The Brooklyn Rail

Reading the late Tyrone Williams’s last book, befittingly released by his alma mater, is to be caught up in a bittersweet moment which pulses both with loss and pleasure at rediscovering this poet’s immense power to summon the sounds of his culture. We do well to stow away umbrellas, rain boots, thunder coats and instead let the lyric make direct contact at the throat, ribcage and imprint its music as it rises, spills and slides between word and thing. It pours! It writes! “splashing pools of awww…”

If description is revelation, as Wallace Stevens proposes¹ in his 1945 essay-like poem, “Description without Place,” might we not substitute it for iterability, which implies “the repeatability of certain textual fragments … but also unannounced sources and influences, clichés, phrases in the air, and traditions,” as rhetorician James Porter claims.² Understood in its deconstructive mode, intertextuality functions in the absence of the author or addressee. Such a détournement makes Williams’s text come alive where we hear repeated snippets of voices, plainly in focus, in spite of their decontextualized utterances. “home alone”/ “I get the picture”/ “little slut”/ “’hoo dis?’”

At play here is precisely the interval breaching the first ball of sound and its reverberating echo we catch down the line. In other words, the force that propels the iterated language, keeps it aloft along the poem’s arc, and reinhabits it, is nothing but revelation, in the sense that the repetition ushers in a difference, an admission of faktura, a process, a making, read poesis. When we can no longer answer “who says this?” we find ourselves inside a text. According to Roland Barthes, écriture starts precisely there.

Within the formal procedures of Stilettos it is Williams’s paradigmatic extensions which help us tether certain key thematics and offer a point of convergence in this multi-voiced collection. Whether we follow the chain box/room/tomb; cell/sanctuary/confessional box; or tornado/ avalanche/earthquake/tsunamis, we stay attuned to these loops and relays that direct our interpretive axis in poems which mostly dispense with referential certainty, as they favor the sheer melos and energy field of poetic language.

One particular strain to track for its humor and ludic potential is Williams’s use of libidinal torques and puns, charging the verse with little tableaux vivants that parcel out their erotic content with mordant immediacy. From “when all wont to do is text / or sext / u up” to “when she came too—come-cum-come” to “lists, tilts / a slit—ankle to vulva—” to “the whole-- / suspended—he-bang” to “Pop-up nipple / Dot t & a” to “two- / piece bikini atoll” and “heads in laps / lap all m / orality,” the poems tease us with intimate frames, where the body opens up to the crush of desiring machines. In his most helpful author’s note, Williams shares his fascination with film noir’s trope of the femme fatale and attempts to draw connections between these Hollywood figures and the real flesh and blood Black women he knew in Detroit: “The femmes fatales resembled in their behavior and attitudes the Black girls and women I grew up with and around—not only family, schoolmates, and friends but also the anonymous young Black women I observed hanging out in malls and on street corners.” That the slingbacks Lauren Bacall wears in The Big Sleep can dovetail with Stilettos’s “fuck-me heels” suggests a gender account that is constructed out of spare parts that require maintenance and faith in the sexy surplus of such getups. Those carnal signifiers so integral to the patriarchal alphabet are fabricated here not so much in a strict equivalence but instead as a way to “pimp” the scene: quote, strip and re/site.

Needless to say, having been duly cued by the preface, we recognize Richard Pryor’s ghost in some of the raunchier riffs: “Alert: poontag on the lam.”

