Review by Richard Hamilton
“Orders of Service: A Fugue” (Alice James, 2023) by Willie Lee Kinard III is a bracing, coming-of-age narrative in verse. It lays great claim to music theory and, in doing so, becomes a vehicle for the shape and sound of these very lyrical poems. It whets the appetite of those readers smitten by traceable patterns. The fugue, for example, with its ties to classical music and jazz improvisation, does the work of creating a polyvocal, contrapuntal sound chamber, echoing the Greek chorus. Few would know that Kinard’s own musical influences, a life-long student and teacher of contemporary gospel music, are to blame for these forays.
In “Self-Portrait as the Cricket,” the speaker, a self-identified human insect with legs “curved around the knees” with fluttering eyelashes, grapples with and transforms the gazes of others. Each line in a series of couplets imbricates, is a play on the previous one. It is the poet’s way of early establishing one of the most tantalizing aspects of the book, that is the attention to musical techniques. It is not just through free associations, but also by way of speech that is both elevated and colloquial, that readers are invited to journey with the speaker through a rural, backcountry southern landscape marked by hedonism, church infighting, insufferable senior leadership, familial bonds, and differences.
In “The Choir, or Chatteracks,” readers happen upon a church service held outdoors. This could be read in many different ways. I prefer to invoke Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the “Carnivalesque” with its notions of embracing base, even “low” culture. There’s grunting alongside the beat of tambourine shells. “Flagrant divinities” are “rattling deviants” in the choir of “husk” and “hum.” I am reminded of Black, gay activist, educator, and filmmaker Marlon Riggs’ eponymous short film, “Tongues Untied.” It’s the multivalent repetitions, the call-and-response, and the naming that often captivates and troubles.
Yet another star for this collection rests in the way the author undoes the hierarchical relationship between man and nature wherein man lords over, usurps, and manipulates nature for his own self-gratification. Nonhuman beings share the same stage with humans. Natural landscapes are granted equal time. There are many gay, urban narratives, but one hardly ever hears from our astute, country cousins. Backwoods have long been associated with backwards thinking, places gays like us escape from, but here, in Kinard’s world, I get a strong sense of place-making in the proverbial sticks.