Morris/Williams

Daniel Morris

Calling, Being Called, and Calling Back
in Tyrone Williams' c.c.


Tyrone Williams chose c.c. as the provocative title for his debut full-length poetry book in 2002. In a cover photograph featuring the author’s face, Williams’ mouth is closed, but he stares back at the reader, as if returning a summons into subjectivity: Hey you! Who are you? (The title to Section Five of c.c. is, in fact, “Who Is It”). [1] As section titles “Calling Cards,” “Called Card,” and Cold Calls” indicate, Williams’ volume concerns being called and calling back, but c.c. is not an invocation of immediate orality. Imagining the lyric voice as a trace of graphic textuality, Williams in c.c. calls back to a critical apparatus for contemporary Black poetics that Aldon Nielsen refers to as the “nearly hegemonic assumptions about the nature of the relationship between African-American oral traditions and writing, with a clear privilege given to the prevailing ideal of the oral” (24).[i]   At the same time, by publishing c.c. with Krupskaya, a leading Bay Area independent press associated with the Language movement, Williams is calling back to a group of formalistically progressive (open form) poets who, following Cathy Park Hong’s critique, did not emphasize racial justice in its inaugural period. By calling back to both “African-American oral traditions and writing” and to Bay Area Language poets, Williams self-consciously engages with theorists such as Derrida and Benjamin, who regard belated writing as a form of translation. Literature, for Williams, as for Derrida and Benjamin, is full of potential. It is always a form of translation of prior texts and thus always exhibits the connections between writing and the “afterlife.”[2]

Williams’ title challenges the reader to translate the repetition of a letter and a dot into metonymic signs for communication forms that are implied, but, for the most part, hidden.   We cannot avoid the observation that although the poet is interested in reception as a form of call and response, he is also aware that his desire for recognition by an audience as a “voice” worth hearing – or as a “voice” even able to be heard by others -- will not be a straightforward transaction between writer and reader. Rather, the response to his intensely mediated call will require special efforts by readers to decipher the significance of his call. [3] An African American poet who focuses on the material fact of the open form text, rather than imagining his text as a transparent transcription of orality, we can appreciate why Williams would be concerned with reception. Whereas Lorenzo Thomas has argued that “visibility [for a Black poet] depends upon the emergence of an aesthetic or political program that provides a convenient rubric or perhaps a fortunate commercial interest” (Thomas, 222), Williams’ poetics defies affiliation with a “convenient rubric.”   Writing poetry that refuses, in the words of Allison Cummings, to choose between two “artistic imperatives– to write the revolution or to write the process of linguistic revolution” that, she adds, “have often been felt as competing, contradictory demands,” Williams, however obliquely, documents persons, events, movements, and experiences associated with 20th century African American political, economic, athletic, legal, religious, gustatory, musical, and literary activity (Cummings, 4). At the same time, his poetry courts personal invisibility by engaging with a formalistically progressive literary movement – the Bay Area Language movement -- that, following Park Hong, did not emphasize racial justice.

c.c. displays far more white space per page than printed text, but erasures, absences, and the unsaid may, of course, be read as bearing meaning. The long section called “Cold Call,” for example, consists of fifteen pages of footnotes appearing on the bottom of pages that are, otherwise, blank. Do we read whiteness as blankness, or as that which need not be stated, because assumed to be the case in the first place? c.c. verges on weightlessness. It is spectral, ghostlike. A heavy text that weighs in at 95 pages, c.c. is, nonetheless, “difficult” in Charles Bernstein’s sense of Language-type poetry that resists consumption. [4] What language there is in c.c. is splayed all over the page as if language were a visual manifestation of historiographical rupture. (The final section of the book, called “tag,” suggests graffiti, a children’s game in which someone is “it,” and a slip of paper on which to list the price of an item for sale.) If c.c.’s front cover image frames the poetry to come as uttered by an African American male author in early middle age, the back cover frames the poetry that has come before as a contribution to the “afterlife” of Bay Area Language-oriented poetics circa 1975. Framed between covers that send out contradictory messages to the reader, how closely are we to align the poetry with the author’s subject position? Following Harryette Mullen’s critique of the assumption that “’avant-garde’ poetry is not ‘black’” and that “’black’ poetry is not formally innovative,” c.c. is simultaneously a work of African-American historiography and a Language-oriented exploration in writing beyond, after, before, or other than an expression of a speaker’s unmediated “voice.”[5] “Double consciousness gets swept aside/by polyentendres, duck-rabbits, wavicles. /Neither waving nor drowning, we tread water/like a page turning in a book,” writes Williams in “I Am Not Proud To Be Black” from a section called “Who Is It.” The passage invokes the legendary concept from The Souls of Black Folk (1903) in which Du Bois argues that the selves of “Black Folk” are split through white interpellation: “the sense of looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” At the same time, Williams replaces Du Bois’s reading of African-American alienation as a calcified interpretation of race relations while signaling affiliation with a principle of avant-garde representation: the undecidable relationship between sign and signification. As Williams stated in an interview with Joshua Marie Wilkinson, the poet’s work is “a critique of calcification in all its modes – the objective/subjective divide, class/coterie scales, the construction of race and ethnicity according to a biologism dependent on an absolute nature/nurture distinction.” “I Am Not Proud To Be Black” differs through negation from James Brown’s Black Power hit “"Say It Loud ~ I'm Black & I'm Proud” (1968). In Williams’ poem, there is no immediate lyric “I” to announce racial pride ala James Brown. In fact, there is no “speaker” to say anything, much less to say it “loud.” A dazzling array of repurposed écriture, “I Am Not Proud To Be Black” is an exceedingly allusive and exceedingly elusive, fifteen-part sonnet like sequence. The form refers, ironically, to the quintessential European poetic structure for lyric expression: the sonnet.   In a style that Henry Louis Gates might describe as signifying, the poem refers to “white” canonical authors such as Shakespeare (“suffer the slings/and arrows of et tu transfiguration” [67]), T.S. Eliot (“narcotic nonsense, never to wake us” [64]), Milton (“Yet we cannot simply stand and wait/for deliverance [63]) and the previously quoted Stevie Smith, whose contribution refers back to Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat.” “I Am Not Proud to Be Black” is, self-consciously, composed of “variegated vectors, these conflicting and overlapping methods” (61).

Discussing Erica Hunt, Harryette Mullen, and Gwendolyn Brooks as African American women poets who write poetry that emphasizes graphic texture, Allison Cummings notes that “where the Black Arts movement and much poetry influenced by it called for audiences to recognize a new racial pride and a coherent group identity, poststructuralist writing, language writing, and poetry in their wake called for readers to question the literary and linguistic formulations of identity, to distrust the ‘I,’ and to interrogate fictions of autobiographical progression, coherence, or consistency within subjectivity” (Cummings, 5). Incorporating elements of the Black Arts movement into his poststructuralist writing, Williams’ sonnet sequence reads like a zigzag, even inchoate, repetition of tag-like nods to 20th Century African-American cultures that signify Cummings’ “new racial pride and a coherent group identity.” Section Fourteen, for example, by itself lists the “Nation of Islam, Republic of New Africa, NAACP,/Congressional Black Caucus, talented tenths,” as well as “Moore v. Dempsey, Plessy v./Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, Shaw v. Reno” (72). The author does not tip his hand towards political preferences, distinctions of value, or his views on the relative merit of social, legal, intellectual, and political movements. On the one hand, the list includes 1969’s “Republic of New Africa,” which promoted separatism as its leaders “made plans for armed resistance and a prolonged guerrilla war.” [6] On the other hand, the reference to “Brown v. Board of Education” connotes mid-1950s’ integration and non-violent systemic revision of American race relations through legal means and legislative methods. The list portends a mood of what Williams, elsewhere in the poem, refers to as “sublime despair” (73).   I say “sublime despair” because his poem recites a litany of 20th Century headlines of hope for African-American emancipation from oppression, but also a collage of contradictory gestures that leave the “we” in a treading water situation -- “neither wave nor drowning.” In an essay consisting of a nuanced historical analysis of ambivalence towards communism among African-American intellectuals such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, Williams highlights Harold Cruse’s challenges to Civil Rights Movement integration including Cruse’s argument that integration destroyed Black Power and undermined the black underclass. Williams dismisses Du Bois because of what the poet elsewhere calls a calcified mode of seeing the world through a series of misleading binaries. In the interview with Wilkinson, however, Williams acknowledges the “paradox that political efficacy depends on blocs, groups, social formations […] must put up a common front of solidarity.” Disengaged from political efforts of a separatist or integrationist variety, the “we” attend to linguistic defamiliarization and remediation, rather than direct forms of political action: “we turn/the page. We begin outside the book/but the text is everywhere we turn,/a finishing fable” (60).

