A: Hanif Abdurraqib

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So the format of this Substack has its first completed section: the letter A, one living poet, one dead poet. I’m not going to really make any attempts to make comparisons between the poets, unless coincidence delights me.

I think I first came across the American poet Hanif Abdurraqib on Twitter, and it was his prose rather than his poetry – his book of essays and reviews They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us is funny, compelling and polemical. He has amazing taste in music. It was enough to get me to buy his second poetry collection, A Fortune For Your Disaster, which has a similarly strong voice running through it, and which taught me a lot about ordering and repetition in poetry collections. Marvin Gaye’s ghost appears as a recurring character throughout the book, as does Nikola Tesla, and several of the poems have the same title, such as How Can Black People Write About Flowers At A Time Like This. I like how ambitious and wide-ranging his work is, and how it merges the political with both high and low culture, how he plays with voice and vernacular and how he stretches poetic forms.

The poem I’ve chosen is actually one from his first collection, which I don’t own, but it can be found online here: 4 Poems From The Crown Ain't Worth Much by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

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Hanif Abdurraqib

after Frank O’Hara

Ok so straightaway we have things to say here. Expectations are being set up by both the title and the after dedication. The title suggests a sports game (which we find out is true in the first line), but it’s also playful because of the history of those two countries and their proximity and their contrasting ideologies. ‘USA v Cuba’ is a political statement as well as a descriptor of a soccer game.

Afters in poetry are always slippery, because I never know what they are supposed to mean, and I think that vagueness is part of the point of them. My general response is usually along the lines of ok, well this poet is, at the very least, naming an antecedent or influence. To me, after is an acknowledgement: ‘this poem right here wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t read the work of this person’.

It is 3:15 on a Saturday & I am in a car on I-95 on the way to the soccer game & Nate is riding shotgun which is also the name for when you plunge something sharp into a can of beer & split open its aluminum shell before swallowing its urgent sacrifice & I once saw Nate do this five times in one night before the Mount Union game & we got to the field late the next morning smelling like something coughed up in the heat of a 1980’s summer &

As with Dover Beach last time, I found it hard to know where to pause here – more so because of the breathless, boxy structure of this poem. Stopping at that ampersand felt like a kind of mutilation. Still, this is my format and I’m sticking with it. First comments here about this opening – it wears the after Frank O’Hara very firmly on its sleeve. Sometimes an after is so subtle in poetry that it’s hard to see the connection – this isn’t one of those times! It’s not really a spoiler to say that O’Hara is probably going to be my dead poet for the letter O, since he’s a favourite of mine – and this opening as the same breathless quality. The stream-of-consciousness, the sense of a speaker in a hurry to unburden himself, the specificity of timing and dating, the use of first names as though the poem is a casual conversation with the reader about a mutual friend – it’s all here. The use of ampersands is obviously not exclusive to O’Hara but does give that sense of urgency – they stitch the phrases together like thoughts and provide a structure where sometimes the logical meaning does not.

These opening lines are a long digression – digression being another O’Hara hallmark – we’re given the very precise location of the speaker (in a car on 1-95 at 3:15 pm on the way to the Usa vs Cuba football game) but then there’s a rumination on the double-meaning of the word shotgun, and a memory of a time when Nate, the passenger, shotgunned five beers. So we have the speaker and ‘Nate’ being established as close friends and former teammates with a shared history, young enough to remember high-school drinking incidents.

I’m also struck by the violence in that description of shotgunning a beer. You ‘plunge something sharp’ and ‘split open its aluminium shell’ – there’s something unnecessarily carnivorous about that image, which then is compounded in its weirdness by the shotgunner ‘swallowing its urgent sacrifice’. Why is it a sacrifice? Is there also something (homo)erotic there too, in that penetration and swallowing and urgency?

it was almost as hot then as it is right now in this traffic that isn’t moving & hasn’t moved for what feels like thirty years which is to say that it feels like we haven’t moved since we were too small to speak & burden everyone we love with our refusal to crawl back into silence & every car on this highway is in park & somehow people are still pressing on their horns & Nate turns up the radio & David Ruffin is singing I wish it would rain & his voice is unfolding long & slow in the backseat like an eager lover & there is a whole history of men demanding the sky to shake at their command &

With this section of the poem we come back into the present after the digression about shotgunning – so before we have the chance to fully reflect on what that memory of the violent, beery sacrifice is all about, or what the nature of the intimacy is between Nate and the speaker, those ampersands hurl us onwards. This next section of the poem retains the breathless urgency of the voice but is also describing stasis – we’re stuck in a traffic jam listening to the radio.

I think what I like about this poem, and a lot of Abdurraqib’s work, is that blending of contraries. He’s juxtaposing the very everyday descriptions of two ordinary people in a traffic jam with this breathless, kinetic tone and then these grand poetic statements that work to elevate those descriptions out of the everyday. They’re in a traffic jam that hasn’t moved, “since we were too small to speak & burden everyone we love with our refusal to crawl back into silence”. Wow. Lots to unpack there! The poem does feel as though it’s about youth, so is this what growing up is? To grow up means to speak out, or at least become loud, which is then a burden to our loved ones? To grow up is to assert ourselves through noise, which is inevitably a disappointment or a problem for those around us? I see it.

