Optic Subwoof

What we say we recognize when we see ourselves seeing ourselves …

YOU BETTER HUSH

BLACKTRACKING A VISUAL POETICS

For Chaun Webster, Airea D. Matthews, Tarik Dobbs, emi anne kuriyama, Evie Shockley, Michael Demps, giovanni singleton, Gail Swanlund, and Brooke&Brick

Hush.

It rushes in from out the tape hiss thicket, a sibilant imitation of silence, the fecund dark where a sonic world is sung into being. The choir breaks the hush for to hush it. What loud silence is commanded here?

A piano drags in its Achord an instant behind hush’s exhalation, making like sound has a shadow. Then, the aural field fills with the downbeat of beatdown footfalls, a four-on-the-floor stomp conjures ground down in this sudden world. These pulses spread wide the rhythm’s generosity, its plentitude; the good mess of grace notes pulling and pushing what’s lockstepped along, a long way from home to get to where we are.

Hush.

Now with an tolls the piano, the Wattsline Choir under James Cleveland keeping on. That sung chord’s demand bends over the onomatopoeic order, calls shape to a vocal study in progress. The marched cadence against the stage whispered hush bids for quiet maneuvers in the cut. The congregants’ movement must needs stay a rushed hush-hush. And doesn’t the composition and vocal timbre tell us the chorus is a congregation? Harmonies familiar to the Gospel listener, a texture of Black legibility, the tugged glissando of the curved blue note.

And because Hush, Hush, Somebody’s Calling My Name—a traditional song Quincy Jones arranged for an album inspired by Roots, the TV miniseries adapted from Alex Haley’s book—those who recognize are meant to recognize that to hush one’s steps, one’s voice, one’s prayer is to keep Death at bay. That to travel dark is to travel in darkness when one petitions for godspeed, going on the hush to the hush harbor, those holy hollows where Black people could worship in secret. Hush. Where, once there, one might hear:

Somebody’s calling my name.

And when we come to know that this Somebody sounds like Jesus, this song, in the context of a group both haunted and hunted, conducts a study of hush and utterance’s conundrum among the dark surveilled:

That one requires the silence of hush’s harbor to keep one’s flesh from death, but you’ll break that silence to hear the call to a spiritual life.

What shall I do, Oh Lord,

What shall I do?

This lecture is about the noise that calls itself quiet.

This lecture is about meaning to harbor sounds of Black life in an insistent hush.

And because this lecture insists on sound Black life, it’s about what it means to be cut from one context then recontextualized in another.

So:

This lecture calls itself tracing a line through collage as congregants may sing in study of quiet.

Hush, hush, again and again.

This lecture flashes what I mean to conceal when I plan to hush in plain sight, to be in the cut in the cuts that compose the poems that cleave and cleave to my previous visual poetry.

This lecture? It’s about loud-assed, colored silence.

I once led a course where we searched for chimes between literature and hip-hop studio production techniques. An idea my students and I worked at in the first weeks was voice as a signal of Blackness’s presence rather than the presence of Blackfolx themselves.

We played tracks featuring methods and textures of Black vocal performances—rap flows saturated with regional drip, chopped soul hooks, melismatic R & B runs, Trap’s disembodied ad-libs. I described how these locate Blackness as matter, material like burnt cork, ready to be put onto any song, any genre. Key to this idea is that Black voice/voicing becomes a metonym for Black people; we are associated with certain techniques such that they may come to stand in for us. Say: urban or soulful. This is proxy shit, part and parcel byproduct of slavery’s forced import and exploitation’s steady unbalanced export in a marketplace defined by misappropriation. The extracted voice-cum-Blackness gets packaged and shipped on some Henrietta Lacks: detached from its hush-hush source.

Leaning into the contemporary, we traced a run that included Roger Troutman’s talk-box vox, Electro’s vocoders, and Auto-Tune, a pitch corrector developed by Antares. These devices of articulation haven’t the same long history of Black coding as blued notes or the rasp what turns singing to sangin. So, in changing the texture of Black vocality, these technologies unsettle ideas of audible Blackness from their not so distant pasts. Auto-Tune’s forcible corrections high-step over the bent, blued note, turning it from a slide to a chromed-out stairway. This is a serious sonic break in aesthetics. To parse it, I might-could adapt writer/theorist Kodwo Eshun’s suggestion that crate-digging, samplecoveting, hip-hop beatsmiths aren’t necessarily devoted musicologists but impatient with all that isn’t groove. Perhaps the cut notes in an Auto-Tuned glissando might suggest a means to teleport past a traditionally sidling singing voice. From scholar and theorist Alexander Weheliye, I could call it "[reconstruction of] the black voice in relation to information technologies." And Auto-Tune in contemporary Black music is Afrofuturist under filmmaker/multimedia artist Cauleen Smith’s rubric: it reckons with technology, reinvention, and motion.

The uncanny valley of pitch-corrected vocals associates easily with cybernetics. Posthumanity? A twenty-first-century cyborg, sure. But also: Black people as automata is a foundational (mis)reading of our activities. A shallow-ass deepfakkke in which the Black singing voice been an emotional prosthesis for whiteness. Its performance of sonic plentitude some aural comfort food. A signal of being taken higher, taken there, somewhere transcendent, or below woe into a drylongso Hell.

