19 NAMES FOR OUR BAND by
JIBADE-KHALIL HUFFMAN
reviewed by BRETT PRICE

 

 

Fence Books. 2008.

           

I first heard about Jibade-Khilil Huffman in the summer of 2007 when he gave a reading to about 9 or 10 people at Bard College in a small dorm lounge.  He had a relaxed confidence in his voice and I remember being relentlessly surprised by the sudden shifts his poems took as he read.  I asked him to send me some work and what I ended up getting was a longer poem called “At Least the Muses,” which makes up the fourth and final section of his debut book 19 Names for Our Band.  I’ve looked for his poems in journals ever since and was happy to hear that Fence would publish his book earlier this year.
19 Names for Our Band is long (especially for a first book), weighing in at 117 pages.  And it’s filled to the brim with wonky lists, stray quotations, homage and allusions, and revamped poetic and musical forms.  Yet it’s largely anchored by eight prose poems, all called “Very Early in the Life of Jerome,” that appear regularly in the middle two sections of the book. 
Jerome is a strange character, rich with idiosyncrasies that unfold with each new poem.  “This year I will enter a beauty pageant and start courting a boy who calls me his little big mouth bass and I have many loafers, a pair for every occasion.”  This is just the beginning.  Although sometimes it’s unclear whether or not he is the speaker or the spoken about, what does become clear is that the situations evoked by the poems are often absurd and fun to imagine.  Observe:

…As for insisting that I’ve never looked better than when I had a cold and it appeared I was crying, I will say that you never looked better than when you told me you didn’t live here and that man pointing the gun at me wasn’t one of your relatives. (Very Early… iii)

or

…He has to turn me over and introduce me to the floor.  The floor is sometimes carpeted and sometimes his brother James commands his dogs to tear out the carpet and bring it to him at home.  Then this is replaced and James uses those swaths not everywhere destroyed to sniff, to get the dogs to go back and sometimes they attack the wrong place and take the shoelaces of the faculty of the middle school. (Very Early…v)

These poems (Very Early in the Life of Jerome) also read sometimes as parables.  I think of Kafka’s shorter short stories when I read sentences like “Regarding mischief, of an orphanage vanished from dry land, one can say he hates the placement of dirt on top of the city, but that he loves the dirty men who are its inhabitants” (Very Early…vi).  This seems to be much less about a specific city, or the specific inhabitants of that city, but about the conundrum maybe we all feel sometimes of hating the less attractive habits or behaviors of a culture, while simultaneously loving those within whom they inevitably manifest. 
Many of the poems in the book straddle this territory between the general and the specific, the metaphoric and the concrete.  “Framework,” one of my favorite poems in the book is an exploration/demonstration of the complicated and fractured structures through which one might either come to understand one’s identity, or find the task impossible.  It also, however, takes up the topic of poetry or a specific kind of poem and so the relationship between self and poem becomes blurred as well.  “Framework” is a space in which the odd concoctions and variations of history and memory are made visible.  Here are the last four stanzas:

Tract house poems are
not about suburbia they are not titled thrush

they are framed by subject
as outline for
specific plant growth
certain color and
scope, shape of dress

concentricity and
enjambed
general assembly of
staves rocking into ropes “with certain

persons hanging.”

