”) (308); the exuberant artists of the Harlem Renaissance (“Dear Langston, Zora, Louis, Josephine”) and the disappointed refugees from the south (“Dear migrant on a Greyhound”) (309); and “Dear edgy citizen,” laboring under Jim Crow in “the rusty yawning maws / of factories” in places like Chicago, a beast that “digs its claws / in you” (310).

Albeit a Black American pocket epic, Smith’s elegy begins neither on American soil nor with Black Americans but, in keeping with history and with elegiac transnationalism, in the Black Atlantic with Africans who jumped to their death in the Middle Passage: “Dear floaters, bloated kin. Dear flooded necks / and reckless leapers manic for the flow” (307). So many Africans bound on enslavers’ ships leaped overboard that ships were often draped with nets to prevent the loss of human chattel.[14] In a poem unbound by nation as by genre, the long history of such horrendous deaths stretches back in time and across the Atlantic. Playing on the expressions “loved to pieces” and “loved to death,” Smith addresses the stateless dead of the Black Atlantic, who, strikingly unlike Milton’s Lycidas, cannot rise from the ocean as a spiritual essence: “You rise in pieces, loved to death, / at last unshackled” (307). Watery death is the price they pay for their supposed freedom.

             If epic-like strategies help Smith’s elegy evoke the great expanse of this grief-laden history, the sonnet crown provides her with rigorously structuring equipment to compress it into fourteen-line episodes that parallel each other in rhythm and rhyme. Though once linked to a couplet form, “elegy” in modern usage, understood as a poem of mourning, can take on various “external” forms, such as canzone, villanelle, tanka, ballad, blues, free verse, sonnet, and, like Smith’s “Salutations” and Marilyn Nelson’s “A Wreath for Emmett Till,” the heroic sonnet crown. After reading “Salutations” at a conference on the sonnet, Smith said she was “absolutely obsessed with where the sonnet can go right now” but added of the crown, “I was looking for some way to break it.”[15] In “Salutations,” she hammers her verse into the Shakespearean sonnet’s rhyme scheme and iambic pentameter, and gathers all the first lines to compose the final “master sonnet.” But even as she advances the form, she signifies on it to better express Black mourning’s variety (forsaking the crown’s usual repeat lines) and inexpressibility (stopping short of the heroic crown’s fifteen sonnets and pausing on a four-line interruptive fragment). At the end of the sequence, she unmasters the master sonnet by concluding on the twelfth line, with neither volta nor final couplet, structurally suggesting that Black grief and death, like the ababcdcdefef alternating rhyme, is relentlessly ongoing, perhaps even interminable:

Dear George, Trayvon, Breonna, Bree, Tamir—

Dear someone who woke up without their son—

Dear woman, wounded by the things you hear—

Dear anyone who wakes without a sun. (313)

The recursive sonnet structure emphasizes the endless diurnal loop of waking without the sun/son. In the penultimate sonnet, the sonic loop encloses a video loop that dramatizes the grieving parent’s melancholic loop: “Your child will keep on dying, and you must / keep punching play to watch him blue and blue / until he trends” (312). So too, the sonnets that end with rhyming couplets do not mark a volta toward transcendence but rather extend the foregoing grief, as frequently enacted by enjambment with the preceding lines. As seen in sonnet 2, the near-crown’s muscular syntax twists across the regular meter and tightly woven masculine rhyme, as in the hard enjambments that enact the whiplash and torque (wrung, lash, flash, chain) of the newly arrived African’s struggle with chains binding the body at inspection for sale, as also with an imposed language (“Dear mouth . . . wrung / into its new”) (307).

Smith loads the rifts of her elegy with the sonnet’s sonic ore. Alliterated sibilants suggest the horror of submarine Middle Passage bodies—“the stark tableaus / of sliding skin and swarms of slither set / to drumbeat” in the pounding ocean (307). The unrelenting rhyme and meter, like the thrum of continual death and loss, sonically binds the poem. Form speaks most strikingly of content in the ninth sonnet. This solid block of names of Black people killed by the police and others alludes to and extends Black Lives Matter’s #SayHerName and its offshoot #SayTheirNames.[16] But unlike names listed in a tweet or protest march, these names are structured as a sonnet—a feat that astonishes partly by virtue of its poetic skill and partly the abundance of names available to the form’s prosodic units.

