Before I ever stepped to a mic or submitted a poem to a press, music filled my ears, my head, my neighborhood, the kitchen in our household, the whining cassette player beneath my bed sheets. When I discovered poetry, I discovered it through music. My mother had a stack of Mead notebooks filled with her feelings lyrical & lucid, her curlicued cursive winsome & dainty margin to margin. I stole Wallace Fowlie’s translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s complete works from Barnes & Noble (even then I had the moral integrity to steal only from corporations) & was stunned by what I’d found. A little kiss, like a mad spider, will run around your neck. I was enthralled. Imagery like this had never even occurred to me. It’s one of the first tattoos I ever got: lip prints (my first wife’s) with a black widow on them. Maybe still my favorite. I wrote my first poem when I was ten or eleven titled “Despair.” Not much has changed from my disposition, even if my word count continues to climb.
But the poetry notebooks felt like a blur, a version of my mother I didn’t know, someone in the rearview & growing smaller still. It was the Prince & Bonnie Raitt records, blues compilations, doo wop radio stations that were birthrights from her. I stole that Rimbaud translation because I was riveted by the poet I learned about from a Bob Dylan song, on an album that almost immediately became & remains my all-time favorite album. I only wrote “Despair” in an attempt to mimic Kurt Cobain.
Before I’d written a book, before I’d ushered hundreds of students in & out of my classrooms, before my name became recognized in the circles & communities that captured my whole heart, there was music. Even my book’s title, murmurations, refers not only to a formation of starlings but to the rhythm of silence, the notes we hear in the dead of night when it’s just us, the stars, our beating pulse, or maybe while hiding under the bed, knees tucked to our chest.
I didn’t really take poetry seriously until I was almost into my third decade, but I was writing reviews for music magazines by the time I was fifteen, flown around the country by record producers to cover shows before I was old enough to legally drink. There is a pivotal, formative memory of me partying with the Posies in Memphis, where Jon Auer bought me my own pitcher of beer, how I hated the way it tasted but drank it all anyway, danced my brains out all night between folx from sixteen years old all the way up to eighty. No one was ostracized, no one was left out. That kind of community opened my eyes to the community that had been guiding me my whole life up to that point. The broken arm can’t see the cast that’s holding it together, can it?
I would sit on my stoop with my friends, Ryan & Eddie, in the projects where we were all born & raised, listening to mixtapes we’d made each other filled with Michael Jackson, the Jackson 5, Motown & Stax, which, as we got older, turned to Nas & Jay-Z, Biggie & Pac. Our neighborhood & all the neighborhoods like it sprawling across this young & ignoble country were a breeding ground for musicality—in the bumping boomboxes, the slingers cutting lines of more than powder (myself included for a short time), a lyricism birthed from bricks & broken bones, heat & hellions. I learned from all of these people, places, occupations, oppressions, uprisings, but it was Nas’s Illmatic that really taught me how to use language like it was taffy. When AZ kicked off “Life’s a Bitch” with, visualizin’ the realism of life in actuality, I think my head all but exploded. I’d never heard anything like it. How is he doing that? I wondered. I switched my motto—instead of sayin’, “fuck tomorrow,” that buck that bought a bottle could’ve struck the lotto, Nas spit later on the same track. That album almost single-handedly taught me how to write, how to charge words like a weapon but also to administer them as something medicinal. It’s one of only a handful of albums I have never fallen out of listening to—from the first time I heard it until now, I spin Illmatic at least once a month & have for two decades. I know every. single. word. I stay picking up the jewels it continues to drop, unpacking its lessons.
Ostensibly, it seemed that I took to poetry pretty quickly. I was twenty-nine before I ever even started to write in earnest, to take the craft seriously. A lot of people were bewildered, where did you come from? they’d ask. I went from cutting my teeth on the open mic circuit to teaching my own workshops to securing a book deal to writing three more books all in less than four years. I don’t stop, I never stop writing, I can’t. I think the fluidity, elasticity, & kinetic energy of those ’90s boom-bap hip-hop records have a lot to do with it. I am able to recycle & reuse ideas, images, language in a way that’s difficult to access in straight-up poetry. It’s almost an exercise, acrobatic. I only have a seventh grade education, which people seem blown away by, as if academia is responsible for talent & not community, self-discipline, love, support, music, the moon—anything else.
I did not arrive fully-formed. I came to the poetry scene comparatively late, not poetry. Only I learned from cassette tapes & project corners, MCs in freestyles, headphones with the rewind button, my tiny ten-year-old ears pressed to the speakers. I used to make a mess of my mother’s records & cassettes, rummaging through them like I was trying to find buried treasure. She was never upset no matter how much mess I made. I think she just liked us loving the same things & loving them together. I still have her ’84 pressing of Purple Rain with the original poster, framed & hanging in my apartment, as well as every album Bonnie Raitt released in the ’70s. They were hers. They still are. I’m just holding onto them for her.
In the workshops I teach now, I emphasize the importance of community—& that there are different shapes & sizes of communities as there are of any living, breathing entity. The smallest community is two people. Each classroom is its own community. The tenets of community don’t require you to know every single one of your neighbors’ names in a 180-unit building, but that you care about their wellbeing. The lesson I stress most crucially is that the best way to write a poem is to write it next to someone you love & trust. It wasn’t until years after I had escaped the projects by the skin of my teeth that I’d realized how much I’d learned, how much they’d given me. I try to help others avoid taking their own communities for granted.
murmurations is filled with music. Yes, much is made of my Amy Winehouse poems, which I’m asked about often—they remain my most important & personal work to date—& they are, without a doubt, the heart of the book. But a body can’t subsist with only a heart, & the musicians that populate the rest of the book make up their own community, one in which Amy happens to be the one we spend the most time with. A community of ghosts, the neglected, the unseen, the overseen, the idolized, & the villainized. I see each musician in this book (& they are all deceased) as saints of a certain order, martyrs whose teachings were hard-won & hard-taken. I wrote this book in the thick of COVID quarantines, living alone—sometimes, it seemed, even the birds stayed away. As the dead stacked up, in trailers & in potter’s fields, the rate of relapses among addicts also continued to soar & was, to say the least, alarming. I knew many of them. I cannot call them on the phone anymore, I cannot ask how their day was. & here, I remain.
In 2011, I reviewed the Mountain Goats album, All Eternals Deck, & interviewed (or attempted to interview . . . it’s a long story) John Darnielle for its release. The Mountain Goats are my favorite living band & I carried around that advanced copy of the CD from Merge Records like a talisman, played it to absolute death. At some point I left it in my mother’s car & by the next time I saw her, she was singing every word. I love his voice, she’d say—still odd to me, his voice is what generally turns people off of the band. I let her keep it, I didn’t have a CD player where I was living at the time, so she’d get more use out of it than I would. I remember driving down some street somewhere some early autumn afternoon & receiving flashbacks of me, as a child, sitting atop a pile of her records & tapes. Alcoholism took my mother two years ago. After cleaning out her apartment, a lot of those records came home with me, but I could not, for the life of me, find the Mountain Goats CD. I like to think she took it with her. I like to think, wherever she is, I gave her a gift she’ll never let go of.
