Hollywood Forever
Harmony Holiday
2017
Fence Books
Albany, NY
Unpaginated
$17.95
Reviewed by Clara B. Jones in online
journal, The Curly Mind [Es], 2017
“Are you beginning to feel that
bleeding could be reciprocal?” Harmony Holiday (2017)
The poet and cultural theorist, Fred
Moten, has devoted many years to developing a black aesthetics
promoting “improvization” as the conceptual framework of black
Art. Beyond aesthetics and philosophy, Moten has attempted to
integrate Art and radical politics relative to the black diaspora.
Moten's subjects belong to a tradition of black avant garde
work and black cultural nationalism, including, but not limited to,
the overt anger reflected in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s
(e.g., Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni). In his 2003
book, In The Break, Moten adopts an epistemological
perspective to investigate the relationships between radical black
critique, lyrics, and performance. An academic and scholar, Moten's
analysis draws upon semiotics, deconstruction, critical theory,
radical history, and psychoanalysis in order to demonstrate the
fundamental import of improvization to black aesthetics and Art. An
extension of Moten's ideas is the notion that black politics and
black aesthetics are united in service to self-determination and
freedom from oppression.
Harmony Holiday's poetry glorifies
improvization as a mechanism for coping with pain. Her writing is
often raw and depressing, as if her craft is a method of expiation
and therapy. Holiday's work can be placed in an avant garde
genre of radical publishing whereby innovation (“improvization”)
represents a personal good or a good in itself. Unlike Moten's
agenda, however, Holiday's improvization seems cloistered, personal,
and anti-intellectual rather than social and political. Holiday is
sharing her demons, as shown most clearly in her 2011 book, Negro
League Baseball (Motherwell
Press). The daughter of jazz great, Jimmy Holiday, the poet's
words verge on randomness, as if reality is almost too painful to
face (“...The tenuous scent of/one lit on purpose is different than
that of one that senses some superfluous earth then, hurry up and
light.”; “My father was Jimmy, dad/was weeping so frankly it came
like gazing had”; “And every time I fall in love, what
television, another obituary, I am three, trying to tell psychology
about/psychology....”). Negro League Baseball seems to
scream that the world doesn't make sense, that it is chaotic. There
is lots of babbling—baby-talk, perhaps; each poem seems like a crie
de coeur—somewhat crazed though not completely out of
linguistic control (“The things we know are rigged giddy,
pornographic/the already things—jigjig, slow-slow/”; “Then one
disappears in the forward and we have become somebody—“). The
2011 collection reveals the poet's experience; life is improvized
like jazz...like her late, haunting father's chosen way of being.
Holiday's new book, Hollywood
Forever, is a compilation of text art—language superimposed
upon text in the form of racist posters derived, apparently, from the
1940s as well as upon photographs of various known and unknown
figures from black entertainment and political domains. Again, jazz
features prominently in this collection, though this book links the
personal, social, and political in more overt ways than in the 2011
volume—signs of nascent insight (“I've come here to lash out/I've
come to reclaim my tenderness”; “There is this ambivalence that I
must deal with/How do I deal with it—how?”; “I begged you/to
come in/the costume/of a dead/American hero”). Some of the first
poems in Hollywood Forever seem to bear a spiritual mien, as
if to say that sinning is a way to receive grace—but, for whom
(“Here's this unidentified, but/identifiable for some, black/man,
walking out of a dingy,/ominously lenient jail cell, his/suit covered
in blood, head/bandaged, eyes downcast in/arrogance before shame...”;
“We hit the pitched Iowa road like convicts in his landless
motor saw a white god in/Texas and black one in shackles and we still
woke up in Los Angeles the choked/up mecca of our carbon black
masks this fame that ass etcetera”)?
Hollywood Forever is a pastiche
of fragments, prose, prose poems, and what one would conventionally
term, “poems.” The book classifies as radical publishing because
it is a performative, oppositional act (“Forensics outside of Miles
Davis' jail cell”). The text art design is potentially effective as
a radical statement of novel black art; however, of the approximately
78 pieces in the volume, at least 22 are printed in a virtually
illegible manner, detracting from the potentially powerful effect of
the collection. Nonetheless, Holiday's new book demonstrates a
maturity missing from Negro League Baseball. In 2017, the poet
takes her place as a citizen of the United States commenting as a
member of a marginalized race though her “voice” remains
emotionally wounded and relatively flat intellectually with a nascent
sense of agency. Harmony Holiday has received recognition for her
novel treatment of themes and for her unique linguistic formulations.
Reading this poet's work is an entry into a psychological discourse
of one damaged young woman to herself and, tentatively, to her
readers. I have never read anything quite like these writings that
are recommended as gateways into one very interesting mind.
*Published 5/9/2017 in The
Curly Mind [Es]
