I’ll start with the most basic of confessions: I know I didn’t understand everything Sadé Powell wrote in wordtomydead, and I know that even when I re-read her words—no matter how many times I should re-read them!—I will never understand all of it. And part of that is cultural—Powell is a Black woman, and I am white—and part of it is, well, neurological. This is concrete poetry, word melded into art, and, yo, my dyslexic brain pretty much shuts down when it tries to read wordscrammedtogetherlikethis, or stretched out looooong and yoooooonnnnndddddeeeeerrr in a myriad of ways.
None of the poems in wordtomydead are titled, and some are more seething mass of letters than direct intelligible words. Those poems (or art pieces?) tell their own story: claustrophobia, often, or fear, or desperation, or the urgent need to say everything that can be said, before the ability to do so is cut off. They are not restful poems, which, I think, must be more than half the point. They are fucking urgent, a call to action, even to me who can only pick out a word here and there. (The image at the top of this post is both the cover of wordtomydead and a poem within the chapbook—and a damn fine example of those words rushedtogethertoformaseethingroilingmass.)
I think it’s important, here, to pause and discuss the (mechanical) way Powell created wordtomydead, and to note the way Ugly Duckling Presse brings it to life. Powell evidently writes on a 1940s mechanical typewriter, which, I think, makes her particular expert manipulations of text and image and white space possible. You can do SO much with a good typewriter, things that a computer will struggle or fail altogether to manage, and Powell takes every advantage of those abilities to create wordtomydead. And Ugly Duckling has done a beautiful job with this book: they always put out lovely work, but this little chapbook, stitched together, words slamming into each other like dying icebergs, is a masterpiece of chapbook construction, and of form following function.
And did wordtomydead speak to me? Oh, God, yes. In one poem Powell writes of the ways in which her old New York neighborhood is changing and staying the same, writing at one point, “what am I unbecoming?” And is it not a form of unbecoming, every time our haunts are turned upside down? I know I feel something similar when I see the street on which I grew up, or the color block monstrosity of a dorm where there used to be open ground.
Will wordtomydead speak to me the next time I read it? I have no doubt it will. But I also think, next time, I will not concentrate quite so hard on making meaning of those words, but rather allow myself to swim through the images Powell has created here.
Essentially a Nerd 