MBARI 7: Excerpt by Uche Nduka

Jean Genet is buried in Morocco. He is my out-law brother. Your swag in an airport security line.

A touch of bells. The clarinet has other things on her mind. Browning my bells.

A spine of steel or a spine of straw? A clown nose making a power grab. Or when your eyes change their minds about wonder.

He can’t look away. Who cares if you are distracted by the strolling moon. Telling us about a schlub as much as he knows.

Pitch-bending was a logical choice. They laughed at me when my lust got heard.

The external justifications for our existence are all conundrums. A slide into the sweetness beneath your clothes. Having fun sharing a laugh.

Spread on the surface of the mysteries that entangle us. Making sure the stiletto shoes stayed on point. I didn’t give you shit for doing that un-pop thing, saying that un-pop thing.

In the beginning was a playhouse where peace of mind became an evolving art project. Stressing people out with hopeless explanations. Remembering forgetting slow jams.

Depends on our knowledge of the pages just read. Oblivion without coating does look cool. Breaking water: junketeers, nestseekers, parachutists. A couple of death threats spotlit.

I serve you soup under pine trees. In search of what clarity is hiding. Idealism is not obsolete. Every living thing sings beyond railroad crossings.

Body of proof? Throes? Those drones sent to your cities. We waited until we couldn’t wait any longer to decompress, to deepen the shadow.

That juggler’s vertigo cuts to the bone. Pork cooked in its own fat. The air braids a mood. Floor sanding, dusty grooves. I’m alive because I was rocking away.

Breaking my vow to verbs. This exposure to the fabric of my life. Rubrics bristle, expecting rain. Gone missing, cylinders in a tunnel.

Ridiculing the placid screen. Plunging into fury, again and again. Driftwood teased the storm. You sauntered through the snarl of the storm.

I have placed saltlicks on foreplay and fellatios. You felt you belonged to another planet. You weren’t doing what you were supposed to be doing the way you were supposed to be doing it.

I needed to hear why you felt that way. Daylight threw us over the edge. By no means did everyone agree with the agitating slob.

Horses soaring through clouds. The chamber we share. It’s a little too late to walk away.

They claim they don’t want to take sides yet they crave awards/prizes for their photographs of your drowned bodies.

Boardwalk, mezzanine, past deception. Mountains are our neighbors. The aloof astronaut became cuddly. A pretty serious matter.

Beside the hardware moons locked eyes moons kissed. Beads of sweat on marked-up galleys. We really care about this place so now we shall take dissent to the extreme.

Stoking the lunar module. Even poetry is grist for their commercial mill.

Not the first of their moments together. Crowds gawk at colorblind lovers. It was once a safe landing spot. Orbiters in crescent curves.

Blemishes on lens. A testament to three moon globes. Those bombed out sculptures those bombed out statues those bombed out paintings in Iraq and Syria.

The squirrels and a canon of their own making. Marching music, footwork, watershoes. Too sly to be held back by mere exposure time.

This earthrise is an evidence. A flash fire breathing inside a muscle. Night again in a hand-corrected manuscript. Walking a runway: controversy still coming into focus.

Those broken manacles in the constellation of lovers. I can fuck myself up sometimes. I’m cool about it. You can’t say the dance-off doesn’t love you.

Uche Nduka is a Nigerian-American poet, essayist, collagist. He is the author of twelve volumes of poems of which the most recent is titled LIVING IN PUBLIC (Writers' Collective of Kristiania, Inc., 2018). Some of his writing has been translated into German, Dutch, Finnish, Italian, Arabic, Spanish, Serbo-Croat, French. A 2017 NYFA Poetry Fellow, he presently lives and teaches in New York City.

A Kind of Quest that Never Ends: In Conversation with Uche Nduka

DCW: I don’t know if you have ever seen Nardwuar’s interviews, but he always leads with this question, which I think is an important one: Who are you?

UN: I am a nomadic living archive. I am not willing to entirely concede to things and rituals that overtake us as human beings. Overcoming limits is part of what a poet does. I aspire to be true to my emotional intensity and personal sensibility while writing. To be aware, to be attentive, to be a positive force in the world. I am committed to living practical poetry.

DCW: Living in Public, your 10th volume of poetry, was released in July of 2018. Having been a little more than a year since it’s been out, how has the reception been? What are your feelings about it now?