In the passage quoted above, and at other places in c.c. that reference everything from Pullman Porters to Black Panthers, “I Am Not Proud To Be Black” reads like a Black History Month highlight reel.   In terms of African-American literary aesthetics, the poem, similarly, pivots from the poetry of Ishmael Reed and Amiri Baraka to work by Anne Spencer and Robert Hayden. Williams cites “Those Winter Sundays” in c.c., a race-neutral memory poem about a son who never thanked his father for keeping the house warm and his son’s shoes polished before churchgoing. In “I Am Not Proud To Be Black” there are nods to non-violent civil rights activist Rosa Parks as well as Jamaican born Colin Ferguson, who murdered six on the Long Island Railroad in 1993. There is the story of the “glamorous,” but “broke” “showgirl” dancer Harriet Browne as well as a reference to O.J. Simpson as The Labors of Othello Simpson (66). All of it exists in a procedural web that we may read, as they are internal to the poem, as expressions of “disfigured hope” (60), or, else, as at another point, as cynical simulations of clichéd Black stylings: “But in what does this preservation/of African American culture consist? It can/hardly consist in anything more than eating/black-style food, listening to black-style music….” (71). Asserting “the text is everywhere we turn” in part two of the poem, Williams contributes to a revisionary historiography of Language poetics in its “afterlife.”

Born in Detroit, Michigan, where he would go on to earn three degrees in English at Wayne State, including the PhD in 199O for a dissertation on “Open and Closed forms in 20th Century American Poetics,” and a literature professor at Xavier in Cincinnati since 1987, Williams, as noted, has published his first poetry book with the distinguished Bay Area independent press Krupskaya in 2002. By publishing with Krupskaya, Williams is connecting his experience as an urban male African-American Midwestern author and teacher with a Bay Area cultural movement from the 1970s that critics have taken to task for racial insensitivity. Cathy Park Hong, for example, regards Language writing as part of an avant-garde that has been antithetical to identity politics to the point of insensitivity to the roles race, class, gender, and ethnicity play in the composition of a cultural imaginary that Language writers wished to upend through linguistic defamiliarization.[7] A translational rereading of Bay Area Language writing history, c.c. shares affinities with recent writing by Lyn Hejinian, who in “En Face” (2015) recalls the lacunae of race “back in the era of the long becoming of the Language writing movement” from about 1975 to 1990.   Acknowledging the importance of writers of color including Lorenzo Thomas, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen, Hejinian admits, “we [white Bay Area Language poets] thought and talked well about power structures, gender, capitalism, imperialism, and we spoke very little, if at all, about race.” One could say Williams’ volume serves as an announcement – his “calling card” – of his arrival Out West as a bona fide “difficult” poet. He is identifying, after all, with a publisher known for releasing books by (paradoxically) well-established language oriented white authors such as Judith Goldman, Kevin Killian, Rob Halpern, and Laura Moriarity.[8] Williams’ writing calls back to a racialized past in poems such as “Study of a Negro Head,” but also to a prior historicizing that imagined Language oriented writing as race-blind. His poetics recovers the fact that Language writing is, and has always been, inflected by an African-American aesthetics that preceded it. As Hejinian now acknowledges, Black Arts Movement poets influenced her work, as did authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, who, Hejinian notes, understood signifying in “Some Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934), “as a fundamental strategy for innovative and subversive language practices and first brought some of its usages to the attention of white readers.”[9] In her belated recovery of African-American contributions to Bay Area Language poetry, Hejinian, in 2015, attempts an act of ideological desublimation. Writing four decades after her initial contributions to the movement, her goal is to make apparent that which was always already there, but hidden from view: “it wasn’t because it [that is, ‘black American linguistic innovation’] wasn’t there.”   Like Hejinian, Williams revisions the Language movement by publishing with a Bay Area press in 2002. He is involved with the African and African-American traditions defined by Hurston in 1934 and Henry Louis Gates in 1988 as “signifying” – “formal revision that is at all points double-voiced” (Gates 26).[10] Williams’s poetics are doubles in the dizzyingly array of multiple senses that includes an indeterminate relationship between voicing and texting (Gates’s “Talking Book” as “the fundamental repeated trope of the black tradition” [45]).

Given that Williams challenges associations of Bay Area experimentalism with whiteness via the photograph of the African American male figure on the front cover of c.c., what to make of the fact that two white avant-gardists, Susan Howe and Nathaniel Tarn, endorse the book on the back cover?   Howe’s blurb mentions that Williams “explores the boundaries between poetry, politics, and history.” She leaves out the fact that Williams is a black man or that race is an overt issue in c.c.   Howe never mentions that c.c. deals with South African Apartheid, quotes a Dunbar poem in which the speaker cannot get his voice across in the poem, and collates “found” passages regarding a “Blonde Negress” at a museum with the first line of “The Dark Brother,” a sonnet by Lewis Alexander, which begins, “’Lo, I am black but I am comely too.’” (43). Howe doesn’t mention that c.c. pays “homage to Ola Mae Quarterman, a black civil right fighter” (95) (“Bottom Left Corner Folded ‘In’” (12), “Hayes Williams, one of the first prisoners whose conviction was overturned due to DNA technology” (“Upper Right Corner Folded ‘In’” (15), and to Arthur Bell, a former dancer with the New York City ballet who was found homeless on the streets of New York City” (“Upper Left Corner Folded ‘In’”[13-14], 95). Nor does she note a poem from the graffiti-type “Tag” section that ends the book, which alludes to “Strange Fruit” lynching. Tarn’s longer endorsement focuses on Williams’s tonal complexity, “formal invention,” invocation of “character,” and, in a nod to the language of race, claims Williams bridges a gap “above all between African American concerns and those of the plain vanilla majority.” Back cover endorsements are not book reviews, much less essays. Nonetheless, Howe’s omission of “African American concerns” and Tarn’s reading of Williams’s work, not as an expression of “African American concerns,” but rather as a halfway house – a mediatory “bridge” – between two racially encoded groups, are telling aporias on the book’s back cover that suggest the reception troubles Williams’s title has anticipated on the front cover. Howe and Tarn regard the relations between “caller” and “called” in c.c. as post-race or as an intervention in what Williams refers to as a “calcified” social world in which a “black” author expresses “concerns” to a “white” audience.

