An Unfolding Elegy
/It is difficult to talk about the poet Jake Adam York without talking about his unexpected death in December 2012, at the age of forty. Those who knew him mourned a husband, son, 
It requires the work of volumes to come. Inscriptions for Air is then a book without a single spine, without a single binding. My hope is that its presence in a larger body of work that asks not only questions of memory but also questions of life will suggest the necessary continuity and perpetuity of the work of memory.
Born in West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1972, York grew up in Gadsden, Alabama. A tall, bald white man who could have been mistaken for a skinhead, he knew he looked the part of the murderous power he decried in his poems. To that end, he questioned what it meant for him to write the forgotten and often suppressed histories of murders committed by men he resembled. He recognized that if he did not examine his position as an elegist, he could instead usurp these histories for his own gain.The elegies are the centerpiece of York’s poetry. He also wrote about music, in particular the murder ballads of the Louvin Brothers and the jazz of John Coltrane and Sun Ra. He wrote about his grandmother’s southern cooking and his love of whiskey and barbecue. For York, we relate to one another in music and food. We create memories and a sense of belonging. In this light, the elegies are not just for the Civil Rights martyrs but also for our best selves: the selves we subsume to the demands of power and privilege.
The song is one their mother sang,a campfire waltz on autumn nightsor alone, a lullaby,the oldest song they know.Now the tape is rolling,Charlie on guitar, Ira mandolin,the way they’ve done since they were kids,in heirloom melody –
In the song, a young man goes on a walk with his girlfriend. He beats her to death and throws her body into the river. Back home, his mother asks about the blood on his clothes; he says he had a nosebleed. That night, he is haunted. In the end, he is in jail for life, pining for the girl he once loved.Of the murder ballad, York said in an interview with Gregory Donovan at Blackbird, “The stories they told were tragic. But the songs couldn’t be sweeter. And I’ve been struggling with this aesthetic problem of how to write about history that’s terrible without offending this history, offending the victims of this history.” He wanted to write poems that “are interested in things that are terrible, but at the same time in their textures, the sounds, the music of the poems, offering something more dulcet.”The song “Knoxville Girl” predates the Louvin Brothers. Its lineage can be traced across the Atlantic to “The Bloody Miller” from seventeenth century England, a time when ballads were a popular way to record history and tell stories. In engaging with the murder ballad, York aligned himself with the ancient role of the poet as scribe and witness.
I didn’t think that poetry’s authority or the elegist’s authority or tradition’s authority was enough to allow entrances into these lives. I thought that it shouldn’t be enough. Maybe, the trouble with elegy is not that suffering is inconsolable, even partially, but that poetry’s demonstrations of its own authority, as justified per se, are what threaten to turn elegies into pornographies of power. And the murders I was writing about were murders by power – physical and hegemonic power – I didn’t want to place the murdered at the hands of another kind of power without asking questions of that power, and that meant asking questions of myself and my ability to enter their lives and memories. So, in many of these poems the elegist becomes the victim of another sort of violence, most of it self-willed if not entirely self-controlled.
York contended with this asymmetrical power of the elegist in the poems “Negatives” and “Vigil”.The speaker in “Negatives” looks at a postcard photograph of the 1911 lynching of John Lee in Durant, Oklahoma. A crowd gathers around a plume of smoke; in one version, the words “Coon Cooking” are etched into the negative. York positioned the speaker as part of crowd:
you can see only smokeand the appetite on the facesclosest to the heat,the desperate arching of a bodyeager for a glimpse of the gravity,the magnetism of this powerless man.
York blurred the lines between witness and spectator. Looking becomes prurient, the witness implicated. The speaker imagines the flames engulf the crowd and by extension, himself:
but the cloud now a dark tornadocaught on the verge of breaking through,ready to consume each watcheruntil all there is is this plume,the body enlarged,its ash, a thousand postcardsof a world he dared not dream he dreamed,signed with the names of all who watch,ready to inscribe the scene Wish you were here.
In careless hands, the lynching becomes just another spectacle.The poem “Vigil” remembers Virgil Ware, a 13 year-old boy killed on the afternoon of the 1963bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. He had been riding on the handlebars of his brother’s bicycle when two white teenagers shot him. The speaker watches over the body on the ground, next to the bike, and imagines:
Let it gather this heat, this fire, hold it all.Let the crucible door open like a mouthand speak of its bloom of light, molten and new.Let me stand in its halo. Let me standas it pours out its stream of suns.Let me gather and hold it like a brother.And let it burn.
I started more deliberately founding the poem’s syntax and sound on the facts and, wherever possible, the actual language of the murders, as gleaned from documents, interviews, newspaper stories, or photographs. In writing these poems, I would start with a quotation and build the poem out from there, shaping the syntax to echo the quotation, or building the line on the nominal length of phrase in the quotation, or developing strands of echo or synonymy or explication from the quotation’s diction.
