Notes on Restatement and Progression. Proper Nouns. Notes on Recursive Progressions.

Kami Enzie:

For “Notes on Restatement and Progression…” I was interested in exploring poetry that functions similar to art objects. To have strategies of comprehension change in response to the experience of reading.

What is unsaid through this pin board of proper nouns? “July Detroit” and “Harlem August” form two distinct place/time points of data. “August God” carries the suggestion of the spiritual and majestic into places of urban heat. Is it transit depicted between proper place names? What might it mean to rename “America” as “the Old Country”? For whom and with what implications? Etc. The poem comes from a larger manuscript in-progress, River of Love, that is about inconceivability.

This piece is an erasure/process poem made from James Baldwin’s essay “Notes of a Native Son,” and the gathered nouns are presented roughly in their order of appearance. Baldwin published the eponymous essay collection in 1955 after he returned from France to the same “dangers and rigors” of America he had fled in 1948. As Baldwin writes in the Preface to the 1984 edition: “When I was told, it takes time, when I was young, I was being told it will take time before a Black person can be treated as a human being here, but it will happen. […] Sixty years of one man’s life is a long time to deliver on a promise, especially considering all the lives preceding and surrounding my own.”