The Black Experimental Impulse: Returning to Seismosis

A student in my recent "Twenty-First Century African American Literature" seminar insisted, "We should stop using the phrase 'Experimental Literature.' All creative writing is an experiment." This is true, but I think the black experimental impulse is a different kind of experiment. I think, for many Black artists, the impulse to experiment can be the impulse to somehow convey ways of feeling free that are too weird to be expressed straightforwardly.

Carolyn Rodgers captures this feeling weird zone of blackness when she writes, "Black is weird. is different. we have layers of european shit piled on our souls."1 Amiri Baraka captures the role of heavy, historical and ongoing antiblackness in this impulse to be free and weird, when he muses, "Verse is a turn, simply. Like a wheel, it has regular changes x . . . Except what we want is vers libre — free verse. Never having been that, free, we want it badly. For black people, freedom is our aesthetic and our ideology. Free Jazz, Freedom Suite, Tell Freedom, Oh, Freedom! And on!"2

For John Keene and Christopher Stackhouse, in Seismosis (2006), feeling free leads to a creation of open space where blackness can be marked and unmarked. The open space is created through an interplay between Stackhouse's line drawings and Keene's poetic lines. The non-call and non-response between the drawings and the words creates a meditation on the nonlinear possibilities within lines as conceptual and formal units. The lines in the drawings gain a new dimension when felt alongside Stackhouse's question, in a 2012 interview with Rashid Johnson, "Do you feel you fit into a line of black American painters and artists? Do you feel part of a continuum, or don't you see it as a continuum? Is it more like a crowd than a line?"3 Stackhouse, in this interview, is not analyzing his drawings in Seismosis but the question he poses for Johnson — the idea that being an artist moving with and outside of a crowd may be different from the lines that create a continuum — illuminates the practice of worrying the line in his drawings in Seismosis. Lines moves in strange, unexpected ways in his drawings; they create tangles that feel too crowded to be any type of smooth continuity. In Seismosis, the line drawingscreate a crowded space of tangles through the continuity of the line, giving a sense of the formation of the tangling, so to speak. Stackhouse works lines for their most non-linear possibilities and makes the crowded space of tangles feel like the space of heightened possibility and freedom. The feeling of being an artist moving with and outside of a crowd also shapes Keene's poetic lines in Seismosis.

Seismosis opens with the words, "In the mark event, you enter your signature."4 The emphasis on "signature," throughout the book, makes readers/viewers of this word and image text think about the tangled lines that create signature and the possibility that "signature" begins, in this text, to sound/look like identity. The final words in Seismosis are "In the mark, we choose and lose signature." If we choose and lose identity, we are always signing and always erasing our names. A "mark event" is comparable to a signature on the body that one can never refuse. Keene drops the "event," which makes us imagine a continuing process of marking that might be more than race, gender, class, sexuality assignments; "the mark" here seems like an "event" that never ends. If the mark of identity feels like an event, the re-marking and unmarking of identity can feel like a space of interiority. When Keene ends this book with the words "in the mark" (italics mine), we feel this interiority of identity. The final words "we choose and lose signature" are a call to rethink the lived experience of identity formation as, often, a complex process of finding the freedom to re-mark oneself and lose some of the tight-fitting restrictions of what has been assigned. Consider: in the 1990s, a popular t-shirt worn by young Black people announced "Black by Nature, Proud by Choice." Keene's idea of choosing and losing signature reveals the deeper dimensions of this sartorial performance of identity. The young people wearing this t-shirt may have desired to re-mark and unmark. The appeal of the t-shirt was not the idea of "Black by Nature"; the appeal may have been the desire to proclaim that what has been assigned has become so much more than what was hailed by forces of anti-blackness.

