makalani bandele : part five

What do you find most difficult about writing poetry?

The most difficult thing about writing poetry is finding the time I need to devote to it. All the research and background reading, listening, and watching that the poem requires is time-consuming, and I often do not get the chance to write a lot of poems because of this process. I am looking forward to winning some more residencies so I will have time and isolation necessary to give all the attention required to come up with ~10 poems and invent a new poetic form.

makalani bandele : part four

How important is music to your poetry?

Music, particularly jazz, is foundational for the poems I write. Which is not to say that The Blues, Jazz, Soul, and Hip Hop musics don’t also find ways to slip into my poems. I developed an intimate connection to African American music as a child listening to the Hard Bop and Soul music my parents played at parties they held at our home. My poetics are largely made up of an experiment to try to capture and contain the nuance of the African American worldview and arts of African American speech and music within a nice, tight poetic line. One of my primary concerns when writing poems is how do I make this funky. I mean to write poems that boogie. I do not limit the way a poem can boogie to its rhythm or sonority; I also consider how an idea or series/collage of images might excite the reader’s imagination to dance. Thus, I tend toward lyricism as opposed to narrative. When I work narratively, it’s the way a bluesman would with a flow of images, a myriad of inferences, and quite bit of disjunction. 

With a new form I invented called ‘the unit” it is made clear how I sometimes even use music to construct the form and ethos of the poetics I am working in. “the unit” is a prose poem form I invented to explore the boundaries of language, syntax, form, and musicality in poetry. It was inspired by virtuoso pianist Cecil Taylor’s groundbreaking 1966 album, Unit Structures in so far as it desires to embody the feel of collective improvisation encountered in Free Jazz as a poetics. Even as a prose form, “the unit” approaches the lyric with the precision and abandon of an instrumentalist free improvising. The unit form attempts to imitate (or model) the musical conversation the instruments enjoy in Free Jazz as it is not bound by corresponding rhythms, same time signatures, conventional melody, or harmonics. What this produces in poetic terms is a collage of non-sequiturs, discordant images, and re or de-contextualized clichés. 

makalani bandele : part three

How does a poem begin?

In every possible way imaginable. The inspiration for a poem can come from some detail I catch in nature or a social setting. It can come from something I am reading, or a frame from movie I am watching. A poem can begin from an old note or phrase I wrote down that I discover going over my notes. A poem may find its generation in conversation I overhear or the inspiration to write a poem in a form I haven’t tried or don’t feel I have enough practice in. I see sitting down to just write when I don’t have a specific poem idea as an exercise that doesn’t always produce a finished poem, but inevitably parts and pieces of future poems. I feel like I am always writing poems, I am just at various stages in the “completion” of poems.

makalani bandele : part two

What are you working on?

Among several things I am really excited about, one is a collaborative project I am working on with a Free Jazz musician/composer and a videographer. Often collaborative efforts produce artwork that is not democratic or organic. One discipline takes centerstage and commands more of the audience’s attention. Though somewhat unavoidable in the intermixing of mediums, there is an added layer of inequality when the mediums are operating in different modes (i.e., Jazz with narrative poem, where the lyric less music becomes little more than background sound for the narrative). In this collaboration, all the mediums operate under the principle of abstraction—detail without context. The visual language in the video will be brief, disparate shots; each poem will be a series of non-sequiturs; and the music will be free improvisation. Have you ever heard of a multimedia abstract piece? What we are creating are highly interpretive constructions where non-linear conversation is taking place between 3 disciplines in one work of art. Within the piece, sometimes it is working like three monologues, sometimes you get an a to b conversation with two mediums while the third is having a monologue, and finally you get moments when it feels like all three are in conversation. What is beautiful about it is that where people see the conversations and connections will be different for each person. I love when works of art are open enough for people to have multiple points of entry.

makalani bandele : part one

makalani bandele is an Affrilachian Poet. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation, Millay Colony, and Vermont Studio Center. Currently a candidate for the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Kentucky, bandele’s work has been published in several anthologies and widely in literary journals. The author of hellfightin’ and under the aegis of a winged mind, awarded the 2019 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, poems from under the aegis have been published in Prairie Schooner, 32poems, and North American Review. His latest manuscript, vandals of knock city, consists entirely of his invented form “the unit” and poems from this unpublished collection have been published or are forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, The Common, Inverted Syntax, and A Dozen Nothing.

photo credit: Andre Howard

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?

I love this question because I can give a very straightforward answer. Fred Moten. I was hipped to Moten’s work by a poet named Randall Horton. It was around 2010 and he was editing my first collection hellfightin’ as an editor at Willow Books/Aquarius Press and he suggested I check out Moten based on what he saw me trying to do in my work in hellfightin’. When I tell you it changed everything for me as a poet, I do not exaggerate. I am pretty sure the first Moten poem I read was the salve trade. It completely blew me away, it simultaneously made me want to stop writing and write a poem right then and there. For the first time, I felt like I heard a poet speak in their authentic, complicated black self in multiple ways that intersected with my own voice, interests, and experience. Moten’s use of black vernacular, imagery from black social life, Jazz references, engaging of post-modern philosophy, and signifying on the Western worldview and philosophy resonated on all levels with my own being and poetics. In encountering Moten, I heard myself and yet also what I wanted to be and strive toward. Moten’s work was entirely liberating for me, because I realized that a big problem with my work was that I was trying to curate all the voices and discourses coursing through my work into a coherent, linear meaning. It just ended up being a jumbled mess that made sense to me, but left most readers lost as to what the meaning was. Moten taught me that I am too complicated and complex to pack neatly in a box and put on bow on it. I began to employ parataxis, non-sequitur, and troubling/complicating of meaning in my work. It has created multiple valences in my work and more ways-in for readers to have fun in the playground of possible meanings that I have created. Now I feel like I can get all my complicated selves in a poem, and not intend specific meanings in the work, but instead be attentive to the possible meanings while trying to create space for evermore possible interpretations.