He called this method the “documentary lyric,” explaining:
I try to write a poem that, however narrative, is still clearly lyric – that is, it’s musical, its attentions to language complicate and even arrest the flow of narrative. The lyric elements – those relations of language that are not necessarily narrative, that exceed narrative – in these poems are, however, not derived out of a private language but, instead, from documents that also provide the poem’s subject.
York used the documentary lyric in “Substantiation,” a sequence of nine sonnet-like stanzas on Emmett Till. Till was visiting family in Money, Mississippi in 1955 when he was murdered for purportedly flirting with a white woman. He was fourteen. The killers tied a cotton gin fan around his neck and threw his body into the Tallahatchie River. York focused not on the crime but on the aftermath:
The sheriff says it wasn’t Till we pulled from the river,that man was as white as I am, white as cottonblowed by the cotton gin fan that weighed him down,looked like he’d lain there weeks, not a kid at all.He was a stranger just out of Money, recalledby a store clerk, a hobo, a crossroad guitarist.The reporter finds them at the once abandoned crossing.They say it’s like the sheriff says, came up one night,headed Clarksdale way, another one, hat pulled down,right behind. Three days later, the bluesman says,a plague of starlings gathered into little boysthose who fished and found the dead man’s foot.The reporter stares into his cataracted, cotton eyes.He cannot find them, no matter where he looks.
This opening stanza lays out the facts and establishes the tone of the poem. The community, as represented by the sheriff and later the defense lawyers for the accused, claims Till is alive and his mother ordered a body dug from a fresh grave. The reporter, who is based on two real-life journalists, comes to town to cover the trial of Roy Bryant and John Milam, but he is thwarted by locals who refuse to deviate from the official story and the sheriff who gives him wrong directions. York weaves these two points of view to create a portrait of a community’s denial and, ultimately, the silencing effect of power.The civil rights movement worked to dismantle state support of white supremacy, but underlying that support were private and often unexamined beliefs about race, power, and privilege. Bryant and Milam may have acted as individuals, but they were threatened by what they saw as a loss of their white identity. The community supported them until, after they were acquitted, they boasted of the crime and thus exposed the community’s complicity.The poem “Substantiation” is accusatory. York made his argument by accreting the facts – or more accurately, the lies and the doublespeak – in the story. He built documentary-like scenes and let the images make the commentary. Most crucially, he composed a consolatory music that, as he said, “draws the readers’ attention even more closely to the facts and events that should disturb them fundamentally.” In employing the documentary lyric, York created poems that make us face the inner workings of injustice.
In 1890, Eugene Schiefflin, in a bid to bring all of Shakespeare’s birds to North America, introduced the starling to New York’s Central Park. As the starlings multiplied, they became seen as an invasive species, a rhetoric that echoes fears of racial pollution. In A Murmuration of Starlings, these birds bear witness to racially motivated crimes, as in the opening poem “Shall Be Taught to Speak”:
A thousand miles away, in Arkansas,six men pose beneath a tree. In the photograph,the hanged man’s sweater’s buttoned tight,his hat, his head raked to hide the noose.One man stills the body with his cane.Another moves to point, but his arm is blurred.Trees burn quietly in the morning sun.Their jaws are set. Just one thing’s in motion.
No one sees, York repeated in the collection. The power of his work lies in part in his relentless accretion of detail; he refused to let us look away. “For Lamar Smith,” on the voting rights activist gunned down on the courthouse lawn in Brookhaven, Mississippi:
No one sees him cross the courthouse lawn,the lone black man in the election crowd,and no one steps from the line and pulls a gunthen slips past the sheriff and the whole white town
“For Reverend James Reeb,” on the white Unitarian minister from Massachusetts beaten to death during a Selma march:
and no one can see what lands, what cracksthe skull, the hairline fracture in tangled hair
And in “A Murmuration of Starlings,” on Jimmie Lee Jackson, whose death at the hands of police catalyzed the Selma-to-Montgomery marches:
No one sees them drag him down the stairsand into the streetbut that is where they found himNo one sees them beat so hardclubs splinterskin and spit and bloodthrough the haze of breath, bodies’ steam
No one sees. No one sees the consequences of their beliefs, the complicity that makes these murders permissible. The starlings, however, are there as quiet witnesses in the background, a chorus of sorts. Their presence and anonymity indicts us. As York writes in “The Crowd He Becomes,” on the Birmingham church bombings:
The mayor says all of us are victims, innocent victims.The lawyer kills his radio. When folks ask laterwho did it, the lawyer says I’ll tell you who.Who is everyone who talks of niggers. Who is everyonewho slurs to his neighbors and his sons. Everyonewho jokes about niggers and everyonewho laughs at the jokes. Everyone who’s quiet,who lets it happen. Now his voice flaps in the raftersof the meeting hall, and everyone is quiet.I’ll tell you who did it, he says, we all did.
