The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty): Tyrone Williams [by Angela Ball]

Border Clashes

 

We stroll out of El Zocalo

to find a world turning white

with snow. Not more than an hour ago,

or so it seems, it was still just a neighborhood

of homemade heaps and small dark houses

huddled against the single-digit skies

of southwest Detroit.

Kim plods to his Escort. I fire up the Tempo,

turn on the wipers.

1-75 to the Lodge,

I pretend to follow the north star

but pull off at the Warren-Forest exit

and pull into the Third Street Saloon.

I take out a five for a Stroh’s

and take a look around

at the only other patrons,

a table of students,

one of whom I know, a poet.

She catches my eye, looks away,

carelessly laughing as I recall

*

Christmas night at the Detroit-

Windsor border. I sat alone

in the back of an Accord

being driven by Mary, Katie

beside her, two sisters,

nearsighted, brown-haired, blond.

The guard bent down, jerked his head

my way, and sneered, “You gals

bringing anything across?”

Flashing licenses and teeth—

“Is—that--all?”—

Katie, enraged, swore for hours,

but how could I, I who have always

lived between countries,

between that night and another night,

thirteen years before,

when my girlfriend and I

found ourselves detained by Customs

because I was said to resemble

a West Indian brother

twenty years my senior?

Later, back in the U.S.A.,

Katie and I danced our asses off.

Sweat flung from the sprinkler

our figures cut, twinkled like icy

stars on the stage

lit unlit by slo-mo strobes.

I could smell the sweat of a hundred

worlds, the sweet and sour stench

of cheap perfume and bargain-brand soap.

It was the hot sauce and garlic of Hamtramck

and Highland Park, Rayis Brothers

and Brothers Barbecue, Eastern Market

and Lafayette Coney, an ethnic festival

teeming with bloods.

When the lights came up, we filed out,

stunned, as though the places

to which we had to return--

Plymouth and Detroit--

had been found dead

in each other’s arms:

murder-suicide.

*

Last call, and I’m just fine.

I stumble to my car, spin out

of the lot in a spray of sleet and mud

and hit the northbound Lodge at sixty.

Not a few of these vehicles are harboring drunks

like me. The world is still turning white.

The white dotted lines are useless now.

We weave our ways home,

as best we can,

in lanes of our own making.

-Tyrone Williams

About the poem: It was written during, and about, the year I returned to Detroit (1986-1987) after spending three years in Cincinnati (1983-1986). For me it evokes that year I was trying to decide if I'd stay in my hometown or return to my job in Cincinnati (which I did) .-Tyrone Williams

Tyrone Williams is the David Gray Chair of Poetry & Letters at SUNY Buffalo. He is the author of several chapbooks and seven books of poetry: c.c. (Krupskaya 2002), On Spec (Omnidawn 2008), The Hero Project of the Century (The Backwaters Press 2009), Adventures of Pi (Dos Madres Press 2011), Howell (Atelos Books 2011), As Iz (Omnidawn 2018), washpark (with Pat Clifford)(Delete Press, 2021)and stilettos in a rifle range (Wayne State University Press, 2022). A limited-edition art project, Trump l’oeil, was published by Hostile Books in 2017. He and Jeanne Heuving edited an anthology of critical essays, Inciting Poetics (University of New Mexico Press, 2019). His website is at https://www.flummoxedpoet.com/

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifty): Tyrone Williams

Every border is a question, a passage from one state of being to another. Tyrone Williams’s compelling poem of passage negotiates straightforwardness and peril: the evening of a man-about-town á la Frank O’Hara, the decay of towns and their possibilities, and the danger of passing between worlds when trolls and their questions guard the bridge.

At the start, “we stroll out of El Zocalo”—a Detroit bar channeling a Mexican bandstand—“to find a world turning white / with snow.” We feel the pleasant shock of transformation that ennobles “homemade heaps and small dark houses,” but at the same time can’t avoid the ominousness of “a world turning white”—a world in which the poet-speaker’s presence is at best, questionable; at worst, dangerous—seemingly unlike the cityscape O’Hara strolls in “The Day Lady Died,” its material choices so rich that he almost falls asleep with “quandariness.” Yet mortality and injustice are at large in both poets’ worlds. As a Black performer and drug user, Lady Day has been targeted by law enforcement and forbidden to sing. She triumphs through a whispered performance so powerful that her audience stops breathing—as she herself will do, before long. The poem, steeped in this retrospect, carries both exhilaration and chill.

This poem’s “I do this, I do that” moment, “Kim plods to his Escort. I fire up the Tempo,” conveys massive information with a glancing touch. This is a familiar scene; the cars basic, their upbeat names ironic. The poet, after pretending “to follow the north star” finds himself diverted to another drinking spot—whose specific highway exit and name, along with “Stroh’s”  and “a five,” sink us into the scene the way O’Hara’s “New World Writing” and “Strega” do in “The Day Lady Died.”

The poet sees students, including “a poet I know,” whose laughter shades into a memory of “Christmas night at the Detroit- / Windsor border,” and an incident featuring a border guard who “jerks his head” in the speaker’s direction, asks the white women in the front seat, “You gals / bringing anything across?” His friend Katie swore for hours after this, but the poet, all too familiar with such scenarios, who “has always lived between countries,” remembers a worse incident, a time he was falsely detained on suspicion of being someone else.

The mood changes to manic festivity as, “back in the USA,” Katie and the poet dance frenetically: “Sweat flung from the sprinkler / our figures cut, twinkled like stars. . . ,” a moment eloquent with joy—human precipitation joins the poem’s snow and sleet-spray. The stanza throngs with place names—a sign, we have come to understand, that the poet is at home:

     It was the hot sauce and garlic of Hamtramck

     and Highland Park, Rayis Brothers

     and Brothers Barbecue, Eastern Market

     and Lafayette Coney, an ethnic festival

     teeming with bloods.

But the section ends with a darkly comic image of “The places to which we had to return-- / Plymouth and Detroit-- / . . . dead / in each other’s arms: / murder-suicide.” In its fatality, the poem reminds us that the border between place and people is permeable, that places determine lives, and that these are places that manufacture death.

The last section heads the poet home. “Just fine,” he stumbles to his car, spins out “in a spray of sleet and mud.” The highway’s milieu resembles the bar’s, except snow blinded: “The white dotted lines are useless now.”  Some borders are crucial to all.  We remember, perhaps, O’Hara’s statement, early in “The Day Lady Died,” that he will get off the train and go “straight to dinner / and I don’t know the people who will feed me,” this trivial uncertainty pointing toward an existential one, an uncertainty much more radical in Williams’s poem. Its “I” has become “We,” and we are left, in William Stafford’s phrase, “travelling through the dark”:

     We weave our ways home,

     as best we can,

     in lanes of our own making.

What is a free-verse poem if not “lanes of our own making”?  Tyrone Williams’s masterful poem recreates a complicated dystopia in which living while Black generates endless “Border Clashes.” Williams’s lines (or lanes) string tight, summon the tension between knowledge and mystery, safety and danger. Making of it a sort of song. -- Angela Ball

Comments

[sarah gelder]

You make a cvonvincing argument for considering Tyrone Williams's poetry in the context of the New York School. Thanks.