The first section of the book is entitled “The Cincinnati Poems,” which comprises a lyric cartography of Cincinnati, New York, Terre Haute and Detroit, cities that trace lines of flight and return for Tyrone Williams, autobiographical subject. Not only do these metropolitan centers signal a speaker geolocated with striking precision: Belle Isle, Detroit; Tuxedo Park, NY; Good Samaritan Hospital or Forty Thieves Restaurant in Queen City, but, in addition to threading an authenticity effect, they stamp an emotional trajectory onto these life stations. Like running your fingertips along a beloved’s cheekbone, the text returns to the d, the strait, the lost object, even if its autodiegetic narrator only dreams of leaving one day: “gotta git outta did dump cincinasti…”

Another kind of decoding, a larger, radical angle on the place names needs to be spelled out here. Williams does not hesitate to evoke the legacy of racial discrimination when wittingly and semiotically, he titles a poem, “Reading Ohio.” The lack of the expected comma telegraphs the poet’s didactic impulse, which results in a quick historical aperçu—the attentive reader produces—of Reading as a sundown town, prohibiting its African American inhabitants from remaining there after dark. Similarly, a riot of a poem called “At the Glass Menagerie in Cincinnati” dredges up the ugly past in Covington, KY, where a popular restaurant and cocktail bar with the same name was legally found guilty of denying access to its Black patrons. Williams’s language anchors questions of location without disavowing the US’s abominable history of prejudice and inequity.

It will surprise no one to notice the presence of defamiliarizing devices as part of Williams’s artistic practice. Having little patience for the well-crafted poem assumed by “official verse culture, with its restricted vocabulary, neutral and univocal tone in the guise of voice or persona, grammar-book syntax, received conceits, static and unitary form,” as Charles Bernstein dubs it, Williams delights in literally disarranging and deforming in order to prolong the act of perception. A quick glance at three titles will suffice to register such playful swerves the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky calls ostranenie: “Filigustbuster,” “Tsariana,” and “Connipniption.” In these estranged language forms, the reader will groove to the wild nuptials, say, between a legislative filibuster and the crazy antics of Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray of Ghostbusters, or a tsariana and an aria, or yet, conniption as flash of anger and an extra pin or nip or PNI, some kind of navigation point. The upshot of such linguistic shenanigans consists in drenching the lyric with the materiality of the signifier, being made aware of its excess, its aural key, its own raison d’être. Such intrinsic tilting toward the ludic flow accords with Williams’s standing as a fellow-traveler of the Language school and brings to mind Harryette Mullen’s work, especially in Trimmings and Muse and Drudge, where her lyric glides from one pitch to another in a kind of sonic erotics: “Akimbo bimbos, all a jangle. Tricked out trinkets, aloud / galore. Gimcracks, a stack. Bang and a whimper. Two to / tangle. It’s a jungle.”³

Like winning Wordle on the first or second turn, what is utterly impressive in this collection has to do with the ways the poet reconceives the presence of vernacular voices, which at times attach to certain subject positions, but more often than not, go beyond specific personae and instead sharpen the full-throated song at hand. The inscription into some of these poems of the vernacular mode is a mechanism for stressing the inventiveness, humor and heart-tone of such a communication act. Supremely mobile, supple and rhythmic, Black vernacular imbues a sparkle of recognition—been there, done that—and combines sonically with the text’s other strands to create that fundamental heteroglossic effect responsible for tension or collaboration. Williams’s poetics synthesize the plurality of discourses to break open its normative univocity.

In the final analysis, Stilettos tenders a sound Commons for a modern poetic practice.

Lastly, I would be remiss not to take notice of Williams’s title which seems to conform to surrealist logic where the greater the distance between two juxtaposed realities, the stronger the image. ⁴ But beyond this surrealist provenance which might situate a firing range for practicing rifle shooting—or even better, the distance covered by a bullet—on one hand, and a pair of spike heels on the other, it is the metonymic slippage which retains us. Where is the shooter? Where is the stiletto wearer? Cherchez la femme, my friends. Could it be, d, bereaved?

Chris Tysh

Detroit, May 2024

1. As Jay Parini reminds us in Some Necessary Angels (Columbia University Press, 1997).
2. James Porter, “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community.” Rhetoric Review 5.1 (1986); 34-47 pp.
3. Harryette Mullen, Trimmings, Tender Buttons, 1991, p. 45
4. André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism. “The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born out of a mere comparison but only through the bringing together, the juxtaposition, of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be – the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.”  http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/andre-breton-manifesto-of-surrealism