In its absence, Howe’s endorsement speaks to the avant-garde erasure of markers of subject position that Williams himself critiques in a boundary 2 essay from 1995. For Williams, formal inventiveness among African American poets has tended to be “invisible in American Literary History” because the focus has been on “thematic blackness” (128). Among the exceptions, Williams states, would be Ed Roberson, whose poems such as “Bird’s Blake,” which references Charlie Parker and William Blake, exist on the “margins” of a Black Arts movement “aesthetic criteria for authenticity” (128). Like Roberson in “First Person,” Williams throughout c.c. foregrounds what critic Tristram Wolff calls “the feeling of being watched by an outside eye” (553). Beyond “being watched,” Williams’ thoroughly mediated lyric “I” reflects the poet’s reframing of prior texts authored by other hands. Paradoxically, Williams’s “authenticity” appears to be the product of his creative refashioning of prior texts.   As Wolff notes in his essay on Blake and Roberson, the residue of Romanticism appears in Roberson in what he, Wolff, calls a “coeval” sensibility. By “coeval,” Wolff refers to multiple timeframes that inhabit the same space. In Williams’s case, a “coeval” poetics takes the form of hyper-referentiality. “Cold Calls,” for example, includes two pages of “End Notes” with fifteen citations. References range from poems by Dunbar and Claude McKay to poems by William Wordsworth and Miller Williams to critical texts including Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain to citations from The New York Times science section about how stars form from “surrounding gas clouds” (40).   Williams’ “coeval” poetics challenges “authenticity,” a conception of the relationship between lived experience and representation that Williams complicates, if not rejects. Williams connects Roberson’s poetry with language experimentalists and ethnopoets such as Robert Duncan, Jerome Rothenberg, Nathaniel Tarn, Nathaniel Mackey – queer, Jewish, black authors – who represent “several lines on inquiry” of which the quality of “ethnic/racial authenticity is only one part (129). Roberson is an important model for Williams in c.c. because the poet born in Pittsburgh in 1948 draws on the “limitless possibility in the sign systems, languages and art of any number of Western and non-Western cultures” (129). For Roberson, according to Williams, “blackness is not a fixed standard (biologically or culturally)” (132-3). As in his reading of Roberson and Erica Hunt, Williams is exploring concepts such as the marginal, the intersectional, the in-between, and a zone of uncertainty in his poetry. (133).

Comparable to poetry by Roberson and Hunt, c.c. is an avant-gardist project that emphasizes the inextricably intertwined relationships between race and representation. In the section entitled “Called Card,” for example, Williams foregrounds the problematic issue of how white Europeans represented and displayed African bodies in poems such as “Study of a Negro Head” and “El Negro.”   In “Additional Notes,” Williams notes that “’El Negro,’ more familiarly ‘El Negro of Banyoles,’ is the name given to the stuffed body of an African man displayed in Europe 1916-1917. In 1995 his remains were returned to Gabarone, Botswana. ‘Study of a Negro Head’ is the title of an Albrecht Durer drawing” (95). The identity of the sitter for “Negro Head” is unknown, but because Durer drew the image in 1508 during the period of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, commentators speculate that Durer may have met his subject when he visited Bellini in Venice, a port city. The Slave Trade tended to benefit Europeans through the importation of raw materials from the Americas, so it remains a mystery where Durer, the German, met his subject. http://cghs.dadeschools.net/african-american/europe/durer.htm.

“Study of A Negro Head” is difficult to unpack because it begins with an abstract, self-reflexive, and paradoxical reflection on the relationships between verb forms, language, image, reality, time, and history: “This recalls a future” (33).   Refraining from offering a typical ekphrastic translation of images into words, Williams’s elaborate attention to how grammar, and especially verb forms and tenses, shape the meaning of Durer’s drawing in words, indicates the poet’s understanding of writing as a creative response to representations in their “afterlife.” The first word in the poem, the pointer, “This,” for example, is a slippery term that can function as a pronoun, an adjective, or an adverb. It is especially difficult to decide the referent to “This” in the case of a self-reflexive poem that references a “study” drawn by a German artist around five hundred years ago. The “study” itself represents an unknown individual who served Durer as the model for a “type,” a racialized categorization of personhood. Is Williams saying “This” poem recalls Durer’s drawing as projecting “a future” in which the image of the facial features of a “Negro Head” will be, from the prospective temporal perspective of 1508 used – misused -- in subsequent centuries to authorize pseudo-scientific claims to white supremacy?[11] We must remember that Williams’s facial portrait adorns the cover of c.c. He identifies the Durer image as a precursor to his own: “hand-made, -maiden/drawing of my face in 1528” (33). Rendering time as multilayered and multidirectional, “Study of a Negro Head” traffics in retrospection and prophecy. The poem imagines Durer’s perspective on the “Negro Head” as a projection of a future work of art (a study towards a finished painting, possibly a version of “The Adoration of the Magi”). We may think of the visual study of a racialized head circa 1500 as a problematic contribution to the cultural imaginary that inaugurated European exploration into the “new world” and increased the Transatlantic Slave Trade that eventually brought Williams’ ancestors to the “New World.”[12] “This” poem is, of course, itself a “Study of a Negro Head.” The student doing the studying is not Durer five hundred years ago, but Williams, calling back to the image from around the year 2000. Williams, after all, is a “Negro Head” in the sense that he is an African American contemporary intellectual. He is a reader/viewer who identifies with the “Negro Head” as subject and object. He is reflecting on a reflection of another person (“a Negro Head”) by another artist (Durer). Williams devotes the fourth line of his poem to one word: “Indefinite.” The word is an adverb for unclear or of “without clear limits,” but in a grammatical sense an “indefinite article” is a noun, “the grammatical name for the words "a" and "an" in English or words in other languages that have a similar use” (Cambridge Dictionary online).

Like much else in c.c., “Study of a Negro Head” defies straightforward interpretative readings. Nonetheless, when I return Williams’ call as an active respondent who pieces together significance from the bricolage of textuality, as well as ponder the implications of the abundant white space that surrounds the wording, a reading (or series of readings) emerges. For example, I wonder about the relation of the word “Indefinite” to Williams’s decision to indent the term towards the right margin, leaving about a one-inch space instead of text to the left of the word. The space feels meaningful, even as the meaning is uncertain, “indefinite.” The white space can signify as an erasure of language or as the language of erasure. We can read the space as a blanket of white (supremacist) coverage that violates through concealment African-American inscriptions that might otherwise contest racist imaginary. In spite of the abundance of negative space, pieces of the archive have found their way into “Study of a Negro Head.” Writing exists as mangled trace of prior racialized inscriptions. On a formalist level, Williams’ admission of so much negative space may be his nod to affiliation with schools of alternative U.S. modernist and postmodernist poetics such as Olsonian “Open” field as well as an African-American poetics in which space may indicate a syncopated jazz beat.   The line following “Indefinite” is justified on the left margin, but is cast as a parenthetical aside and in the form of an interrogative: “(forced march? Ticker tape? Brownian?)”. Without resorting to Google, I decipher the first two phrases without much trouble.   Not specifically historicized in the poem, a “forced march” calls to mind the ”trail of tears” marches that befell Eastern Woodlands Indians in the Jacksonian era (1830s) as well as the Bataan Death March. What about Brownian? One meaning of Brownian as an adjective for movement would be “Brownian Motion,” which, as Encyclopedia Britannica reports, refers to “any of various physical phenomena in which some quantity is constantly undergoing small, random fluctuations.” The phrase fits Williams’s practice of copying “found” material in which “fluctuations” occur through the movement of something from one place to another. [13]