Keene's notion of "losing signature" may only be fully comprehended as his words move alongside Stackhouse's line drawings. Could the black experimental impulse be a way of choosing and losing the impulse to represent blackness? Renee Gladman, another experimental artist who draws and writes, poses the question, "How do we find language, how do we put the complex shape of our interiority — its vast web-like structure — into the straight line of the sentence?"5 Seismosis itself is a practice of choosing and losing signature and entering into the "vast web-like structure" created by the interplay of the line drawings and poetic lines. There are no straight lines in the poetry or drawings in Seismosis (as Cheryl Wall emphasizes, the "worried line is not a straight line").6

When lines become most worried in Seismosis, we enter into folds. Keene writes, "Whom will I gather, gather into these folds?"7 In my interpretation of this book as a meditation on the marking, re-marking, and unmarking of identity, the idea of "folds" that "gather" is the key line that makes me re-hear the earlier line, in this text, when Keene writes, "In the end, refuse signature"8 The folds that gather become the space where the signature of settled identity has to be refused. In the folds, the signature often included in the paratext of slave narratives (underneath the words "written by himself," "written by herself") can finally be refused because Black art no longer has to be framed by the straight line of the color line.

The resonant words "In the end, refuse signature" appear at the end of "Self," one of the only poems that include any explicit (or marked, perhaps) reference to blackness. Two other poems, in Seismosis, make the word "black" matter, but this poem "Self" is the one poem in Seismosis that directly addresses the issue of Black identity formation. The first line in this poem is "Self, black self, is there another label?"9 The poem begins with the question of an alternative label and ends with a call for the end of labels. This poem can easily be read as a manifesto that doesn't want to be a manifesto (a reluctant manifesto on experimental black aesthetics). The book's two other uses of "black" can be interpreted as evidence that Keene and Stackhouse collaborate to make the black experimental impulse feel like the worrying of the lines of identity formation, mining the lines' strangest, most unexpected possibilities.

In "INNER CORE," Keene makes blackness sound like something that people called to be black are always excavating: "{black layer} from internal prior order."10 Stackhouse's line drawings also create this sense of a layering and search for something "internal." In the third poem that includes the word "black," the poem entitled "SUB LIMINE," Keene writes, "I project you, this strangeness, / ecstasy bleeding into the black / reflection: identity / do you hear it, does it hear you?"11 The lines teach us how to feel the strangeness and ecstasy of blackness. The art of the poetic line in this sequence is pronounced. Each line break makes us feel the "ecstasy bleeding." The tension between ecstasy and reflection shapes the black experimental impulse. We, blackened people, often fall into a type of ecstatic trance trying to make art out of the reflections and projections that seem to be our identity. And the ecstasy of being called into this blackness can make artists move with such freedom within these reflections and projections of identity. This poem ends with the lines "drawing is surfacing / through a different plane."12

Keene and Stackhouse truly meet in these lines. They meet in that "different plane" where the black experimental is indeed a way of representing blackness through not representing blackness. They meet in that "different plane" where abstraction does not need to be set apart from representation (where a Black artist can simultaneously choose and lose the signature of blackness). Their co-creation, Seismosis, experiments on that "different plane" where visual and literary abstraction seems to be hailing a reader/viewer who is lost and not trying to be found. In drawing XXIV, Stackhouse's curvy lines almost begin to look like letters written in cursive. Stackhouse makes us try to read a line of possible letters that moves upward until it disappears in the upper right corner of the drawing. On the opposite page, Keene writes, "In the disappearance, the intimate nests."13 This particular poem and drawing interplay is a full co-creation. Keene's idea of the intimacy created through disappearance is evoked in the drawing through a thick black line in the foreground that almost looks like a reader's finger could touch it and feel a texture different from the texture of the rest of the page. This line that looks as though it could burst out of the page creates the sense of another dimension of surface, one that disappeared because the investment in the binary of surface and depth has so often naturalized the imagined difference between reading and seeing, writing and drawing. The last words in Keene's prose poem "Reflex," which accompanies Stackhouse's wonderfully, strangely textured drawing, are: "What was cast away retains its power: stain."14 The thick black line in the drawing feels like the stain that "retains its power" when Keene and Stackhouse meet in the most experimental zone of black art and black identity formations — the zone where the marking, re-marking, and unmarking of blackness are all entangled in the smudge that feeling free becomes.

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Margo Natalie Crawford (@BlackPostBlack) is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of English at University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of What is African American Literature? (2021), Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First- Century Aesthetics (2017), and Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus (2008).

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