makalani bandele on “the unit,” Featured in the Tenth Annivsersary Ocean State Review
“the unit” is a prose poem form invented to explore the boundaries of language, syntax, form, and musicality in poetry. It was inspired by virtuoso pianist Cecil Taylor’s groundbreaking 1966 album, Unit Structures, in so far as it desires to embody the feel of collective improvisation encountered in Free Jazz as a poetics. Even as a prose poem form, “the unit” approaches the lyric with the precision and abandon of an instrumentalist free improvising. Each “unit” is a container, a space carved out for the celebration of ungovernment and how melodious dissonance can be. The foundation of the form is Ron Silliman’s poetic device, the New Sentence. Here is a quick summary of the qualities of the New Sentence: “1)The paragraph organizes the sentences; 2)The paragraph is a unity of quantity, not logic or argument; 3)Sentence length is a unit of measure; 4)Sentence structure is altered for torque, or increased polysemy/ambiguity; 5)Syllogistic movement is: (a)limited; (b)controlled; 6)Primary syllogistic movement is between the preceding and following sentences; 7)Secondary syllogistic movement is toward the paragraph as a whole or the total work; 8)The limiting of syllogistic movement keeps the reader’s attention at or very close to the level of language, that is, most often at the sentence level or below.”
Poems in “the unit” form attempt to simulate or approximate the musical conversation* between instruments in a Free Jazz performance. The language, ideas, and phrases expressed in the poems are representative of the music, notes, and phrases that would be played (heard) in a Free Jazz performance. In this way, the poems might be thought of as either transcriptions of the music, or surreptitious notations that the musicians might use to guide their improvisations. The broad and diverse range of subjects and source materials employed in the poems are characteristic of what urbane, cultured, contemporary, Generation X, multi-ethnic, well-educated, socially conscious artists of the 21st Century United States might express in their art. The expansive repertoire, interests, politics, and influences on display in the poems is portrayed as statistics, AAVE, lyrics from African American Music songbook, the African American Music tradition, puns, folk sayings, various contemporary theories (like Afropessimism, post-structuralism, String Theory), dictionary definitions, and visual studies terminology to name some prominent examples. This dimension of the poems, quoting from diverse sources, is deeply embedded in the Jazz tradition and other African American Musics, especially Hip Hop. It has long been the hallmark of the soloist in Jazz to sprinkle her improvisations with a bar or two, or a few recognizable notes from popular song, classical composition, or blues tune. This assembly of a panoply of cultural references in a nonlinear, discordant, discursive, and hermeneutically open modality make the unit, as a form, arguably the first poststructuralist form. It is in particular the employing of Free Jazz aesthetics that pushes the language in the poems towards a heightened ambiguity, as wildly different subjects and source materials are played right after, alongside, and over against one another generating new valences, particularly surprising, even playful suggestions that are at odds with the original or common interpretations of the phrase(s). As the unit form attempts to simulate (or model) the musical conversation the instruments enjoy in Free Jazz as it is not bound by corresponding rhythms, same time signatures, conventional melody, or harmonics, it seems (sounds) like a bunch of nonsense (noise) at first as the New Sentences (musical bars) talk at, talk over, talk around, talk indirectly about, completely ignore, and suggest other narrative or philosophical directions for the New Sentence(s) prior to it or after it. Thus, there is a marked polyvocality to poems in this form, and speaker, subject, meaning, and even tone are constantly shifting. This opens a verdant semantic terrain where every New Sentence resonates with metaphorical possibility and a complex of multiple valences. These “bars” are organized by how they sound against (with) one another as much as by how they might relate to or enrich one another semantically. The rules for the form are simple and owe their direction and intention from the rules for Ruth Ellen Kocher‘s invented form the Gigan: sixteen New Sentences or sixteen bars. Some of the words in the first New Sentence and the sixth are combined to make up the twelfth New Sentence.
*(I don’t mean to suggest that the above is the only context in which to understand “the unit”. Another reading of “the unit” form outside of the Jazz tradition might be as a collage poem.)
a unit_9 kind of love
1to travel the gay globe with them owning the cornice and your black reflection in the piazza. 2the attorney general is out on bail and prosecuting niccas to the fullest extent of the law. 3an expanse of complexions, complexities and contradictions inherent. 4run it back. 5as another way of saying, fish don’t fry in the kitchen. 6shawty do the bankhead to the subaltern. 7do fries go with that shakedown the cop dispenses to pay for his luxury vacation home? 8instants of havoc, despair, pink houses, white picket fences, carnage, mass destruction, white people smiling and waving unwittingly. 9the deer stops and listens, then drinks. 10it’s important to me, that you know you are free.[1] 11is it live or is it metaphor? 12have bankhead will bounce and reflect back on black and gay intersection, and how shawty got over over there and back. 13it’s a horn player’s world full of skin hunger. 14these eruptive disruptions are heavily syncopated. 15that’s when you get jacked for all your measurables. 16needless to say.
