Comments Serving as Introduction to upfromsumdirt’s Deifying a Total Darkness
As delivered on March 1st 2020 on the occasion of the release of the full-length poetry collection from Harry Tankoos Books. Zinc Bar, NYC.
I first connected with the man born Ron Davis on, of all hellscapes to meet someone, the internet. He commented on a Tumblr post of mine, which is something no one had ever done before. I immediately researched who he was—this poet-person behind the mask of a spaceless, lowercased, string of words: upfromsumdirt. I was immediately smitten by the work—and that’s smitten in both senses: a strong attraction and struck with a firm blow. I knew within an hour I wanted to publish his work.
Since that moment, I’ve experienced a ceaseless string of skull-thuds in the form of upfromsumdirt’s poetry. Which is why I’m so honored and pleased to be presenting him here, to mark the occasion of these works finding some jerry-rigged containment in the form of this beautifully constructed full-length collection.
Deifying a Total Darkness represents what’s most rewarding, in my opinion, of brother dirt’s work. Ron has a certain irreverence (he recently referred to it as “avoiding any contrived sense of professionalism”) toward the body of work he’s been cultivating down in Kentucky. It’s as though he had zero expectations that this work would reach, zombie-like, from the patted earth and muddy sludge across the screens of laptops and smartphones.
There’s play to his Afro-pessimism and an organic base to his futurism, and so “the space suit explodes petals” and “the astronaut [is] a houseplant.” His Afro-futurism is like Rammellzee’s: forward-seeking while wildstyling with junkart mixed media costumes constructed of this world’s trash culture. This is all to say he presents to us the detritus of this failed intercontinental project called capital.
Much like his award-winning visual art—these poetic lines cobble together sources like a compost pile of the humbler gods. In his own words, they are “blackly chaotic.”
He reads with a deliberate disaffection—he refuses to stand in front of crowds and showtime and inflect with theatrics. He prefers to lull you into a false sense of security as the words themselves gnaw through your skin like spirited germs.
He never seems far from the medical condition known as witzelsucht—a pathology, or curse, or gift (I would argue) of a human being who can’t stop making puns. And so we get these gems dropped on us routinely: in one such example, “[he’s] got what you creed.” Meanwhile, “Shakespeare sits up in his grave [to utter] ‘all lines matter’” / he reinvents Rakim: “syncin’ up our master plans ain’t nothin’ but syntax inside our hands.” / “swing low Sweet Harriet” / “the Wolof in sheep’s clothing.” His allusiveness and punning are relentless, boundless.
I also admire his anti-institutionalization of poetry positioning. Of AWP, he asks, “how many poets does it take to ekphrasis a lightbulb?” I admire his kaleidoscopic vision of Black Art—he’s Ishmael Reed’s unruly and disobedient son, making the father proud. He’s got no regard for polish or sheen—in fact, he says “‘shoo, polish!’ / is the black poet’s eternal stanza.” He’s daring and crude enough to mix high and low registers to make his noise, which is at times a clattery cacophony and at other times a Lexington lullaby.
His activism shines in poems like “Photographer Catches the Exact Moment A Volcano Erupts,” which appraises the Baltimore uprising of 2015. He conceives the deep potholes and craggy hunks of loosened asphalt that comprised the streets, the pathway, the so-called “rough ride” Freddie Gray was subjected to as a matter of geology—that’s to say a scientific inevitability. A volcanic eruption that was destined to occur because we still live on the fissures even though we like to forget we do.
The seriousness is always undergirded by dark humor, though, as he writes: “i’m anti- / fascist and it keeps raining ketchup / no wonder we’re american.”
These reasons, all of them, are why I’m so pleased to be a friend, collaborator, and fan of Ron’s. And now we all get to hear it in-person: upfromsumdirt.