c.c. is a titular abbreviation, a metonym for something, but for what? I am not sure, but I am confident there is more than one “what” to unpack. Carbon copy? Pre-email “literal” carbon copy? Email era use of a now defunct, technologically transcended, and yet linguistically preserved term for transmitting the same message to multiple receivers? “Black” author as a “Carbon” (coal-colored) “copy” (mockingbird mimic) of a “white” discourse?   “Black” author as a “Carbon” (coal-colored) “copy” of a “black” discourse such as the Black Arts Movement in which Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) wrote in “Black Art,” “We want a black poem. And / a Black World. / Let the world be a Black Poem”?[14] An originary, non-racially marked author of universalist import because, as Wikipedia notes, “Carbon compounds form the basis of all known life on Earth, and the carbon-nitrogen provides some of the energy produced by the Sun and other stars…..Carbon occurs in all known organiclife and is the basis of organic chemistry” A copy of carbon transformed through time from the soft common substance into the hard bright light substance of great value, the proverbial diamond in the rough? Carbon copy as secondary audience? As something overheard? We could keep playing, creating correspondent interactions with the signs in a kind of call and response gesture. What comes to our minds? CC Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels? A doubling on Stevens’s “Comedian as the Letter C,” the serio-comic long meditative lyric invoking Crispin’s failed journey South to a tropical landscape to rejuvenate his language and thus transcend his drab New England quotidian life that ends his first book, Harmonium? The graded marks given by the teacher on the average student’s report card? Christopher Columbus?
         A term used to define placement of text in a formal letter after the closing salutation, CC is related to another abbreviation, PS (Post Scriptum; “written after”). The connection between the formulaic procedures followed by letter writers, and Williams’ proceduralism in c.c. is apparent in his imitation of what he calls, in an interview, “the formal 19th c. greeting card format of four of the poems in c.c.” (Bottom Left Corner Folded ‘In’; “Upper Left Corner Folded ‘In’; “Upper Right Corner Folded ‘In’; Lower Right Corner Folded ‘In’”). Given what I noted earlier about Williams’ poetics as a translational form of literary afterlife, it is useful to think about c.c. as a complex rendering of a text “written after.” Williams suggests this reading of c.c. through his decision to assign his volume’s epigraph to Emily Dickinson’s concluding epistolary remarks (and tombstone engraving): “Called back.//Emily//--May 1886”.[15] As Craig Dworkin remarks, c.c. is, on a formal level, at points a carbon copy without an original, or a copy with an erased original.   A fifteen-page section of c.c., “Cold Calls,” as Dworkin notes, features “appropriated, collaged, and recontextualized language as a citational system of footnotes hugging the bottom of the page and referencing endnotes” (11-12). As with much else in c.c., it is a fool’s errand to summarize, paraphrase, or read “Cold Calls” as if it were a mimetic poem with transparent meaning. That said, we notice patterns in the citational materials. For example, the first “footnote” poem -- at the bottom of the otherwise empty page 39 – quotes from a passage about the topic of “spatial/temporal lacuna” as related to “temporary disruption” or “permanent abortion – of service,” and then shifts to “an example of such disruption, failure, and breakdown” in Dunbar’s “Ships That Pass in the Night.” Dunbar, at times, wrote in a vernacular style and, at times, in a style reminiscent of traditional European lyricism complete with iambic pentameter metrics. “Ships That Pass in the Night” is of the latter sort. Dunbar’s poem thus “mimics” a white-encoded poetics, but the content of “Ships” comments on the spectral quality of a voice that does not maintain vitality and connection to authorial embodiment. “Voice” is transferred through a “vessel” that we may compare to the poetic artifice itself: “My voice falls dead a foot from mine old lips/and but its ghost doth reach that vessel/passing, passing.” Taken together, the “footnote” emphasizes the relation between images and words, as well as pre-established structures of representation and the failure of the form to enact the speaker’s desire for self-expression.

The first “footnote” poem in “Cold Calls” recalls Williams’ focus on the disrupted relationship between image (the cover photograph of the poet) and reader expectations for a style of writing that will serve as a narrative caption to authorial experience as “voice.” The third “footnote” poem, about racial violence and South African apartheid, includes bits of a news report involving a “foreign respondent,” a description recalling Williams’ interest in calling and returning calls through correspondence. Chopped up into a rush of headline passages gleaned from The New York Times and separated, ala Dickinson, by dashes, the poem alludes to the 1993 gang murder of Amy Biehl, a white Stanford educated Fulbright recipient who served in Cape Town as an anti-Apartheid activist. In a terrible irony, “a crowd of [black] youths” shot Biehl to death as an act of revolutionary violence. The footnote to the poem states the murder contributed to the end of apartheid: “South Africa is free today because of the bloodshed,” according to a quotation linked in the “End Notes” section to The New York Times. The footnote is indeed a “cold call.” It offers a rather “cold” –- in the sense of extreme emotional restraint to the point of heartlessness – recollection of a brutal murder that may, from the perspective of Realpolitik, helped dismantle South African apartheid. Williams’ rendering is also “cold” in the sense that the writing seems uninflected, objective, a recording of facts about one incident that contributed to the history of a racist system and, potentially, its undoing. How does this “cold call” about the murder of a Bay Area educated white female activist, mistaken by young African males to be supporting apartheid, relate to Williams’ investigation of interracial politics in avant-garde poetics? We noted that in the Dunbar poem, a black poet experiences the loss of voice through mimicry of a white style.   Here I turn to Harryette Mullen’s invocation of the term “aesthetic apartheid” in her response to Ron Silliman’s “Poetry and the Politics of the Subject” (Socialist Review, 1988). As Randall Couch reports, Silliman argues that “women, people of color, sexual minorities, the entire spectrum of the ‘marginal’—have a manifest political need to have their stories told” in a more conventional form than those progressive poets who identify as members of groups that have been “the subject of history” (65). Mullen regarded such a cordoned-off version of avant-gardism as “aesthetic apartheid”: “Ron Silliman did us all a favor,” she has said, “when he articulated what I consider a productive tension between content and form, between identity and innovation.” [16]

The two “footnote” poems from “Cold Calls” I have described so far deal with racial conflict and disfigurement. Other “footnote” poems are not so obviously about race, and maybe are not about race or racism at all. One “footnote” poem, for example, refers to the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. The poem offers the perspective of terrorists, who view the passengers on the jet that crashed into the towers as “sinful” (51). The poem also offers the viewpoint of Christians who read the tragedy as a religious apotheosis: “Crashing into a skyscraper, a Boeing jet ‘disgorged its sinful passengers” and “from which their spirits ‘floated upwards towards a glowing image of Jesus high in the clouds’” (51).   “Footnote” poem four, again not focused on African-American experience, collates imagery from Wallace Stevens, John Keats, Homer, Beckett and the tales of Scheherazade’s “thousand-plus deferents” with references to the economics of credit lines and “bulk mailings.” The “intent” of this poem, I argue, is to imagine the roles of hope, longing, and patience as venerable aspects of how culture and economics function, grow, and sustain themselves in the face of cessation. We think of the image of Penelope weaving and unweaving Odysseus’s shroud to ward off the suitors in Ithaca. We recall the constant jabbering of the bums Vladimir and Estragon as they wait for Godot. As in Godot, Williams has sent out his calling cards, has made his cold calls, in writing c.c. He has thus expressed a desire for communication, for connection with an audience of readers. In an entrepreneurial sense, he has invested in the possibility of a return on his bulk mailings.[17]

If we regard c.c. as an abbreviation for carbon copy, we are inclined to ask about the relationship of an original work to a copy of that same work? We must historicize the topic.   Neoclassical poets in the English tradition such as Alexander Pope understood the art of copying a masterwork as a test of skill and a healthy nod to traditional masters. In the 20th century era of copyright law and the cult of artistic originality, by contrast, copying is an area of aesthetics interrogated by experimental visual artists ranging from Marcel Duchamp to Sherrie Levine. Their goal is to challenge legal definitions of authorship and ownership of representations, as well as to interrogate the commodification of creative expression in an art world in which symbolic capital translates into serious green in late capitalism.   A key point that Gates makes about signifying in his classic study, and that Williams demonstrates in his essay on conceptualism and radical mimesis, is that, in a Derridean sense, there is a difference in the same when a writer or artist copies an “original.” In an interview, Williams remembers Mrs. Ewing. She was a linguistics-oriented “pre-integration ‘Negro’ teacher from whom he learned “every grammatical marker is purposeful” and that “every torque of the language renders ‘meaning’ problematic.” He notes that her teaching is related to the “’condition’ of African-American existence in particular” and “American life in general.” c.c. indicates that Williams paid deep and abiding attention to the lessons Mrs. Ewing taught at Durfee Junior High School. [18] In the essay on “Radical Mimesis,” Williams uses the term – “torque” – that he learned from Mrs. Ewing to describe how Phyllis Wheatley, the first African-American and among the first women to publish a book of poems in North America, expressed difference through emulation in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). Describing Wheatley as a precursor to the “Mockingbird” school of African-American female poets such as Georgia Douglas Johnson, Williams writes of Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America”:

I believe that it is possible to argue that mimesis, as deployed by certain artists, at certain moments, did serve to critique hegemonic cultural values.[…] Wheatley relies on her ability to manipulate grammar and syntax to turn the tables on her Christian enslavers. She torques the language and grammar of her benefactors to create a space for an African subjectivity presumed to have been fully suppressed by her enslavement and subsequent exposure to ‘good’ values.

