Takoma

Poetry

The Tribute Years – 2018-2024 by Malik Wilson

Sunday, November 9th, 6-8pm

Takoma House

Malik Wilson’s 6th book of poetry finds him in fine form – perusing, explicating, wondering, considering – and in his latest vein, paying tribute to all manner of life, experiences, and things. A kind of Song of Myself for the laggard, distant Generation X set, tiered through ribbons of maleness, Washington, DC, late African American life and physical, aesthetic, and spiritual pleasure, The Tribute Years is an early summation of Malik’s oeuvre – a gourmand of life with juice-streaked lips, with a resonant refusal, and even pride, at placing down anything less than a kind of totemic intellectual and philosophical promiscuity. 

A kind of hip hop Generation X John Ashbery, Malik Wilson's prose/poetry seeks to capture the nature and fill and feel of everyday life. Getting at the undulating rhythms that undergird caught speech, Malik's lines are a masterclass of distillation in a fevered world where we are over-blitzed with information, sounds, sensations. His art can be seen as a kind of ongoing process of rendering, editing down, the making of an essential statement. Taking to heart the English language's ability for clipped, moany, koany expressions, what results is a jazzy-still word-silent collage of outrage, introspection, perspective cuddling, and, most of all, the assertion of a kind of Adamic notating and archiving of things. 

Our leader, and the founder of Takoma, we are most proud of Malik for the ideas of ascent, community, and communion in his art practice. There's a way in which - 'he does it for us, because of us' - is true in a way that both restrains and sets free. The curtain falls just beyond us to those near us as well, casting a kind of shed evening light, something ghostly, strange, but also very familiar. 

The Tribute Years - 2018-2024 is Malik's 6th book, and his first since 2014. A kind of mid-career, mid-life summation, it is 'about' all the things Malik's work has always been about - "harmony, rhythm, the classics, the garage, the steppe". Vistas both far and near beckon, adapting to what the poet Mary-Sherman Willis has called Malik "near and far range, both normal and weird". Perhaps no better complement has been given to Malik than that of his mentor, the scholar and teacher Dr. Herman Beavers, who said to him after reading his second book, "I wasn't so sure, but when I read your book, I knew you had figured it out - I knew you were ok". 

That can be a kind of summing up of Malik's entire oeuvre, of the purpose and mission of his art - a record of how he stayed ok, stays ok.