UPON Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, New Museum, New York, 2021. / DOUBLE SONNET after A.J., C.S.D., C.G., J.B., D.R., P.C., M.B., K.G., K.W., M.E., K.B., E.G., M.D. & R.S.

1970 –

^{for Okwui Enwezor}

Firehose blast pummels. Torqued silhouettes.
Teach me how to Dougie…We don’t succumb.
Everything that stood in their way…ruthless
destruction…for which tool brazen Diamond

hammers back against murder. Article:
Philando’s fiancé booked. Our assault
maps. Bradford’s built paper, string tactical
veins pulse in black crumples. Forearms—Baller

K.G. (Celtics) seizes, spits. Gouache, white ink,
magenta mouth-stung light. Walker: We tried…
Not venom, neurotoxins. Vomit pink—
Is it? Our exhaustion translates: We tried…

Bubble hoodie. Helmet-to-weave, No Rem,
M.E., welded steel: Lynch Fragments for them.

Art mines, solders, bleeds. Angles as expect
orate to its hyphae. Roots—in Hyper
cardioid and contact—mics—Dew, Pigment.
Beasley and Gallagher sinew lines, curve

sensorium as polyurethane
query: optic vertebrate, lexicon.
Translucent human-gut spores. Body planes
used in the hi order for…your drill…Drum

Bits…/ntial…ad…FREE WORKSHOP will…i
of America…now…PUT YOUR HANDS UP
AGAINST THE WALL! The building is on Fiiyy
yAAHH…got my 3 kids, and we bounced…Smoke rup

tures Alien’s proboscis…They don’ know…
They don’ know…Pixels—blues, violet shadows.

Ronaldo V. Wilson is an interdisciplinary artist, poet and scholar. He is the author of Carmelina: Figures (Wendy’s Subway, 2021). He is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at UC Santa Cruz, serving on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program and principal faculty of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

About Ronaldo V. Wilson

Themes

Form

About this Poem

“This poem is a meditation on the Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America exhibit, curated by Okwui Enwezor at the New Museum, where I spent four to six hours per day looking, sitting, standing, dancing, walking, crouching, lying down, being near, and listening to the art, over the course of a week. As part of a double-sonnet sequence interrogating race and representation I explore how particular artists from the exhibit oscillate between modes of the figurative and the abstract to create embodied, material routes that cohere the torqued, yet fluid condition of capture and freedom of Black Being/s. My poem is in direct conversation with artists Arthur Jaffa, Charles Gaines, Mark Bradford, Kara Walker, Melvin Edwards, Kevin Beasley, Ellen Gallagher, and several shared interlocutors: Cali Swag District, James Baldwin, Diamond Reynolds, Philando Castille, Kevin Garnett, Michelle Dobyne, and Ridley Scott, each of whom help me to understand strategies of gesture, form, movement, and subjectivity; as well as vast lineages and imaginative possibilities in the face of traumatic history and everyday life.”
—Ronaldo V. Wilson

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71. Realizing Lucy

At the top of the hill, before the light gives way to the pine
that fractures across the sky,
and the farmhouse, opens its door to shadow, there is a
signal.

It is not the dead bird, lying out flat and face down in the
middle of the street, its brown
belly on the pavement, cooled by the wind.

It is not in my chest, which opens up into sections as I
breathe in the air that almost
shocks me into falling face down as I climb the hill.

Ronaldo V. Wilson

2016

Post-Dissertation-Intervention (i.)


I always tell my dancers. You are not defined by your fingertips, or the top of your head, or the 
bottom of your feet. You are defined by you. You are the expanse. You are the infinity. 

—Judith Jameson
 

Elizabeth Alexander in The Black Interior writes about beauty, and how black artists 
resist monstrousness by their own self-definitions.  

I’m interested in this repair, too, but find comfort in the ugly.  I love monsters.
We both consider Brooks.

Ronaldo V. Wilson

2014

Poems

UPON Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, New Museum, New York, 2021. / DOUBLE SONNET after A.J., C.S.D., C.G., J.B., D.R., P.C., M.B., K.G., K.W., M.E., K.B., E.G., M.D. & R.S.

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71. Realizing Lucy

Post-Dissertation-Intervention (i.)

Poems

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UPON Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, New Museum, New York, 2021. / DOUBLE SONNET after A.J., C.S.D., C.G., J.B., D.R., P.C., M.B., K.G., K.W., M.E., K.B., E.G., M.D. & R.S.

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