In his essay on radical mimicry, Williams argues that we cannot separate the meaning of copying from the evolving literary-historical contexts in which the writer or artist makes the copy.[19] Writing in the wake of Duchampian conceptualism and in the midst of Goldsmithian uncreative writing, which troubles legal definitions of intellectual property rights, Williams is playing with the idea of carbon copying as a form of ludic subversive activity. Williams, however, is claiming a special meaning for the art of the copy in the context of African-American signifying practices.

In c.c. Williams’ “carbon copy” poetry negotiates unstable relations between repetition and alteration in a process that simultaneously preserves the “original” (the historical “foundational” text) and erases its prior meanings through the replacement copy.   In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935), Benjamin famously suggested the art copy lost the “aura” of the original. He viewed the loss of “aura” in relatively positive terms. In the age of the aura, the viewer received art independently, as a form of distanced contemplation of a ritualized work.   Without the aura, art reception becomes a form of communitarian immersion that occurs, for example, when we go to the movie theater to catch a flick. One needs, as does Williams, to recognize, as Benjamin did not, that works by a replicator such as Sherrie Levine, in “carbon copy” works such as “After Walker Evans” (1981), themselves take on the “aura” of originality through the historical context of art world theory. Repetitions become valuable, ironically “original,” conceptual projects. Williams has engaged with conceptualism in an article on “radical mimesis,” a term coined by Judith Goldman, an author associated with Krupskaya Press. Whereas Duchamp and Levine put forward “readymades” or copies of prior art works to expose the relation of the art market to commodity capitalism, Williams engages with the art of the copy to interrogate how African Americans have been mis-represented in prior art and writing:

     While the debate within these conceptual fields turns on the relationships among the optical, the readymade and language, I want to widen
     the scope of Goldman’s argument by demonstrating how the concerns of conceptualism in general, that is, in the plastic, visual and verbal
     arts, are analogous to the concerns of some Negro, colored, and even black writers from the 18th to the mid-20th century in the United States,
     not as conceptual aesthetic issues per se but as flawed and inadequate “representations” of the African human.

In his essay on radical mimesis, Williams notes the racist attitudes towards Phyllis Wheatley held by “Enlightenment” thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson claimed that Wheatley’s poetic “mimicry” of “white” styles was the exception that proved the rule that African-Americans in general were inferior beings who lacked creative imagination and mental powers.

     From the point of view of European descendants unable to fathom the possibility of subjectivity on the part of Africans, the African who
     spoke English “well” may have been a novelty, capable of mimicry, but the African capable of writing English well was, by definition, a
     protest novelty. Whereas the ability to speak English could be, and often was, attributed to the propensity for “imitation” among
     Africans (connected to their “innate” talent for music and dance), the ability to write English suggested the ability to reason and think,
     that is, to forge original thoughts. The demonstration of these skills thus offered a counterargument to, a protest against, the general belief
     that Africans were incapable of the reasoning attributed to Mongoloids and Caucasians.

“Happy Fault,” the first poem in the sequence entitled “Carded,” Williams tells us in “Additional Notes,” is “dedicated to Phyllis Wheatley.” (95).

Like much else in c.c., “Happy Fault” resists paraphrase or easy interpretation.[20] Nonetheless, the poem suggests how ideological control of the subject takes place when one is “called” by another who possesses a greater degree of state power, such as when a policeman shouts “hey you!” The speaker of “Happy Fault” is responding to a call, perhaps a knock at the door, or a telephone call. (Published in 2002, Williams wrote “Happy Fault” when many people still used landlines, not cell phones). “Happy Fault” begins: “Who was it/Was it for me,/you, or some/misnomer,/wrongly called” (21). In the next movement of the poem, however, it is difficult to know exactly who is speaking and to whom. Williams does not link the general pronouns such as “who,” “you” and “me” to any specific names or characters. Instead, he recalls a scene of violence against a speaker, disabling speech: “tongue torn out,/favoring a hand?” I think of the story of the Rape of Philomel by Thracian King Tereus as told in Ovid’s Metamorphosis and retold in Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” In the Philomel narrative, a politically empowered male cuts off the tongue of the female rape victim to deny her speech, and thus testimony.   Unable to announce the rape through speaking, however, she weaves the story into a tapestry.   A story associated with the origins of female creativity as related to the aftermath of physical trauma and the blockage of speech, we may link the Philomel story to Wheatley’s poetics. Like Philomela in the sense that she did not feel she could speak directly about her oppression, even in her poetry, Wheatley needed to express protest indirectly, through “mockingbird mimicry.”

As in “Study Of A Negro Head,” in which future and past merge as the speaker reflects on a Durer drawing that, he notes, may resemble his own appearance, “Happy Fault” begins as a response to a prior call. As “Happy Fault” progresses, however, the one “who beckons” is aligned with a potential version of the speaker of the poem as a “future ‘I’” (21). Williams selects the future perfect form (indicating completed action) to describe the paradoxical sense that the precursor has already arrived, and, paradoxically, is still on his way to arrival -- “Who will have/arrived” --, but the self that arrives is in imperfect form – limping, “belated, ‘off-line.’ (21). The last part of “Happy Fault” returns to the opening query about the identity of the caller. The focus shifts, however, from an interpretation of “called” as referring to the person who has beckoned the speaker to a reading of “called” as meaning “referring to” someone or something as if that someone or something were something else. In this case, the speaker is wondering about who “called” into being (“referred to”) a chain of referents: “Christians, Negroes,” “Negroes, black as Cain,” but Cain,/nothing but Cain/with impunity?” (22). The speaker is asking tough questions about the relationships between African-Americans to aspects of Judeo-Christianity. He is asking how the chain of associations between “Christians” and “Negroes” has devolved into an association of “Negroes” with “nothing but Cain,” the Old Testament biblical figure associated with banishment, marking, and fratricide.

Williams himself deciphers “c.c.” as the abbreviation for titles to three of the five sections in the volume: “Calling Cards,” “Called Card,” and “Cold Calls.” These phrases are themselves common, if somewhat outdated, vernacular expressions associated with business or social communication, but they also remind us of Althusser’s theory of how the state produces subjects through authoritative beckoning. As in signifying practices defined by Hurston and Gates, the three section titles suggest how both readers and writers respond to the call of language as a form of the afterlife by expressing a willingness to call back in creative response to prior representations. Poetry is a meeting place between reader and writer, but the location for this meeting in c.c. is uncertain. The relation between material text and semantic meaning is unstable, but Williams deciphers c.c. through a section title that refers to a telephone salesperson engaging in a commercial transaction with a complete stranger (“Cold Call”). Another section – “calling card – may suggest a material sign to express the prior appearance of a visitor who, now absent, has left a trace of an attempt to meet another person, then absent. The card serves as a trace of a desire for a future meeting between two absented persons. The titular abbreviation c.c. suggests an analogy between the publication of a first book of poems and/as an author’s Calling Card. If Williams is likening an old-fashioned “calling card” to a 21st century publication of a physical book of poems put out by a small independent press (in this case, Krupskaya), then he is, by analogy, suggesting the physical object he has produced is already a trace of an atavistic mediation of intersubjectivity.   No doubt, calling cards (as a method to prepay long distance telephone calls) and print volumes of poetry still exist, but they recall, perhaps nostalgically, perhaps critically, an earlier moment in the communication arts. [21] In c.c., Williams sends out a kind of calling card, but he also explores the idea of being “Carded,” the title of the second section of the book.   We regard the act of being “carded” as a threatening activity if read, for example, in the context of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, or the current situation for immigrants from Central America and Mexico at the Southern border of the United States. In both cases, being “Carded,” or a “routine” identification check performed by a government official, could endanger the safety, freedom, and welfare of a person who “looks like” the person photographed on the cover of “c.c.” Brook Tankle’s sepia toned black and white cover photograph depicts Williams staring at the camera. What is notable to me is that the copy of the author photograph selected for the cover looks like it has been mistreated. Crumpled, scratched, and marred, someone has deliberately folded the copy of Williams’s image into four identification card sized quadrants. The white crease marks create a cross shape in which the vertical and diagonal quadrants meet at the poet’s left nostril. The meaning of the white cross crease is uncertain, but it appears to me as if Tyrone is in the crosshairs of a rifle’s scope. Alternatively, perhaps, the cross suggests a religious symbol. Given the history of Ku Klux Klan cross burnings, however, the cross as religious symbol connects back to the sense that Williams notes the danger in racialized representation. Tankle has lit the photograph so that the left side of Williams’ face is much lighter in tone than the right half, which is very dark, shadowy. Because Williams foregrounds the relationship between image and identity in poetic sequences such as “Calling Card,” I surmise he is noting how hue – and especially dark versus light – impacts how viewers interpret the person – the face -- within a racialized environment. In “Face Qua Flash Card,” a conceptual “found” poem in the “Carded” sequence, Williams investigates how persons are marked according to stereotypical categories of language use and appearance. Splayed out on the page with ample amounts of white space separating the segments of the poem from one another, “Face Qua Flash Card” represents a defamiliarized array of racialized, class-based, and, in general, prejudicial observational phrases.   A bottom note links the phrases to a “State Department/Customs/INS Key” for evaluating (and rejecting based on appearance) potential immigrants at a border or airport: “slimy looking,” “wears jacket on shoulders w/earring,” “no way….poor, poor, poor,” “avoids eye contact, ” “smells” (24). Spread out in a jagged manner around the middle and right part of the page are names associated with Asian, Middle Eastern, Hispanic, and Indiana groups: “Mohammed/Wong/Miguel/Swami/Chang.” There are also five upper case abbreviations that, a note at the bottom of the page tell us, relate to INS code for “rich kid,” looks poor,” talks poor,” looks rough,” and “take care.” “Face Qua Flash Card” appears in the “Carded” section of a book titled “c.c.,” which may stand for “calling card.”   The book cover, as noted, includes an author photograph. When taken together, all of these aspects of the poem’s context suggest that Williams is exploring relationships between image, identity, and coded interpretations (including racist, classist, and xenophobic) of “types.”   His poetry engages, often in ludic, punning, parodic ways that signify, in Gates’s sense, and, to some degree, unsettle, the “looks” and speech practices that are, in “Face Qua Flash Card” stereotypically pejorative elements of a racist imaginary.