Notes on a unit_9 kind of love
[The term sentence, when used in this study should be understood in the context of Silliman’s New Sentence. When I say ‘sentence’, I generally mean New Sentence.]
This unit is a perfect expression of the unit form as freedom of expression. I feel confident that the unit is the first poetic form with a framework that creates space for poets to say whatever they want to say with little or no pressure to adhere to syllogistic or hermeneutic norms. That is not to say that a traditional form like free verse does not encourage great liberties, only that those freedoms are tied to rules of prosody and not so much subject (or lack thereof) or content. While the rules of the unit form do not explicitly direct the poet to be discursive or trouble sense, the design of the form is to approximate free improvisational ensemble performance, which is chaotic, disjunctive, and abstract (in music term). Thus, if one is not reaching for non-representation, ambiguity, and/or dissonance, then one is not in keeping with the ethos of the unit. While the unit on varying levels ‘say something’, there is no doubt that meaning, is troubled, and the unit, as a whole, does not have a central anything (theme, message, voice, tone) as a conventional poem would. This is one of the reasons why I argue that the unit is a poststructuralist form.
In the following comments, I am endeavoring to talk more about what I am doing than what the sentence might mean. The unit is meant to be a very fluid form, it is difficult to pin down one meaning if any at all, but there is a lot there and it’s deep. If a reader has the patience to get beyond the lyrical mayhem, there is a sea of possibilities and ideas to dive into.
1 Where does a sentence like this come from? I was taking a Queer Theory course and read several chapters from Under Bright Lights by Bobby Benedicto. Great book! Germinal. Anyway, I loved the idea of global gay or the gay globe. I love employing architectural terms in my poems, there is something about the structure-related meanings and the sonority of many of the words that fascinates me.
2 F$@% Texas AG Ken Paxton. This thoroughly corrupt mofo was indicted on securities fraud charges. After his arrest (shouldn’t an AG be forced to resign after they are arrested and charged?) his bail was set for 5k. While out on bail (that was 6 years ago), he charged a Black man with voter fraud, that man’s bail was set at 100k. The justice system in this country has never been just. Paxton was more recently investigated for bribery charges related to election finance. He was cleared by an investigation run by his own office!!!
3 Great alliteration here. This seems to me another way of describing poems I am writing in this form. Also related to, even inspired by the previous sentence.
4 https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=run%20it%20back
In terms of the flow of the poem, this felt like a good place to use a short imperative, after all the declaratives.
5 Part of the lyrics to the TV sitcom The Jefferson’s incorporated here for its metaphorical possibilities. Or the reference to fish is not really about fish. In most instances, what I am saying in units is not what I am talking about.
One metaphorical possibility: taken with sentences 3 & 4 all together this AAVE inspired expression is another way of talking about all the ‘expanse of complexions, complexities and contradictions inherent.’ But again, this is just one possibility, another might be to take this as ars poetica. If you think about it ‘fish don’t fry in the kitchen’ of the Jefferson’s high-rise apartment, because the fish smell would overwhelm the whole apartment and might invade surrounding apartments as well. The idea is that one must do a new thing because of new circumstances, which is a premise of this new postmodern poetic form, it was okay to fry fish in the old neighborhood, which is to say the older forms were okay for their ethos.
6 The ‘bankhead’ is a recent African American dance out of Atlanta, GA, named after the Bankhead area of Metro Atlanta. Dancing in the face of adversity is a possible reading. But again, this can also lend itself to an ars poetica reading among others.
7 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTku4XQ0QX8 Again the punning on or syncopation of song lyrics enabled me to formulate a question at a moment in the poem previously dominated by declaratives, an imperative, and two dependent clauses. In choosing this 7th sentence, the most important consideration was that it be an interrogative to satisfy my sense of rhythm (that I think is created by varying the sentence types). Next important consideration was the wording and subject of the question. I think we are in dire need of police reform, including defunding to shift those resources to areas of mental health, eliminating poverty, and improving public education for the poorest.
8 Another dependent clause. I think I employed this clause more for the litany or list effect.
9 Replete in my unit poems is the use of the image as metaphor. Almost without exception, when there is nature imagery in a unit it is to be read as a metaphor as well. I find enormous suggestive possibilities in the reading of sentences 8, 9, 10 as a semantic block.
10 As I was writing this unit, I guess I felt so uninhibited and such liberty that the lyrics from this song popped up in my spirit. I love how this lyric at this point in the poem dramatically shift the tone, if only for a moment.
