Futurepoem Books is excited to announce the winner of the 2022 Other Futures Award: makalani bandele, for his book (jopappy & the sentence-makers are) eponymous as funk.
(jopappy & the sentence-makers are) eponymous as funk is a conceptual literary enterprise that imagines and recontextualizes for readers the Free Jazz performance of the fictional band jopappy & the sentence-makers. The poems and visual art in this book investigate anti-blackness, Western hegemonies, and the resilience and transcendence of Black culture. All the poems in this collection were written in a poetic form bandele invented called ‘the unit’, inspired by virtuoso pianist and composer Cecil Taylor’s groundbreaking 1966 album, Unit Structures. The free jazz ethos and how it encourages polyvocality and a panoply of cultural and rhetorical references in a nonlinear, discordant, hermeneutically open modality make the unit arguably the first, self-consciously post-structuralist poetic form.
Look for (jopappy & the sentence-makers are) eponymous as funk sometime in early 2024!!! Watch this space.
A collection of poems inspired by the life and times of virtuoso Jazz composer and pianist Earl “Bud” Powell. Powell was troubled by police brutality and harassment, drug abuse, alcoholism, and mental illness throughout his life, and these subjects are central themes I explore in the work. These poems have been a vehicle for me to investigate how Black genius has encountered, been profoundly affected by, struggled against, and whether consciously or unconsciously, developed mechanisms to cope with White Supremacy in the US.
A notion that was never very far from my thinking when writing these poems, is the poet Tim Siebles’s idea that a poem is “a spoken solo, a musical composition built line by line for the express purpose of creating an emotional/intellectual experience for the audience.” Taking Sieble’s notion a step further, I incorporated blues and jazz music theory in the construction of these poems. For example, in Jazz improvisation, solos are full of memorized phrases and chord progressions, references to popular songs, other musicians’ solos, wrong notes, as well as “fill in the blanks” with the right note based on tastes, knowledge of the scales and ability to play them. How things get put together, that is, what musical phrase follows what, has to do with various kinds of associations artists might make in the moment. Similarly, I utilized jazz music theory in the construction of these poems. I experimented with referencing (music lyrics, other poems, and popular phrases), different kinds of associative and discursive techniques, parataxis, catachresis, abstraction, and sonics to capture the “feel” of Jazz composition and vernacular spoken among the musicians. The language of the poems is often non-representational and highly metaphorical on purpose. Jazz like Classical music is abstract music compared to lyrics-based musics, therefore I wanted to explore a poetics that could effectively render the hermetic and abstract nature of Jazz performance and the slang used among its devotees.
Finally, these poems are multivocal and have multiperspectivity. Sometimes the speaker is Powell or a close friend or family member, sometimes the speaker is the spectator at a performance, other times the narrator is a fellow musician within the group performance with Powell, and sometimes the music itself speaks.
Cover art by Ron Davis
The title of this collection is derived from the nickname the French Army gave the all-Black 369th Infantry Regiment in World War I, the Hellfighters. hellfightin‘ is a tour de force of lyricism, mysticism, jive philosophy, and discursive narrative as blues lick. The title of the book, as a term, is best understood in the context of the critical framework of the Blues ethos as it speaks to the resistance of Black life to the onslaught of White Supremacy. In this way, hellfightin‘ is a poetic education in the African American musical, cultural, and historical traditions. This collection is in a long line of books that seek to bring attention to the Black literary tradition in all its intersections with Black music traditions.
Praise for hellfightin’
“You will want to remember these poems. There is hurt here, and there is the music that turns hurt into song. This collection reminds us it’s always about music. Downbeat. 6/8. Da-da-da. Alway about sound. And that being black in America, being human on the planet, has always been understood best when the wails and the moans, the glee and the fists raised the air, have had their sound echoed to a rhythm we all understand. Call this poetry an immersion and soak yourself in what you find: ‘color surrounds us/ and communicates/ without cadenza.'”
– Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Felon Poems and Shahid Reads His Own Palm
“makalani bandele’s hellfightin’ is a collage of modulations and montmarte, harmonics in pinetops, sonics in Parker’s bars, locutionary blues and choruses that play on and on and on in the psyche, uniting something rich in us all.”
– Alison Adele Hedge Coke, American Book Award winner and author of Blood Run and Dog Road Woman
“What a blessing to find a poet who writes with a deep love of song, one whose affinity for melody and history gives you a sense that his ears and heart have entered a spirited bond, makalani bandele is that poet, and his lines do more than dance—they swagger. Not with arrogance, but calm, knowing confidence that calls the reader back back for more. When bandele declares ‘i like my government like i like my improvisation, mellifluous,’ we can’t help but think ‘government’ could easily be exchanged for ‘poetry,’ turning the line into a take on the bandele’s skill. Secular, sacred, and singing loud, hellfightin’ inspires.”
– Mitchell L. H. Douglas, author of dying in the scarecrow’s arms and \blak\ \al-fə bet\, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky/Editor’s Choice Award