In the essay on “The Authenticity of Difference” in African-American poetics, Williams examines the uneasy relationship between author photographs and poetry texts that, he claims, may serve as “captions” for the visual depiction of the poet. In his essay, Williams pays special attention to the relationships (or lack of relationships) between author photographs, endorsement “blurbs,” and the poems within the volume. Williams advocates for “de-captioning textuality,” by which he means he does not want the poem, and especially the traditional autobiographical narrative poem, to serve the “normative function” of a “caption” in relation to the author photo (134). He favors a poetry such as Hunt’s that exists “within and outside constituted identities” (135).
     Still, one could ask if the narrative/lyrical traditions in which [Elizabeth] Alexander, [Natasha] Trethewey, and Rita Dove work do not reduce
     their texts to captions, a nonpejorative utility if one writes in order to make oneself visible. For the consequence of writing in a way that
     de-captions textuality, that separates it from its normative functions as caption or blurb, is precisely invisibility.   (134)

In his 2015 essay, Williams focuses on the problematic relationships between author image, narrative visibility, and poetry texts as “captions.” His commentary indicates his concern with a text’s availability to be “automatically assimilated to ethnic, racial, or even gender-based politics” (134). c.c., ironically, foregrounds Williams’s photographic image, not in a small square the size of a driver’s license picture on the back flap, but rather on the front cover and of the size that occupies most of the cover’s space. This photography is, literally, in your face.

Taken together, c.c., the book title, and the front cover image of Williams represent provocative, even contradictory, gateways into the difficult text that follows. I use the adjective “difficult” to describe Williams’s poetry in the way Bernstein does in Attack of the Difficult Poems (2011), as the site of potential reader anxiety that, Bernstein advises, tongue in cheek, may be overcome with due diligence on the reader’s part: “Don’t let the poem intimidate you! Often the difficult poem will provoke you, but this may be its way of getting your attention” (5). Bernstein kidding aside, I have treated my difficulties in reading c.c. as a crucial element of my response to Williams’ poetics. Rather than withdrawing from attending closely to the text because of its challenges to immediate intelligibility, I regard difficulty as itself a meaningful aspect of my experience of c.c.   I also find myself thinking about Bernstein’s comments on the “difficult poem” as “an unusual problem” in a racialized context even as Williams’ poetry, like that of Erica Hunt, functions “within and outside constituted identities.”

For Bernstein, “difficult” poems are problems. For Du Bois, an existential crisis for Black Folks was not having problems, but being a problem. We recall Du Bois’s comments from The Souls of Black Folks: “Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” Parodying an infomercial discourse on how to treat a disease or affliction with a salve, pill, cream, or medical procedure, Bernstein treats difficult poems as a source of reader anxiety and a way for the author to get “your attention.” “So the first step in dealing with the difficult poem is to recognize that this is a common problem that many other readers confront on a daily basis. You are not alone!” (4).   Symptoms of difficulty include “elevated linguistic intensity; textual irregularities; initial withdrawal (poem not immediately available); poor adaptability (poem unsuitable for use in love letters, memorial commemoration, etc.); sensory overload; or negative mood” (4).   How does a reading of a difficult” poem as source of reader “intimidation” and as an attention-getting device function in the context of “difficult” poetry by Tyrone Williams, a “black male author from Detroit,” who courts and resists association of his writing with his subject position?

On his website Heretofore, Williams displays a small-c catholicity in his enumeration of musical tastes and influences.   Prominent “COMPOSERS and ARRANGERS” include African-American jazz and soul stylists ranging from Ellington and Strayhorn to Miles and Sonny to Stevie and Smokey Robinson. Williams varies his selections in terms of genre, but his choices are mainstream when compared to free jazz experimentalists such as Anthony Braxton, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman and Roland Kirk, none of whom makes the list. When it comes to the contemporary avant-garde, we find British electronica figure Brian Eno and punk rocker Joe Strummer from The Clash. Alternative white female folkies such as Maggie Roche and Katie McGarrigle make the list. Most striking to me is Williams’s emphasis on white male composers associated with the Great American Songbook and Broadway: Leonard Bernstein, Hoagy Carmichael, Harold Arlen, Cole Porter, and Burt Bacharach and Hal David.   These composers produced numbers for the stage that African-American jazz legends such as John Coltrane, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Carmen McRae reimagined as syncopated standards.   As with Coltrane, Vaughan, and the others I have mentioned, signifying on traditional texts is most certainly a part of Williams’s modus operandi. Williams’ list of musical influences helps me think about how to read the “difficult” poetry in c.c. In the end, I read his poetry as a form of resistance to stereotypical identifications of his writing with a reductive understanding of his subject position.   c.c. is and is not connected to the cover image.

Works Cited

Walter Benjamin. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt.
Translated by Harry Zohn. New York, Mariner Books, 2019.

Charles Bernstein. “The Attack of the Difficult Poem.” In Attack of the Difficult Poem. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2011.

David Bromwich.   How Words Make Things Happen. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Casey N. Cep . “Called Back.” Paris Review. October 30, 2013. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/10/30/called-back/

Edmund Chapman. Afterlives: Benjamin, Derrida and Literature in Translation. A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of
     Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities 2016.

