POLYNOMIALS AND POLLEN: PARABLES, PROVERBS, PARADIGMS AND PRAISE FOR LOIS - JAY WRIGHT

100 R.I.P. Harold Bloom. The man died recently and I found myself considering his legacy and watching YouTube videos of his interviews. He’s a great at it. He’s overly dramatic (he’ll call something like Harry Potter the death of literature, or tell you that Shakespeare invented being a human), he can recite basically all of the Western Canon (which he, of course, famously defined) and he calls everyone “my dear” or “sweet child.” But when thinking about his legacy, I think he often unfairly gets painted as a racist and a YT chauvinist (as far as the other major Bloom criticism, the one alleging he harassed and molested female grad students, I feel disgusted and disappointed). I think it is fair and proper to say the Bloom is overly dismissive of art’s role beyond personal aesthetic pleasure, especially the ways people who are not ancient, tenured, rich college professors might want to use art. Though I do not think it’s right to say that he seeks to deracinate the Canon. While it’s true that he’ll say that Alice Walker or Toni Morrison don’t deserve places in the firmament (I don’t know Alice Walker but he’s wrong about Toni Morrison) he does propose non-YT alternatives. Which brings me to how I heard about Jay Wright. Bloom recommended him, suggesting that he’s being overlooked at a Black Poet due to academic desire to have Black Poets write more polemically. I would say that Wright isn’t more popular because he’s really hard. The work is rich with allusions and leitmotifs and all the stuff you’d expect from Poetry with a capital P, but the religious/symbolic language draws from Indigenous American and African traditions. Specifically, each chapter is a series of short poems built around a concept from Yoruba, Akan, Dogon, Bamana or Nahuatl cultural traditions. I don’t know a lot about these cultures and cosmologies, I’m sure I missed a ton of connections and thoughtlines. My favorite section is “Ilhuitl,” the Nahuatl one. Since I know a little something about Nahuatl culture (the title is the Nahuatl word for a day or festival day) I caught some of the stuff surrounding flowers and hummingbirds, which occupy a different position symbolically in Nahuatl culture than they do in the “Western” poetic tradition. Seems like it would be great to read in a class with a teacher who could walk you through the references. Plus,there’s some untranslated ancient Greek. I could read one word and felt like a fucking braingenius. Otherwise, I’m not the best poetry reader or reviewer. I will say that I enjoyed the length and that you can read each section in one setting and really lock into the flow and cadence. It was an interesting rhythm of sections that resonated and I enjoyed followed by sections I found impenetrable. But those sections never lasted long and the parts that hit really hit. 400 +1 non-Western conceptions of god.