Educator and author Cameron Barnett occupies the best of all possible worlds when it comes to the discipline of poetry. He’s accessible without sacrificing erudition; he’s challenging without being off-putting; and he delights in guiding readers into a bayou of unexpected word associations and sensations.
Not to worry, though. The author of the award-winning collection “The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water” never abandons his readers to the Phantom Zone of obscurity while exercising his prerogative to cast the spells that are every poet’s birthright. Barnett’s latest collection, “Murmur” (Autumn House Press), hits bookshelves on Feb. 27 and is already being hailed as a triumph.
Poet Monica Prince, author of “Roadmap: a Choreopoem,” makes this startling, but apt, observation: “‘Murmur’ plays jazz on the spinal cord.” M. Soledad Caballero, author of “I Was a Bell,” describes “Murmur” as “Simply stunning — simultaneously expansive, inventive and intimate.” Pittsburgh literary expat Deesha Philyaw compares “Murmur” to a “glorious shout” with poems designed to “shake up histories, both intimate and political. They stir and disturb the ways we look at love, at race, at our people and ourselves. A bold, beautiful and brilliant collection!”
It’s hard to disagree with any of these descriptions, but it should also be said just how funny and provocative many of the poems in “Murmur” are, beginning with “Reading Black Poems to White Audiences: A How-To Guide (Part III: The N-Word).”
There’s no need to reproduce Barnett’s scathing poetics here since it would only provoke the kind of post-racial moralism and hypocrisy he decries in the poem but understand that it is truly a tour de force of simmering rage both historic and personal. It confirms what many have always suspected about a certain subset of writers: It is often the outwardly genial writers like Barnett who are the most radical authors out there.
“This poem was in reaction to one specific moment I experienced, but one that also speaks for other moments I and friends of mine, other writers of color — Black poets — have experienced where you get the double whammy of praise and unsolicited counsel,” Barnett said during an interview in Swisshelm Park where he spent his formative years. He now lives in the Friendship/Garfield area with his wife, writer Anna Weber.
When asked if he planned to read the poem aloud to the predominantly white audiences he is bound to encounter once he begins promotion for the book, Barnett laughed. He knows how combustible the word is, especially with well-meaning white folks who may feel compelled to police the use of the “n-word” even by African-American artists.
“There are a few poems here that feel more for audiences of color that probably will resonate with the murmur of sentiment that runs through the book,” he said, ever the diplomat.
As a teacher at Falk Laboratory School in Oakland, his middle school alma mater, Barnett understands the importance of reading his audiences correctly, especially when unfurling poems as uncompromising as those contained in “Murmur.”
“The sentiment, the anger that’s building up under the ground of that poem and under the text as well, that to me is for an audience of people who know that feeling and who have a heritage connected to that feeling,” he said.
On the other hand, Barnett will read “Little Africa on Fire,” a tragically beautiful dirge and catalog of history that tells a major part of the American story that will likely get his book banned in Florida:
“This is how the story begins: a touch, a bump, a hot mouth,
Jostled skin in an elevator, escalation, tension, even just the illusion of trespass. It always seems the smallest contact triggers the fire, the tip of a match struck along the lips of containment.”
A friend of Barnett, who read an early draft of “Murmur,” said it was “a very angry collection.” The poet has some thoughts about that.
“‘The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water’ didn’t pull any punches,” he said, “but it’s a much more philosophical collection.” He believes his friend was pointing out that he was addressing issues more directly now than in the past; he agrees. “I’m expressing things in a rawer way.”
Asked if he had planned to up the emotional ante with “Murmur,” he looked pensive and gave his answer some thought.
“I had a vision,” he said. “I can’t say I had a plan, but I knew I wanted to write into uncertainty. When I was writing my first book, earlier, even before I knew it was going to be a book, I was a poet who felt [I] had to know where [I] was going to land before [I] actually started moving.”
This is a common affliction of many writers and one that was repeatedly pointed out to him in graduate school. Now Barnett makes a point of consciously working against the tendency of being too controlled and over-planned at the expense of a higher truth he wants to get at.
Even the least observant readers will notice the ubiquity of the word “murmur” embedded in poem titles and verses throughout the book.
“The ‘Murmur’ fragments were originally one long poem,” he said. “A poet friend advised me to break them up into stand-alone stanzas.”
This was wise advice. “Murmur” derives much of its power from the judicious placement of the heartbeat-themed stanzas, mostly biographical, throughout the book.
“When I was a little kid, I had a pediatric checkup and the doctor heard what they thought was a heart murmur, which frightened my mom,” Barnett said.
“My dad, who was a doctor, said there’s no way this could possibly happen, so he had a followup checkup and the second doctor said there was nothing there. But the mere suggestion of it stuck in my mom’s mind.”
Though the original diagnosis was proven faulty, it had its effect on the Barnett family.
“Kinda unbeknownst to me as a kid, [my mom] was always worried that maybe there was some truth to it and one day — I was a very active kid — that I would just fall over, and that would be it. And that became as I talk about in the book, ghosts, these things around us that are kinda there because it’s talked about, but not really there ’cause it’s not real — things that hung over me as I was growing up. I wanted that idea to permeate everything I possibly could, sorta like being in the liminal space between reality and unreality and life and death and how that could apply to race, America, manhood, being a good person or not a good person, and that goes for the speakers of the poem and the targets of the poem.”
One of the best poems in “Murmur” also happens to be the first:
“I’m searching for the perfect light,
The perfect pen, the perfect place to loose an arrow of forgiveness, neither forward nor backward, just true.
I’m searching for neither a true nor truer Blackness, not for transformation without change, not for the lingering scar but the scab long fallen off.
I’m searching, two fingers to the wrist, for whom I tell myself to be, searching for love in an EKG, searching for the murmur one decibel at a time.
I’m searching for my messy truths for an arrhythmia of remembrance, for a patriotism seven years sober of supremacy, for a grammar of freedom precisely punctuated.
I’m searching for the crumbs I left behind without knowing, for approval neither Black nor white, for the myth of my making and the architect of my remaking, for the muted laughter of ancestry breaking through.”
Tony Norman’s column is underwritten by The Pittsburgh Foundation as part of its efforts to support writers and commentators who cover communities of color.