Give Us a Poem: Joshua Bennett
Studio Museum
Paul Stephen Benjamin
God Bless America (installation view), 2016
Courtesy the artist
Photo: Adam Reich
In January 2018, the Studio Museum and Dr. Joshua Bennett invited five New York-based poets to write and perform ekphrastic texts responding to the mediums and concepts visually represented in Fictions. The Next Black National Anthem by Bennett brings our celebration of National Poetry Month to a close, but poems will continue to appear in Studio as we celebrate and reflect on the written word's relationship to visual art.
The Next Black National Anthem
Joshua Bennett
Will naturally begin
with a blues note.
Some well-adorned
lovelorn lyric
about how
your baby left
& all you got
in the divorce
was remorse.
& a mortgage.
& a somewhat
morbid, though
mostly metaphorical,
obsession with
the underground.
How it feels to live
in such unrelenting emptiness,
unseen, altogether un-correctable
by the State’s endless arms.
Just imagine: Ellison’s Prologue
set to the most elaborate
Metro Boomin instrumental
you can fathom, brass
horns & pulsar cannons
firing off in tandem
as Aretha lines a hymn
in the footnotes. Twelve &
a half minutes of unchecked,
bass-laden braggadocio.
The most imitated,
incarcerated human
beings in the history
of the world & every nanosecond
of the band’s boundless
song belongs to us.
It is ours, the way
the word overcome
or The Wiz or Herman
Melville is ours. In any corner
store or court of law, any
barbershop argument
or hours-long spat
over Spades. The Next Black
National Anthem will,
by the rule, begin
in blood, & span
our ongoing war against
oblivion. Clarify the anguish
at the core of our gentleness.
How even that generosity
is a kind of weapon.
This music, our bladed
criticism of a country
obsessed with owning
everything that shimmers,
or moves with a destination
in mind. Even the sky.
Even the darkness
behind our eyes
when we dream.
Dr. Joshua Bennett hails from Yonkers, NY. He is the author of The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), which was selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series, and Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man, which is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. Bennett holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University, and an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Josephine de Karman Fellowship Trust, the William F. Milton Fund and the Ford Foundation. His writing has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Poetry and elsewhere. He is currently a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University.