In my work, I’ve meant to mess with this marvel; being a Black poet bid to sing. To hush, without voicing Hush. To forestall a death varietal by way of a silence. Which is to say, I’ve tried to compose poems I cannot read aloud. To re-rig a visual poetics into legit, loud-assed colored silences.

What is a loud-assed colored silence?

I figure it as a teeming field of language. A radio station that thinks it’s a photograph, a collage that wants to be a palimpsest, a pen nib in the eye—poking it or jutting from it. At least that’s what the loud-assed colored silences were meant to be.

I wrote seven of them for my collection Buck Studies. Booming System aka Miranda Rizights, Scat, Beat Music, Human Beatbox, Modernism, Moan, and Protest. Each, save That Loud-Assed Colored Silence: Modernism, nods toward a mode of utterance associated with Black culture. This is not to say that Black culture has no reflections in Modernism, only that one might not begin from the grounds that Modernism is, from jump, about sound.

Loud-Assed Colored Silence poems work a number of compositional techniques I’ve been at since I started my performative typography poems. In her essay Trauma and the Avant-Garde, poet and critic Sueyeun Juliette Lee describes the series in general and That Loud-Assed Colored Silence: Protest in particular:

Presented as collaged torn and layered text with various white-outs, font sizes, and overwrites, these works are visually loud in a way that conjures layers of posters lining public walkways in metropolitan downtowns.… They confront the reader, asking them to abandon a conventional understanding of how a poem should appear on the page. These works invoke graphic design and literature.

In That Loud-Assed Colored Silence: Protest, Kearney directly references and protests the surplus of signification that is blackness. If we imagine this work in visual layers, the base or farthest background layer references the famous civil rights protest song, We shall overcome someday. However, the lyrics have been transformed—some of the parts that are legible read, We are overcome. We are all afraid. The next layer appears in the largest font of the piece; AIN’T I AN AM? I AIN’T WHAT! and I CAN’T AIN’T! are further emphasized by their placement in rectangular boxes.

The next layer up is composed of permutations of the now nationally recognized campaign and hashtag #BLACKLIVESMATTER, but transposed as #BLACKLIVESSTUTTER, #BLACKLIVESSTAMMER, #BLACK-LIVESYAMMER, and #BLACKLIVESMUTTER.

I composed these poems (except, again, Modernism) using page-layout software. In nearly all cases (Beat Music being the only poem using the torn images Lee describes), I worked exclusively by typing into then arranging text boxes I planted in the poem’s open field. The typeface I selected for the body text of the Loud-Assed Colored Silence series was the same as the more conventionally formatted poems in Buck Studies. At the time, I thought this consistency would guide readers to keep reading rather than switch to looking.

This anxiousness around whether my poems would be read versus looked at has been a part of my poetics for some time. But it wasn’t until 2019 that I gained a more precise vocabulary with which to deheebie my jeebies.

In the fall of that year, poet and scholar Evie Shockley convened Color Inside the Lines at Rutgers. In this symposium, participants assembled to discuss Visuality and Visibility of Race in Poetry. As defined by Shockley:

Visuality [is] formal aesthetic choices that draw poetry on matters of race and ethnicity into a prioritized relation with visual culture or the visual field. Visibility [is] cultural legibility and social representation (how race and ethnicity might be discernibly present in the work, for actual or potential audiences).

Visibility, it seems to me, corresponds to reading. Visuality, to looking.

As a Black person in a space, I recognize my visibility, the uttered hush of it. That I am (mis)read as a present absence/absent presence: I am simultaneously here, a particular flesh and blood human; yet the materiality of Blackness absents me as a specific presence. That I am visible when an eye needs me to be where I’m wanted for my unwantedness and invisible whenever I’m not needed. I imagined the visuality of the Loud-Assed Colored Silence poems would drive readers to more actively read what’s visible, drawing them in by recalibrating legibility, performing a kind of typographic shimmy. I think they’ve done that.

However, I also hoped they would displace my body from spaces where its legibility gets recalibrated by others. And they might have done!

But my simple ass decided to read them aloud.

And, in voicing them, I rendered them scores, undoing their resolution as visualities. They were not complete until I performed them, which amplified my visibility. Every collaged voice becomes additional fleshing—my throat rasps, my diaphragm announces itself by way of sustained sounds, my head ticks to render mechanical repetitions, spit flies from my mouth. Yet, these techniques, meant to perform collage as a vocal mode, tears at the edges of my (lyric) particularity.

Here I was, meaning to be in the cut, only to start cutting up.

The history of the African diaspora is one in which brutal decontextualization followed by violent recontextualization are the start of our what had happened was. What is it to reckon with what it is to be displaced then re-placed only ever as out of place unless we’ve been put in our place?

This forced movement is similar to collage, a mode of production I have long found fascinating. Perhaps because it seems to chime with an idea of Black subjectivity. Perhaps it was once mere coincidence. Though for nearly thirty years, collage has been, for me, a methodology, a praxis.

Last year, however, I came out the shower, thinking on this section of this lecture. I was standing in steam, daydreaming some insight about collage. Instead, I came up with the merely provocative—

Humanity’s first encounter with collage was death.

And even this was not what I legit thought. Death isn’t necessarily worked since death can happen without a consciousness arranging it, a presence that seemed a requirement of art, which was where