The last two stanzas are especially double edged.  On one hand, this could be read as an ars poetica, a description of the kind of poems in the book and, in many ways, it’s an accurate one.  It makes a lot of the same moves that the other poems make, while calling attention to those moves in the process.  And the book is littered with the names of other writers and artists (“…certain// persons hanging”).  However, on the other hand it also evokes some extremely severe aspects of American history.  I can’t help but think of lynch mobs and hangings.  Huffman manages to articulate the immensity of the personal by highlighting certain threads of history and making audible the reverberations of that history now.  The poems at once show the “persons” that voluntarily or consciously influence them, while at the same time, expose what “persons” and events perhaps involuntarily influence them.
Much of this book also bring to mind the painter Mark Bradford, in whose works the power seems to arise out of the tension between collage and painting, high and low gesturing, and the elaborately complex intertwining of surfaces and depths. 
Similarly, what I find most interesting about 19 Names for Our Band is Huffman’s ability to bring seemingly disparate subjects and objects into association without submitting to the ever-present temptation of over-determining their relationship.
I was trying to describe the book to a friend of mine the other night and found it extremely difficult to answer his question: “what are the poems about?”  Eventually I had to just say, “read the book.” Part of this difficulty comes from the poems’ inherent resistance to paraphrase.  Though they are filled with objects and events that refer to a world outside of their own particular compositional make-up, ultimately their specific charge comes from their refusal to ride solely on the energy of the objects/events from which they draw or to which they refer.  I’m reminded here of Olson’s idea of the poem as a “high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge.”   Maybe it’s useful to quote Creeley from a small essay called To Define I found in Donald Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry:

A poetry denies its end in any descriptive act, I mean any act which leaves the attention outside the poem.  Our anger cannot exist usefully without its objects, but a description of them is also a perpetuation.  There is that confusion --one wants the thing to act on, and yet hates it.   Description does nothing, it includes the object, -- it neither hates nor loves.        

I don’t mean to bind this book to any particular poets or ideas of poetry, but it’s important to emphasize how well Huffman uses history and certain traditions as a ground from which to deviate.  And the poems certainly do deviate.
The sentence vs. line dynamic in these poems remind me a lot of Creeley in the way that the sense or significance of a sentence is often undermined by the sense of a line, making actual the inherent conflict of the subject at hand.  However, Huffman’s sentences don’t so much unfold as they do morph.  Often, a sentence will travel the entire length of a page more like a quickly-shifting river suddenly supplied with too much rain water, than a canal flowing through its pre-dug course.
The title poem of the book, a numbered (1-19) list of potential band names beginning with “Handjob” and ending with “and bribed will never say them,” reminds me of Ted Berrigan’s “The Ten Greatest Books of the Year” poems or Alice Notley’s “The Ten Best Issues of Comic Books.”  Huffman’s list is far from straightforward though.  The trajectory of syntax begun in many of the lines carries over to the following line, but the logic is often indeterminate and constantly disrupted by the numbers, which serve as markers to separate the lines, despite their syntactical coherence.  Here are numbers 6, 7, and 8 from the poem:

6.     Underwater is
7.     An invitation to compare the incomparable tone of a Kohler and
        Campbell with any other piano.
8.     Adult dog is the new unicorn.

A huge strength of this book is that even with all its associative and syntactical shifts and jolts, one can always follow the richness of the music.  “Diamond Zones” is a poem in which I found myself lulled much more by the sounds than the subject matter:

…after the
dinner mint

plate cleared away, while
others still in need of
obedience, seeming
in thumbs trapped
under fallen 
of flake of ledge.
For the sake of

good planning
I have never once traced
the bullet to its beginning
as a stopper in a jar….

I felt similarly about the poem “You just have to go down a flight of stairs….”  Though, in it, Huffman uses repetition not only to build a musicality that continually thrusts the poem quickly forward, but also, it seems, to bring closer the gap between intention and action.  In other words, “You just have to go down a flight of stairs/ and go down a flight of stairs….”  Plus, a reference to Williams’ poem “This Is Just to Say” makes a tongue and cheek appearance:

…And
you have to wait by a dock and
hook sand from out of the bottom

you have to hook sand from out of the bottom
and you only have to
color your lips with music
and loads plums into the icebox.

19 Names for Our Band is continually insightful, innovative, and surprising.  It’s definitely one of the best books I’ve read this year.  I’ll end with a quote from “Palimpsest” that does a pretty good job of describing the reading experience:

…Brought

of the current
by no means
which were fabrics

of other uses
yet walled water, yet
lip-synched, the Holy

Ghost catches you
and you fall down.