A writer, like me, who wants to explore the duality or multiplicity of our cultural and historical life – to look not only at the official (white) history history that precedes the Civil Rights Movement and that often complicates it, but to look also at the stories and lives that were suppressed or nearly erased, and to look at those things at once – has to occupy several places at once. Since writing is a temporal art – it requires time to create and time to consume – the only way to achieve simultaneity is through constant self-revision. One work revisits another.
Persons Unknown continues with the Civil Rights elegies, but instead of focusing on the details of the murders, York evokes the haunted landscapes of the crimes. The title poem is “The Hands of Persons Unknown,” a documentary lyric on Mack Charles Parker, who was arrested for alleged rape, abducted from jail, and murdered in 1959. His body was recovered from the Pearl River near Poplarville, Mississippi, ten days later.
Ice buds on the oaks and hickories.The rain, the ice keeps coming.The limbs lean down. Light may stirin the bulbs of ice then break, spreadand split in the smothering dark,then close again, just headlamps passing,ice cocooning every limb.
Here York does not accuse, not directly. He stays with the landscape: ice, rare in subtropical Mississippi, as well as the trees, river, and glass. He addresses Parker as he imagines the violence inflicted by hooded men:
They’ve come for you as if counties’worth of water could claim its bed,claim its crest in you. You leaveyour mark, your water, but subside is slow,a melt to the bridge, the bank, the stream,high marks for a Bible and a brushin the morning to wear it back again.
The landscape becomes an accomplice to the crime. Unlike the starlings, which make noise as they depart the scenes of the murders, the landscape keeps its secrets, including the identities of the men who shot Parker and tossed his body into the swollen river:
Tell us how the river rises,how one prayer becomes anotheronce it leaves the mouth.Tell us how Mississippimakes an undertaker of the water,a perfect gauze for every wound.
Then afternoon is a conspiracy of color, an echo the heat or the historyin our voices draws us into – someone else’s version of ourselves –and the inevitable, painful quiet in which an answer must arrive.
He does not respond; his answer is too long and complex for a casual conversation.In “Self-Portrait in a Plate Glass Window,” he dines at the Selma café where James Reed last ate and notices the owner watching him:
It’s the right address, though the name has changed,and he must be asking, as I am, am I where I’m supposed to be.
He avoids the man’s gaze and focuses on his chicken and greens instead:
Eyes down, I’m working to the blank plate and the questions that have to follow –Where you from? What you after? – even if no one says a thing.
Under the restaurant owner’s gaze, York questions his own presence: why does he need to write these difficult histories? Why does he not maintain the silence expected of him? There are two sides to privilege: tt is the luxury to be blind to the suffering of others and the ability to speak truth to power without severe consequences.York returns to West Palm Beach in “Self-Portrait in the Town Where I Was Born”. At a seafood shack in the black part of town, a girl with a baby on her shoulder asks him and his companion, “What y’all doing here?” He wants to say, “I was born here,” but he realizes that is not what she asked:
This is the momentwe become visible,when we emerge or develop,the only whites in a block or two.
Why are you, white man, in our part of town? The question echoes his own: why are you, white man, writing our histories? The people in the shop turn to him:
waiting as I take a breath –vinegar and brinein the rising wind –everyone waitingfor the sound I’ll make,the first word I’ll say.
In this moment, he suggests his responsibility to the black community: to use his privilege to make their stories known without speaking for them.
One of those modes is the monument, and the monument is about making some sort of large public statement that seeks to reorganize the way the recipients understand themselves or their position in the world in which that statement is possible. The other approach is the memento, which is something more personal that, if you will, evidences the artist’s relationship with that subject in his or her life, in his or her own bodily experience, without necessarily directly implicating the reader in any particular way.
As Ovid or Onomacritus – or was it Ike Turner? – said music makes everything want to reach out of itself,rocks forgetting their gravity, birds hovering as if become part of the air itself
York slides from the ancient Greeks to the blues legends Ike Zimmerman and Robert Johnson before he says:
This is how, in these moments, when music coaxes everything out of itself,when you become so attuned you almost hear the light
The light in this juke joint in Mississippi makes him think of William Moore, a white protestor killed near Gadsden:
after walking from Chattanooga to Gadsden, with the sign, Jesus Was an Alien,taped to his caisson, his letter for Ross Barnett – Be gracious and give morethan is immediately demanded of you – still folded in its envelopewhen the assassin found him, and this is how I imagineMedgar Evers, not two months later, the pulse of the kitchen lightreaching through the bullet hole in the window to flicker on his skin
This poem is a memento. His remembering of this history arose from his engagement with music and myth. In this fourth and final collection, York wrote the Civil Rights martyrs into poems about his father, his great-grandmother, his youthful experiments with jazz and rap battles. For York, history is not segregated from the present. History, no matter how difficult or damning, is a part of who we are.