Dear George, Trayvon, Breonna, Bree, Tamir,

Alatiana, Dominique, Jamel,

Antonio, DeAngelo, Romir,

Ashanti, Botham, Terence, John, Chanel,

Stephon, Philando, Kentry, Bee, Layleen,

Romelo, Emmett, Eleanor, Montay,

Jenisha, Kiki, Alton, Mack, Francine,

Tenisha, Eric, Dominick, Renee,

Michelle, Elijah, Nia, Amadou,

Akai, Monina, Cortez, Kentry, Sean,

Alberta, Michael, Gabriella, Lou,

Natasha, Brooklyn, Walter, Lee, Laquan,

Ahmaud, Mohamed, Elray, Aura, Shane,

Rayshard, Denali, Sandra, Oscar, Blane.  (311)

That there are so many names to choose from to forge a found sonnet with a perfect ababcdcdefefgg rhyme pattern and fourteen perfectly regular iambic pentameter lines (“Dear George, Trayvon, Breonna, Bree, Tamir”), though pointedly omitting the volta, signals the monstrous enormity and ongoingness of Black grief and death. Paradoxically, tightness of form evokes the vastness and uncontainability of content. While joining the long tradition of ritual naming, the sonnet’s unique aesthetic achievement also surpasses ritual. Speaking about an earlier elegiac segment written, as an epigraph has it, “For the mothers of the lost,” Smith said she “wanted to impose some form,” a “sound,” a “lament,” and to include names other than the few that make the news: “the tragedy is a more constant and consistent drumbeat. . . . I wanted people to say, I don’t know that name, I didn’t know that name. . . . I wanted it to be relentless.”[17]

Smith also sounds a relentless drumbeat in “Salutations” with the hundred-fold use of the word Dear. The insistent salutations—e.g., in the first sonnet, addressed to the Middle Passage dead, “Dear floaters,” “Dear flooded necks,” “Dear debris,” “Dear the voyage never knew / your name”—combine with the strong patterning in rhythm and rhyme to give the poem’s sonic texture a ceremonial, threnodic cast (307). Semantically, the word “Dear,” along with the descriptive “Salutations” in the title, belongs to the epistolary mode, as a verse letter or series of letters. After reading the poem to an audience, Smith commented, “I was originally planning on writing a prose piece, planning on writing a letter, and I couldn’t decide on the letter, and so I just started putting all the salutations together, and I liked the‘Dears’ being buried in the stanzas that way.”[18] Like the fluctuations of grief, instances of the word “Dear” ebb and flow in the sequence, before powerfully intensifying to ten in the eleventh sonnet and seventeen in the resounding finale of this semi-crown’s semi-master sonnet, introduced by two more (312, 313).

Black poets from Claude McKay and Langston Hughes to Natasha Trethewey, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Evie Shockley have deployed the epistolary poem, but what is gained by hybridizing elegy with epistle? If, as Pope wrote, epistolary poems are meant to seem like letters that “pour out all the heart, / Speed the soft intercourse from soul to soul,” then epistolarity produces the effect of direct, intimate contact, albeit mediated and writerly.[19] Smith draws on what Langdon Hammer, citing Theodor Adorno, calls “the letter’s combination of artifice and naturalness, its studied spontaneity and‘mediated immediacy.’”[20] The epistolary mode’s prosy colloquialisms (“don’t you tell me that you plan”) anchor the more literary (“proclaimed by slaver’s scourge”) and philosophical phrases (“body on its way / to being only body”) (312, 307, 311).

But just as this elegy is an epic that isn’t an epic, a sonnet crown that isn’t a sonnet crown, so too, it embraces and twists the epistolary poem into something new. Smith multiplies exponentially the genre’s addressees. Instead of the fiction of direct address to a specific person, her elegy seems to be addressed not to one or two but scores of addressees, including the myriad dead and the multitudes who, like elegy’s procession of mourners, grieve their losses. Pluralizing epistolary address, she expands the scope of its intimacy and directness to evoke the vast collectivity of Black grief and death. Issuing salutations to many elements of historical and contemporary loss, she wields yet another tool from another genre to make it visible.

Smith’s multiple acts of address separate out manifold loci for attention. She engages distinctly, as we’ve seen, a mourning parent’s despair over losing a child to police violence (“Dear someone who woke up without a son”) and fury at the sun’s return without a son (“Dear damn the dawning”) (311). In this same sonnet, she particularizes in rapid succession the mourner’s agony at not hearing the boy’s knock at the door, the mourner’s bodily response, and the void left by death: “Dear reverberating shock, / Dear someone flailing, ripping at the air, / Dear hollow where he was” (311). The insistent salutations passionately recognize and vivify each facet of grief and loss, as if each were a person to be cared for. They draw us close to the parental affection, desire, and longing (“Dear someone who’s / obsessed with resurrecting him”) (311), harshly juxtaposing these affects with the brute facticity of a body dying, then dead:

Dear someone loving body on its way

to being only body, just that red

and syrupy annoyance, hosed away

when street decorum says it will. Dear damn.