Randall Couch. “A Eurydice beyond my maestro: Triangular desire in Harryette Mullen’s ‘Dim Lady.’” https://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter
    /how2journal/archive/online_archive/v2_4_2006/current/in_conference/couch.html
Allison Cummings. “Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women
     Studies. Vol. 26 No. 2, 2005, pp. 3-36.
Paul de Man. “Autobiography as Defacement.” In The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York, Columbia University Press, 1984.
W.E.B. Du Bois. The Souls of Black Folks. 1903. New York: Bantam Classics; Bantam Classics edition, 1988.
Craig Dworkin. “Textual Prostheses.” Contemporary Literature. Winter 2005. Volume 57. No. 1.
Henry Louis Gates. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. New York, Oxford University Press, 1988 [Reissued
     2014].
--. Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow. New York: Penguin, 2019.
Lyn Hejinian, “En Face,” The Boston Review. 2015.
Grant Jenkins. “Feeding the Gods: An Interview with Harryette Mullen.” Rain Taxi 10.3. Fall 2005.
Daniel Kane. “Poets on Poetry: Daniel Kane Interviews the Poet Harryette Mullen.” Teachers & Writers – Poets Chat June-July 2002
     <http://www.writenet.org/poetschat/poetschat_h_mullen.html>.
Harryette Mullen. “Poetry and Identity.” pp. 27-31 IN: Wallace, Mark(ed.); Marks, Steven(ed.) Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s.
     University of Alabama Press; 2002. 446 (book article)

Aldon Lynn Nielsen. Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism. Cambridge University Press, 1997

--. “Black Deconstruction: Russell Atkins and the Reconstruction of African-American Criticism.” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary
    Criticism ; 1996 Fall-Winter; 26(3-4) 86-103.

Cathy Park Hong. “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-garde.” Lana Turner. No. 7 November 03, 2014.
Kathy Lou Schultz. “Rock and a Hard Place: Erica Hunt and the Poetics of African-American Postmodernity.” How2. Vol 1. No. 5 March 2001.
    https://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/online_archive/v1_5_2001/current/index.html
Ron Silliman “Poetry and the Politics of the Subject.” Socialist Review July-September 1988.

“The History of the Calling Card.” https://www.americanstationery.com/blog/the-history-of-the-calling-card/

Lorenzo Thomas. Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century American Poetry. University of Alabama Press, 2000.
Dorothy Wang. , "From Jim-Crow to 'Color-Blind' Poetics." Boston review. 2015 http://bostonreview.net/poetry/dorothy-wang-jim-crow-color-
     blind-poetics
Joshua Marie Wilkinson. “Interview with Tyrone Williams.” The Denver Quarterly. Accessed via Omnidawn April 12, 2009.

Tyrone Williams. c.c.   San Francisco: Krupskaya, 2002.
--. The Authenticity of Difference as “Curious Thing[s]”: Carl Phillips, Ed Roberson, and Erica Hunt. boundary 2, 2015, Vol.42(4).

--. “The Radical and Bourgeois Leftism of Harold Cruse.” pp. 189-208 IN: Moriah, Kristin(ed.) Black Writers and the Left. Cambridge Scholars
     Publishing; 2013.
--. “Radical Mimesis: Conceptual Dialectics and the African Diaspora.” Omniverse. http://omniverse.us/tyrone-williams-radical-mimesis/
     This paper was given at the Celebrating African American Literature conference at Penn State, October 26, 2013.
Tristram Wolff. “Being Several: Reading Blake with Ed Roberson.” New Literary History Vol 49 #4 Autumn 2018, pp. 553-578.

John Yau. “’Purity’ and the Avant-Garde.” The Boston Review. 2015.

[1] As with closed captioning, another possible meaning of the “c.c.” abbreviation, Williams’ title suggests a relationship between a written text and the spoken word in a visual field. The need for “closed captioning,” however, implies a disability on the part of the reader or viewer to hear the speaker without an additional textual apparatus. I thank Monica Wolfe for pointing out to me the connection between "c.c." and closed captioning.

[2] For more on the “text-in-afterlife,” a thesis that understands texts as inextricable from the texts they translate and the texts that translate them, see Afterlives: Benjamin, Derrida and Literature in Translation, a thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities 2016 Edmund Chapman.

[3] I appreciate Williams’s concerns about reception of his calls.   In c.c., Williams’ poetics features what Nielsen, writing on the concrete work of Julia Fields, refers to as a “poem that graphically remasters history, using oral and graphic tradition, orature and historical document, but using them in a fashion that must be seen to be heard” (Nielsen, 30). Adding to Williams’ reception troubles is the fact that he is writing in the wake of a moment in which, as Nielsen argues in Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism, made work such as his own difficult to see and to appreciate. “Too much current theorizing about black poetics secures its success with a critical readership by eliminating from consideration those poetic practices that might disrupt totalizing theories of what constitutes black vernacular” (18).

[4] c.c. is playful, punning, filled with the vernacular, but it is a “difficult” book in the sense of the term Charles Bernstein puts forward in his parody medical condition advertisement essay, “The Attack of the Difficult Poem.”

[5] Williams’s “impure” Language poetry stands in contrast to what John Yau refers to as “pure” avant-gardist art that erases identity from the equation. In “’Purity’ and the ‘Avant-Garde,’” Yau writes: “As the white cultural gatekeepers frame it, experimental writers of color either don’t exist in the ‘colorless’ (read ‘white’) world of the ‘avant-garde,’ or they are late arrivers, like hyenas feeding off the carcasses left behind by white writers.   I am uncomfortable with the association of the work by an African-American poet with the concept of “impurity,” because such a formulation may veer towards repugnant ideas of an African-American poet somehow “polluting” or “sullying” a “pure” good thing.   But I am choosing to hold on to the Yau reference here because it puts in play a challenge to conceptions of poetry as “pure” in the sense of autonomous, of poetry as having no relation to a rhetorical aspect or speech act dimension that connects poetry to action through language as a form of doing. Here I am referencing the complex discussion of the relationships between poetry, rhetoric, and (often unintended) consequences in David Bromwich’s How Words Make Things Happen (Oxford UP, 2019). I add that Harryette Mullen wrote in 1996, ‘the assumption remains, however unexamined, that ‘avant-garde’ poetry is not ‘black’ and that ‘black’ poetry, however singular its ‘voice,’ is not ‘formally innovative.’” http://bostonreview.net/poetry/john-yau-purity-avant-garde

[6] The online site Black Past reports: ”The Republic of New Africa (RNA) is a black nationalist organization that was created in 1969 on the premise that an independent black republic should be created out of the southern United States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, which were considered “subjugated lands.” The group’s manifesto demanded the United States government pay $400 billion in reparations for the injustices of slavery and segregation. It also argued that African-Americans should be allowed to vote on self-determination, as that opportunity was not provided at the end of slavery when the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution incorporated African-Americans into the United States. The economy of the RNA was to be organized based on ujamaa, Tanzania’s model of cooperative economics and community self-sufficiency. Citizens of the proposed RNA would have limited political rights, unions would be discouraged, freedom of the press would be curtailed, men would be forced to serve in the military, and polygamy would be allowed.” https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/republic-new-africa-1968/

[7] In the Denver Quarterly interview with Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Williams reflects on his working class roots and penchant for experimental writing in Detroit: “ I grew up in a working-class family–my dad worked in all three of the plants (Chrysler, Ford, GM) before driving a truck for a distilled water company; my mother was, for a while, a housecleaner in a home for retired women (all white) before she began working in the public schools–and I had a number of service jobs (shoe salesman, grocery store clerk, etc.). My Detroit is labor intensive in every sense of the phrase. So it’s safe to say that my poetry, though it has changed over the years, has perhaps become more complex (though I was writing “experimental” poems under the influence of the Cass Corridor radical/post-hippie scene around Wayne State long before I’d heard of avant-garde movements like the Language Poets), is informed by a working-class/labor ethos. “

[8] As his first book of poems, c.c. represents Williams’s entrance into the situation of the publicized self as a posthumous authorial trace. We may think of the authorial self in c.c. as wearing a death mask or as the subject of a defacement, to use Paul de Man’s term from his essay “Autobiography as Defacement.”

[9] In an interview with Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Williams notes that he was, from a young age, attracted to the Black Arts Movement and to becoming a “grammarian” of the “English Language.” Williams states: “I’ve always been fascinated—since the age of 13—with the Black Arts Movement and some of its practitioners who insist/remind us that we always speak the language of those who kidnapped and enslaved us. At the same time, this “we” is crucial to my sense of our historicity, the obvious fact that “I” and everyone I know have only known “this” language. But the gap between what happened to our predecessors/ancestors and the experience of those born in the Western hemisphere is the space of play, of irreverence–I don’t “revere” the English language but I use it and, on occasion, abuse it. Having written that, I am a grammarian–I was taught by pre-integration “Negro” teachers who taught what we today call “linguistics” in ordinary English classes in elementary and junior high school. And what I learned from the Mrs. Ewing–for example–of the world is that every grammatical marker is purposeful, that every torque of the language renders “meaning” problematic–which seems to me the precise “condition” of African-American existence in particular and “American” life in general.”