UN: That’s my 12^th volume of poems. The book is now out in the world and getting into the hands of those that need it. The batch with the Small Press Distribution (SPD) outlet is sold out. Some bookshops still stock the book. Copies are available in libraries too. I am happy about that. I wrote the poems in that book in quick succession. The voices in the book are anti-assimilationist in stances. Wordstrokes of personal and spiritual veracity. Writing a poem makes me realize that I am interested in something or someone. I tend to think that the political does not always have to become Agitprop. My feelings about the book now? I feel I am still in a generative phase of my work rather than retrospective.

DCW: I recently finished reading eel on reef, and I feel as if I’ve just returned from a long journey. I’m wondering if you could share with us where a poem begins for you. What brings you to the poem, and how do you know whether or not you’re on to something?

UN: The beginning of a poem for me is both exciting and frustrating. I build a poem moment by moment. Mostly I know I am on to something when the process of birthing a poem underscores my allegiance to the tangential, the ecstatic, the expansive and minimal frequencies. And to chance. Yes, eel on reef (2007) was truly an artistic journey. During that phase of my work, I reclaimed the essence of freedom and translated it into poems. The factors that bring me to a poem and get it rolling are remorselessly awkward and variably manifold. A kind of quest that never ends.

DCW: One thing I admire about your work is the need to return, re-visit the work; in order to pick up something that may not have been apparent during the previous encounter. What is it about surrealism specifically which allows for a sort of ambiguity, possibility to sprout?

UN: Perhaps surrealism is a continual voyage. It’s an ongoing revelation of inner and outer selves/states. A surreal poem is partly an autonomous channel. Its efficacy derives from the freedom of the spirit and the freedom of the body. The poem is immune to literary, moral, social, nationalistic, and cultural overdetermination.

DCW: Human beings, and humanity as a whole, are very complex organisms. Your work definitely reflects those complexities. As well, you recently wrote that you were rallying against conservatism in contemporary Nigerian poetry. Do you wish to elaborate more about what you are aiming at? How is this campaign fairing?

UN: Calling it a campaign was just speaking tongue in cheek. But nevertheless, I am very bored with poems that are overweaponized. Poems don’t always ask questions and they don’t always give answers. Poetry is not a mirror. Poems invite us to see and feel the world through new ways. I am against conservative poetry everywhere, not only in Nigeria. I oppose a singular approach to poetry. I don’t support generalizations. There is no barrier or boundary in poetry that I don’t want to cross. I don’t care for poetry that venerates classist social and political conventions. I love scandalous poems! And I need to state that so far there is not enough debauchery /eroticism in contemporary Nigerian poetry. The literary canon ought to be elastic.

DCW: Thinking now of the fact there are many artists, writers, thinkers whose work did not gain traction among the masses until after their deaths: Van Gogh comes to mind, as does Basquiat, among others. Why do you think this is the case? Why are societies, as a whole, so impaired in recognizing the greatness of the artists who walk & work among them?

UN: Most societies spawn zombies. That’s why. Most people prefer the familiar, the routine, the tame, the comfortable, the predictable, the agreeable. Daring is anathema to the status quo.

DCW: In a recent interview with Paul DeRienzo, you spoke about performing poetry, and how the poet and the audience come together to make the moment happen. How it’s a two-way street. What about the relationship with the solitary reader? Do you see any similarities and/or differences in how the moment is made between poet and reader, as opposed to poet and audience?

UN: I really don’t separate the page and the stage. In each of those spaces, engagement is indispensable. Even with a large audience in a hall or club or bookstore or stadium, I aim to speak individually to each person. To communicate one-to-one. I believe in the earthy and the transcendent power of poetry. Thus my relationship with the solitary reader is based on sharing and exploration too. A nourishing mutuality. This relationship is very active because a poem is changing (in motion) while you are reading it or listening to it being read. I hope that nothing I said here limits what my poetry is trying to do.

DCW: Thank you for your time, Uche. I really appreciate it. Is there anything else you would like the people to know?

UN: Thank you for your curiosity! My new volume of poems titled FACING YOU will be published in Spring 2020 by City Lights Publishers in San Francisco.

Uche Nduka is a Nigerian-American poet, essayist, collagist. He is the author of twelve volumes of poems of which the most recent is titled LIVING IN PUBLIC(2018). Some of his writing has been translated into German, Dutch, Finnish, Italian, Arabic, Spanish, Serbo-Croat, French. A 2017 NYFA Poetry Fellow, he presently lives and teaches in New York City.

MBARI 1 by Uche Nduka

More windowed or less. Summer in a garden chair.

Put your hands down there even if there are holes in your pocket.

A life in search of the impact of loving backwards.

Even with a newspaper to sign instead of a book.

On the way to the treehouse. About a rental and radiant ethnicity.

Uh, well, you see, you're in partial pursuit of brush fires.

