On Black Poetry: The Corpse and the Phenomenon of Third-Person Consciousness

Abstract: Blackness, simply, is not . Or, more aptly put— the naught-ness of not . Blackness exists in uncertain terms caught —petrified within meanings fashioned by the violent discourse of culture. Yet, Blackness insists on masquerading within those meanings, performing the transgressive and operating within its own abyssal effects that fundamentally “damage” the laws of discourse. Similarly functioning from a familiar position of theoretical negativity, poetry philosophically represents that which cannot fully arrive—“an affair of ‘private language.” What happens when Blackness encounters the private language of poetry? How does Blackness accomplish the work of utterance facing the impossibility of its being within the operations of the poetic and its silences? What is Black poetry? This paper surveys the convergence of Blackness with poetry, insisting that Blackness presents an aesthetic conundrum to the affairs of language. From this meeting between two negativities, the following questions emerge: What can Black poetry represent? What of naught-ness can be established in the realm of appearances? In this paper, I will argue that under the pressure of anti-Black discourse, Blackness pretends to be— performing itself as poetry. Consulting the theoretical work of David Marriott and Jean-François Lyotard, I will attempt to locate this performance in Melvin Dixon’s poetry collection Love’s Instruments .