[10] In The Signifying Monkey, Gates quotes Bakhtin scholar Gary Saul Morson on the concept of double-voicedness: “The audience of a double-voiced word is therefore meant to hear both a version of the original utterance as the embodiment of its speaker’s point of view (or ‘semantic position’) and the second speaker’s evaluation of that utterance from a different point of view. I find it helpful to picture a double-voiced word as a special sort of palimpsest in which the uppermost inscription is a commentary on the one beneath it, which the reader (or audience) can know only by reading through the commentary that obscures in the very process of evaluating” (Gates, 56).

[11] One article on the drawing suggests the image may have served as a model for Durer when he drew studies of the Magi for his 1504 oil painting “The Adoration of the Magi.” Since that painting was completed four years before the drawing, I am skeptical about this theory.

[12] In Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, Henry Louis Gates notes in the 19th century era of “racial science” in the United States, pseudo-scientific studies including those by then renowned Harvard natural science professor Louis Agassiz “argued that people of different races were actually of different species” (Gates, 59). Gates notes that Philadelphia doctor Samuel George Morton, in his 1839 book, Crania Americana; A Comparative Views of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America,” used “the shapes and sizes of their skulls” to assign a” ranking of races” with the “Caucasian race at the top” and “Ethiopians, or black people, at the bottom” (Gates, 60).

[13] Brownian Motion “was named for the Scottish botanist Robert Brown, the first to study such fluctuations (1827). If a number of particles subject to Brownian motion are present in a given medium and there is no preferred direction for the random oscillations, then over a period of time the particles will tend to be spread evenly throughout the medium.” https://www.britannica.com/science/Brownian-motion

[14] According to Dorothy Wang, “Poems by minority poets are almost always judged on the basis of their thematic (sociological, ethnographic) content in the “traditional” or “mainstream” poetry world and rarely on their formal or aesthetic structures, properties, modes—in other words, what makes poetry poetry and not a memoir or treatise. But the flipside of the same coin is true in the world of “innovative” poetry and poetics, where the “absence” of obvious racial identity is to be applauded—for not exhibiting the hallmarks of “bad” poetry” (read: “identity poetry” [read: "minority poetry”])— and this criterion, too, is content-based, albeit in negative form. A poem without any overt ethnic or racial markers is assumed to be racially “unmarked.” Little or no attention is paid to how poetic subjectivity, which overlaps with but is not limited to racial subjectivity, might inhere in a poem’s language and formal structures—in what is unsaid or unspoken at the level of “content” but manifested through aesthetic (poetic) means.” (Wang, Boston Review 2015.) http://bostonreview.net/poetry/dorothy-wang-jim-crow-color-blind-poetics

[15] On Emily Dickinson’s tombstone, rather than died or returned to the Lord or left this world, it reads: CALLED BACK.

     Emily Dickinson
     Born
     December 10, 1830
     Called Back
     May 15, 1886
As those two words were the last she wrote, in a letter to her cousins, but also the title of a novella she loved by Hugh Conway. See Casey N Cep’s “Called Back.” https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/10/30/called-back/

[16] As Randall Couch, reports, Mullen “is committed to working, in Duke Ellington’s phrase, ‘beyond category;’ to continually ‘rewriting and revising’ identity; and to ‘overcoming ‘aesthetic apartheid’ and cultural difference’ (Kane).” See Randall Couch: “A Eurydice beyond my maestro: Triangular desire in Harryette Mullen’s “Dim Lady”https://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/online_archive/v2_4_2006/current/in_conference/couch.html and Daniel Kane. “Poets on Poetry: Daniel Kane Interviews the Poet Harryette Mullen.” Teachers & Writers – Poets Chat June-July 2002

[17] According to Wikipedia: “Amy Elizabeth Biehl (April 26, 1967 – August 25, 1993) was an American graduate of Stanford University and an Anti-Apartheid activist in South Africa who was murdered by Cape Town residents while a black mob shouted anti-white slurs. The four men convicted of her murder were pardoned by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Biehl
[18] According to the Detroit Free Press, Durfree was slated for closure in 2017 because of poor performance: “More than 120 schools were on the state's 2015 list of Michigan's bottom 5% of schools, including 47 schools in the Detroit district. Durfee has been on the list since 2014. “Detroit's Durfee school to shut as district, state debate closure list.” Ann Zaniewski, Detroit Free Press. Jan. 5, 2017

[19]In the following passages from “Radical Mimicry,” Williams locates Wheatley’s poetry at a transitional moment in the history of literary emulation: “Thus Africans capable of reading and writing in European languages had to concern themselves with questions of the optical and linguistic vis-a-vis the readymade, that is, vis-à-vis the African body. To wit: despite her visual appearance as an African, a readymade presumed inured to nurture, to learning (as opposed to mimicry), Wheatley proved herself able to overcome the handicap of the optical, and thus her “nature,” by emulating in writing the English poetics of the 18th c. So baffling was her achievement, the shock of the new to 18th c. Bostonians, Wheatley had to undergo an oral defense of her work before eighteen esteemed gentlemen of the city. In what sense, however, can I claim that her poems, however novel, registered protest? In what sense can some of her poems be understood as enacting torqued mimicry or radical mimesis?

Mimicry of the European in form, mode and apparent “message” was believed to be the best proof that the interior life of the African was not an effect of the exterior, debased sign of the skin. But mimicry, as imitation, was already on the wane as a positive aesthetic value in the 18th c. as the doctrine of originality, intimately connected with the social, cultural and political revolutions in Europe and its various colonies, began to seize hold of the European imagination. It is this value that Jefferson deploys to disparage Wheatley. As applied to the writing of Africans, free or enslaved, originality was tantamount to another revolution, as destabilizing to the European world view as the Copernican one, since it implied that African and European subjectivity might be indistinguishable from one another.”

[20] According to Brian Kelly in Catholicism.Org: “Happy Fault” refers to the “Church’s prayer “O Felix Culpa” (O Happy Fault) which is sung within the Exultet (otherwise called the Paschal Proclamation) during the Easter Vigil service. “O Happy Fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer!” What I had passed over thoughtlessly, however, was the previous verse of the hymn: “O truly necessary sin of Adam, which the death of Christ has blotted out!” “O happy fault that earned for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer.” – St. Augustine.”

[21] I associate Calling Cards in the United States with a segregated genteel society, as described in this commentary on the history of the form from the American Stationary website:
     A society woman’s calling card “follows her everywhere she goes, remains when she is gone, and is the recognized representative in the payment
     of social debts when personal attention is impossible.” Gentlemen and children also dropped visiting cards along with these “ladies of fashion,” primarily in the 18th through the early 20th centuries.

Calling or visiting cards first employed in 15th century China and later used by the aristocracy of 17th century became popular with England’s nobility and rich in the 1800s. The cards served a number of social purposes, such as a means of introduction, to further acquaintanceship, to express congratulations or condolences and to provide notices of arrival or departure. Card etiquette had strict rules.
Generally, the bearer waited in a carriage, enlisting a servant to deliver the calling card. The bearer folded a corner if delivering the card in person. This first call rarely resulted in a face-to-face meeting as the conveyor generally expected to deliver the item to a servant and leave. Stringent rules prevented awkward situations. Socialites desiring a relationship with a particular person or family dropped off a card and returned home. The receiver replied with their own card in a few days, inviting the initiator back for an in-person visit. If the aspiring socialite received the answering card sealed in an envelope or did not receive a return card, it meant to maintain social distance. https://www.americanstationery.com/blog/the-history-of-the-calling-card/

For Williams, “calling cards” are no longer a material part of a feminized parlor game played in the United States by white aristocrats, and often performed by their Black servants, who were following strict protocols of behavior in delivering, receiving, and responding (or delaying a response) to the card exchange.