What We’re Reading: Sing This One Back to Me

Sing This One Back to Me by Bob Holman (Coffee House Press, 2013) begins with a poem called “[Title of Poem]” which lays out some of the things to follow in the book. Here’s the beginning:

There’s humor here, to be sure, but there’s also a clear love of poems. Holman is a poet who is constantly looking for the “Neverending poem, the other poem, yet another poem[.]” He’s a poet who actively looks outside his own experience of the world to find inspiration in visual art and in the songs and poems of other cultures. Sing This One Back to Me includes a “special guest appearance by Papa Susso,” a West African singer and poet, as well as poems in the ekphrastic mode, translations of sorts from the visual work that inspired them.

There’s a risk of appropriation when someone from a dominant group uses language and stories from another culture. Holman, thankfully, avoids this trap, and is incredibly respectful of the source material he’s working with. The third section of Sing This One Back to Me, “Jeliya! (or, Griot Poems, As Sung by Papa Susso to Bob Holman)” features poems that are performative and energetic, filled with exclamations and digressions. Holman allows Susso’s voice to come through, never editorializing or annotating the poems. “This story begins long long long long long long long long ago” begins “How Kora Was Born,” hearkening to English fairytales. “Jeliya!” begins:

Yay! Jaliyaa!

Alaleka Jaliyaa Daa!

.

God created the art of music

This music! This song!

This song is a celebration!

These lines demand to be read out loud, they demand to be read to an audience. It’s clear that Holman has learned much from Susso.

Not all of the poems here are translations from another language. There is also a series of ekphrastic pieces translated, as it were, from paintings by Van Gogh and Rothko. A typical “Rothko” poem reads like this:

Quest amber tease

Test amber breeze

Anchor azure still

                                —“Bone”

A “Rothko” poem is, according to Holman’s notes, “three lines, three words per line.” Three of the words should be colors, and they should form a tic-tac-toe pattern in the poem. Holman does concede, however, that these rules can be broken, though do so “at your own risk.” As short as these are, they too seem to want to be performed. The sound of the words becomes a new dimension and helps to create a more complex picture in the mind of the reader.

The most heartfelt poems in Sing This One Back to Me come at the end of the book, which contains a collection of lovely poems about family. “Love,” in particular, is a beautiful little piece dedicated to Holman’s late wife, painter Elizabeth Murray. “Your hand throws out / As you sleep[,]” the poem opens, and this intimate moment is compressed suddenly and stopped in time. The poems that follow touch on Murray’s death from lung cancer, making the small moment when her hand “[l]ands and settles” on Holman’s body heartbreaking in retrospect.

While the last section of poems contains less bombast than the previous poems, they are no less performative. Indeed, it is the final poem that the book is named after. “My feet on the lotus?” Holman asks, before answering,

                       […]No, my feet are the lotus!

All God? Gosh, I was looking over at you—shh.

No need this talking, this poem so obvious, shh.

But Holman’s poems are never just obvious. There is always, in his own words, a “[p]oem behind the poem[.]” These poems are colloquial, honest, and sure of themselves, which makes reading them a pleasure. Reading them, though, is only part of the experience for Holman. To fully experience these poems, I imagine one would have to see and hear them read out loud, either by the poet or by someone else. These are poems to share with friends and family until everyone is singing them back.