Dear chalk all washed to none. Dear traffic jam. (311)

“Dear” encompasses every aspect of these charged experiences, not only grief and anger (“Dear damn”) but also the washing away of the body’s outline and even the traffic. If the poem is to witness and grieve the totality of loss, nothing can be excluded from its elegiac care. Some acts of address are to an abstract person (“Dear woman” or “Dear man,” “Dear migrant” or “Dear suicide”) or named individuals (“Romelo, Emmett, Eleanor, Montay”) (308, 309, 310, 311); others are to parts of the body (“Dear mouth,” “Dear chartered womb,” “Dear eye that won’t dissolve”) (307, 308); still others, yet more extravagantly, are to verb phrases (“Dear going to market,” “Dear persist / with your existence,” “Dear fryin’ lettuce in the lard”) (307, 308, 312). Smith breaks open the rhetorical form and grammatical structure of epistolary salutation to make it all-encompassing. In one sonnet, she even addresses the misguided compulsions of internalized racism, in a voice modeled on her mother’s (“Dear wish you’d pinch those nostrils down, / that nose is half your face”) (312).[21] Such extravagance is less typical of direct address in the epistolary mode than of lyric apostrophe, a vital element of elegy since ancient times.[22]

Smith’s multigeneric poem straddles the thin line between direct address (to a listener or reader) and apostrophe (to something or an absent someone)—thin, since address in the triangulated communication structure of a published poem, unlike a private letter, is in a sense always apostrophic, a turning away from (apostrophos) the public, anonymous audience of the poem to the ostensible addressee of the letter. But despite the overlap, there are recognizable divergences. While an epistolary poem seldom multiplies its addressees, lyric apostrophe sometimes does. Smith echoes the apostrophic amalgamation of poems like Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago,” Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” and, in elegiac tradition, Tennyson’s In Memoriam.[23] Spanning the rhetorical, ontological, and generic space between the letter and the elegiac lyric, Smith’s salutations draw on features of each, including those that Jonathan Culler and Barbara Johnson attribute to lyric apostrophe.[24]

Smith’s nimble interweaving of the rhetorical strands of address and apostrophe, of letter and lyric, is a key source of this poem’s power. To reveal the effects of their enmeshment, I tease them apart and perhaps expose how such a poem bridges the divide in contemporary lyric theory between scholars who emphasize lyric’s ritualistic, iterative capacities, as exemplified by apostrophe, and those who foreground lyric’s historicity, as in epistolary address.[25] Smith’s elegy brandishes lyric’s ritualistic and its historical elements. On the one hand, it deploys the epistolary salutation “Dear” as a less vatic or elevated form of address than the apostrophic O, tempering artifice with the epistolary note’s seeming everydayness (“Dear migrant on a Greyhound”) (309). On the other hand, the blatant impossibility of these salutations also tips them toward lyric apostrophe: What does it mean to write a letter to the mouth, eye, or womb of an enslaved person, or—even more extravagantly—to an activity like going to the slave market, persisting in existence, or frying lettuce in the lard? On the one hand, some of the salutations have the seemingly colloquial spontaneity of epistolary address or even vernacular speech (“Dear press / those naps”) (312); on the other, as in lyric apostrophe, the salutations seem ceremonial, in part because of their rhetorical strangeness and anaphoric abundance (“Dear,” “Dear,” “Dear”). As in address, they are embedded in epistolary time and epic history (the runaway addressed as “Dear prey for drooling cur”) (308); yet as in apostrophe, they also heighten the poem’s lyrically recursive, non-mimetic artifice in the perpetual present (“Dear mouth, still bulging with Atlantic”) (307). Address grounds the elegy in the historical particulars of Black experience (“Dear bullet in the back,” “Dear woman wounded by the things you’ve heard”) (310, 312). Yet apostrophic repetitions emphasize the ritualistic act of voicing, akin to a magic incantation (“Dear wild tumultuous, your mouth. Dear God”) (313).

Smith’s inventive braiding together of the extravagance of lyric apostrophe and the entangled historicity of epistolary address, of sonnet compression and epic expansiveness, enables her to claim, draw close, and hold “dear” everything from the “debris” of Middle Passage bodies to today’s “bullet in the back.” Her insistent acts of voicing summon and encompass the particulars and the iterations of a death-strewn historical and contemporary Black experience, holding them within the force field of elegiac care. Harnessing the affordances of discrepant rhetorical devices and genres, Smith revitalizes elegy to give expression, form, and urgent attention to the immense panorama of Black mourning.