Like if I knew then what I know now.

Some cloudy discussions about saving time and saving money.

Every three blocks I look to see what is inside me.

This would be your wealth. The sky is turning red.

You hurled the caesura at a chandelier. What's moxie, anyway?

As opposed to commuting I don't feel like passing through.

The five stages of wickedness. A hashtag, a loss of henna.

Projectiles of prehistorians. I don't even trip anymore.

Figured out how to adapt to excitation. A month from now.

Claw-marks under a hand-glass. Upright frame bushwhacked.

Not a battle of wills but a battle of pills.

When I was filmed it was really boring.

One cross drives out another. Brilliant discord, pine needle.

A rider thrown by his wayward horse.

Like the time I didn't nitpick and my intimacy got stolen.

Death can't conceal sex and sex can't conceal death.

A moment to become a man or a scythe.

The cross-street argues with the cross-hatch.

A contract to protect you from ridiculousness.

Foreign to the season of the ravages of sensuality.

I'm going to wing it not minding what you said about it.

To summon the skin-diver. No sentence less than thirst.

Lowest job in town isn't blowjob. A loss of spare keys.

Or else it impels us to the zenith of a sandwich.

I don't care if you're vacationing in Indiana.

Anguish is bliss as we plunge into the vast linen.

If someone asks me to sign something or spill something.

I'll bloom where you are. A gobbling cantata.

Predawn versions of the open house.

How difficult to disguise your speed.

We travel for days inside each other.

You continue to believe in each and every shithead.

It has central air and she is cool.

Friday, the sumptuous and edgy fidelity.

He sometimes comes here for concerts.

You can have a brownie if you wish.

She has allergies so I must vacuum the house.

Sliding down anomy with a bright blue key of quicksilver.

I told him about that and he gets it.

Magnificent blunders of a six-eyed Banjo.

Your edge adores you. Katabasis of the open heart.

She is the one that made a plea for a raft.

With his parents out of town, hell broke loose.

The shifting ceiling of this room. There are chilies.

For now language is our only sanctuary.

I have my head up my ass. You have your head up your ass.

But morning can bear the weight of our brokenness.

Pure protocol. He was your target of ejection.

You don't have the right to humiliate him.

Less glowing than growling less drums than strings.

My dad's paternal uncle whipped his wives with canes why.

Tables we can wheel around. A flashing cursor.

How do you ground yourself?

I know the play you are talking about.

Second chances with sidewalk salt.

She has many other things going on. Fantastic!

Now what? Your breasts on my ribs.

Are you gonna be free tonight? You better be.

One stranger. Two strangers. Three strangers.

Between the hills your wife photographed from behind.

And even though you won't waltz me to the end of the tunnel.

Blessed are the complications and impossibilities.

A dial like a gust of sorrow. I had to roll in all that.

Of fate and inversions of tiredness.

The documentation of depletions. Her down and dirty testaments.

You don't have the right to humiliate her.

The Postman just dropped off a box of despair.

Danger and mirth are linked. There is snot in every chair.

That strategy is boiling over. A man on the edge of a hill.

Somewhat shaken when an attack of the equinox is afoot.

Sniping spree in a gift shop.

He booked a cruise for both of us.

She tells him to skip the slow motion.

How to live in the cathedral of our desire.

That script we wash ourselves in.

Your music misled the candles and the angels.

When geomancy began to go wrong.

Every once in a while my shorts on her floor.

You entered the apricot.

Which exceeds the limits of rapture.

Monday to Friday: returning flights.

Something like fencing, an inventory of adultery.

Saint of all time, psychic debris, her paraphernalia.

Which is not to say I've not been a witness to the carnival inside bones.

You jacked off and ended up not braking for a light.

7 flavors. The kind of space where language pukes.

Answers in motion together with broad-backed secret lore.

Culture is your cudgel. Nowhere else is of much use.

This must be what sardines in cans must be feeling right about now.

Those streets soaking inside tantric weeks.

Peace of quiddity and scab of suburbia.

The only way to dodge your destiny is to eat it.

To pull the handle and fly formation if I can pull myself out from under self-torture.

Our salvation didn't depend on what simplicity had wrought.

8 incarnations. Marimba moonlight.

Uche Nduka is a Nigerian-American poet, essayist, collagist. He is the author of twelve volumes of poems of which the most recent is titled LIVING IN PUBLIC(2018). Some of his writing has been translated into German, Dutch, Finnish, Italian, Arabic, Spanish, Serbo-Croat, French. A 2017 NYFA Poetry Fellow, he presently lives and teaches in New York City.