And there’s that eroticism again – David Ruffin of The Temptations with his voice that, to the speaker, suggests sex (‘unfolding long and slow in the back seat’), but then another of those ‘big’ statements “there is a whole history of men demanding the sky shake at their command”. Is this about patriarchy? Nate and the speaker both seem young, even though they’re old enough to drive and go to a football game by themselves – so perhaps this is something they’re noticing about what it means to be men? Perhaps it’s related to the earlier statement about growing out of silence and also to the image of shotgunning the beer – to be a man is to assert, to do violence, to drink, to be sexual, to demand the impossible? This doesn’t feel like an endorsement though – there’s something in the tone of that ‘there’s a whole history’ which feels that it’s at least questioning of men who are like this, and/or tired of that expectation.

I’m not saying out loud whether or not I believe in god & I’m not saying out loud what I know the rain means I’m only saying that I need this dry summer to stay dry I’m only saying that the tickets to this soccer game cost as much as my best suit & kickoff is at 3:30 & we are absolutely going to be late & there is a whole history of black people being late to things & there is a whole language signaling our arrival & there is an entire catalog of jokes that dissect this happening & they never get old & by they I mean black people in America & I can hear the joke our college soccer coach made when the only two black boys on the team stumbled late onto a hot field & lateness always makes for a good joke &

Yes, so this part feels like ambivalence towards that expectation of masculinity – “I’m not..I’m not..I’m only”. There’s a disavowal of those ‘big’ things that seem to be expected, and a desire to focus on the here and now.

But that focus only brings more anxiety, because they’re going to be late for the soccer game that they bought those expensive tickets for, and what’s more this lateness is going to make them into a cliché.

So now we have that political angle that the title quietly promised us. It feels like a shift from ‘after Frank O’Hara’ (whatever exactly that means) into something different. The line in italics there stops us in our tracks about America and race –“they never get old & by they I mean black people in America”. This is a gut punch of a line. The message and impact of the line is clear but the meaning feels kind of slippery to me (is that a good working definition of poetry?). Is ‘never getting old’ a reference to mortality rates? It’s definitely a reminder that, if we have a poem about two young Black men in a stopped car in America, then the symbolism around that simply cannot mean the same thing as it might in a Springsteen song, can it? (Abdurraqib is a fan of Springsteen and I don’t think the car/freedom/restriction thing is coincidental). Or does it mean ‘people’ as in ‘a people’? A racial group more generally that has not been allowed to ‘get old’ in America, whatever ‘getting old’ might mean - respected, comfortable, left alone? Either way that line injects a heavy and serious note, and it makes the comparative levity of the ‘jokes’ about lateness feel much less like ‘jokes’.

the punchline is I slept through my mother’s final breaths or the punchline is I stumbled into a living room thick with a family’s grief while clearing a night’s salt from my eyes or the punchline is that I’m always running late I’m always running I’m always trying to move time backwards & tell everyone that I love them & isn’t that funny & Nate points to an ambulance speeding down the highway opposite us & disappearing into the sun & I don’t want to think that there might be a body inside of it & then all of the cars start moving

And that seriousness continues. Obviously none of those things are punchlines. They’re reasons for being late that assert the humanity of the speaker, pulling it away from that racist cliché in the most fundamental way by sharing the speaker’s most painful and personal memories or fears about family, love and grief and fear of sickness/death.

So we have another juxtaposition – the ‘jokes’ about lateness that are based on racial stereotyping but posited as light and inconsequential (at least for the coach, who is an embodiment of that white, masculine American culture), and then the speaker turning the punchlines into these evocations of grief, which turn into panic about having to face up to death and loss.

And then I really like how the poem ends – “all of the cars start moving”. It makes the poem a snapshot of this very personal spiral that the speaker’s thoughts move through, but that cut-off final sentence also propels the speaker out of these thoughts and back into the ‘real world’ of trying to get to the soccer game.

The poem is sprawling, and constructed in such a way as to make it feel like it’s a succession of random thoughts strung together, but it has taken us somewhere. We’ve had the moment of stillness in the traffic jam as a frame for the spiralling thoughts, anxieties and fears of the speaker. Because the poem is doing that O’Hara conversational stream-of-consciousness thing, these anxieties flip between the imagistic (the violent image associated with the memory of shotgunning beers), to the personal (being late), to the sexual, the gendered, the racial, and finally to the confrontation with death and loss. For me this poem is a great model of how to write ‘after’ someone, and also of the power of the stream-of-consciousness voice and the loosened form.

Take a look at Hanif Abdurraqib’s website where you can get his work: www.abdurraqib.com/book

In the comments:

Burden me with your refusal to crawl back into silence?

Demand that the sky shake at your command?

Suggest some ‘B’ poets for next week?