Like Signals

By Uche Nduka

This city is a ham. It's like this all day: poets and skate crews buzzing. A flowing moment; a shuffle of symmetries. The desirable state of a carapace or a whiff of Scooby-Doo. A day keeping the marble hot and throaty. It is not hard here to see what transpires when a poem absorbs the epiphanies of prosody.

Glossiness may actually be an oblique failure at making contact. Even moving towards a sneer, you must harness sparseness. If the grain fails, I will ask us to debate all histories. For these are secret accomplices of pinchmarks. And we are driving thermometers nuts. So far I have never been able to tell a middle from the top. The inverse of numeric citadels. Clearly variables are smashers of dead ends.

Right through embarkments to the bankrupting of the faucet in the kitchen. No thanks for the date the other night. You don't know the first thing about bathroom fixtures. Why bother? Isn't a poem born of the chisel? There's an upside to both venerating literary history and transcending it.

It enlivens my mood when I am asked to introduce poets publicly right before the start of a reading. Whether in mourning or celebration, a poet's presence is magnificent. Poets are world-builders. This is what I said about three poets I recently introduced to the audiences at The Shed Space in Brooklyn and The Poetry Project in Manhattan.

Read the full article on the Poetry Foundation website.