11 There was TV commercial in the 1980’s for Memorex cassette tapes that posed the question, “is it live or is it Memorex”. An interrogative for rhythm’s sake. The moments of ars poetica in these poems is also an effort to teach readers how to read my units.
12 Recombination of the words from sentences 1 ad 6. There was an old TV Western sitcom called Have Gun, Will Travel. My father was a huge fan of Westerns, this is an obvious pun on the title. The actual dance is called the ‘Bankhead Bounce.’ In the second clause, I am punning off the gospel song How I Got Over. Also, check out The Roots updating of this gospel classic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4vV05lZmvU
13 Again, in my conception, the unit form allows the poet to say whatever they want to say, whenever they want say it. For the unit, the constraints on the poem are not semantic or a certain level of legibility, but poet’s own sense of how music, sonority, and rhythm are created in poems without regard for having a theme or a focus point.
14 This is another ars poetica moment. ‘eruptive disruptions’ (I love the assonance, if it were meaningless, it would still sound good) refers to how the sentences often interrupt each other. Sense gets built in a sentence or block of sentences, then it’s disrupted by the following sentence that seems to be headed in another semantic direction.
15 ‘Jacked’ like carjacked, so it means to be robbed. The unit form ‘jacks’ the reader of their sense of comfort in sense and of what they have come to expect from conventional and mainstream poetry. This comfort and the expectations are examples of a few ‘measurables’.
16 This last sentence is self-evident, isn’t it?
[The term sentence, when used in this study should be understood in the context of Silliman’s New Sentence. When I say ‘sentence’, I generally mean New Sentence.]
[1]Todd Rundgren. Lyric to “Hello, It’s Me”. Genius, 2021. https://genius.com/Todd-rundgren-hello-its-me-lyrics
unit_63 for the player in you
1curious mouth. 2dad gum it. 3not all that unusual for one of them traps to be that thirsty. 4did the cop let jopappy go cuz he look like he got a little white in him? 5woke up with crust in the corners of his mouth and eye boogers, must have been one of those nights without a schema. 6it’s hard to find a black cat in a dark room when it’s perched on a window ledge outside across the street watching the neighbor’s terrier chase its tail. 7once you recognize a picture as not a picture and begin to consider that it might not recognize you either. 8what is the best advice anyone has ever given you? 9a recognition of subjectivity that is experienced only in the form of another black man’s head nod as your paths cross on your walk up the street. 10stop just before you’re done—always leave them wondering. 11she keep the good stuff at home. 12just curious but did i just see you put your mouth on a dark ledge full of watching? 13the bass is a narrative below and a narrative containing other narratives so low you can’t get under them without slipping and sliding around in diverse significations. 14consider the source. 15lookin’ for a spot to lay low. 16sometimes you just have to curtis mayfield that thang to get it to sang, other times it’s so disorienting that you have to feel along the wall for its meaning.
Notes on unit_63 for the player in you
Relevant Question: Can we learn to be more comfortable with opacity, not knowing, nonlinearity, multiple interpretations with no correct answer?
1 Chief among the critical characteristics that every great poet possesses is, curiosity. So, reading this as ars poetica, this is like a metaphor for what it takes to write in the unit form.
2 This was once a popular idiom. The correspondence between mouth and gums is what gave rise to the employment of this idiom.
I love these first two sentences in this poem. Of all the units, this is one of my favorite beginnings to a unit. I hear the influence of Lillian Yvonne Bertram in the crafting of these first two sentences. Bertram is a master at this kind of wordplay.
3 Playing around with the popular slang term ‘thirst trap’. Urban Dictionary defines a thirst trap as
The idea for employing this sentence was likely the result of an association of mouth with thirst.
4 At this point in the poem, it felt like there needed to be an interrogative.
The unit poems published in Ocean State Review are part of an unpublished manuscript. The project is a literary enterprise that imagines and recontextualizes for readers the Free Jazz performance (musical conversation) of the fictional band jopappy & the sentence-makers, consisting of jopappy on various brass and wind instruments, lil’ daddy on upright bass, and uneven steven on drums. The conceit is that this is a question that uneven steven or lil’ daddy posed in the performance, rather this the translation into words of what was expressed in musical sound.
5-6 I think I was just trying to make sure I had some imagery in this poem. As well, I wanted to explore an extended image, which would also serve the purpose of giving me a lot of words to build the 12th sentence.
7 Another example of me playing around with notions that pertain to visual arts. But clearly there are other words that could be substituted for picture.
8 Primary consideration for this line was that I felt I needed and interrogative here.
9 I returned to recognizing and recognition here. This points to other things I might have been thinking about in sentence 7.
10 This is the paraphrasing of a Thelonious Monk quote. This is ars poetica. You will often see this in my work where I will cut a phrase off before it can make complete sense. For an example, see the first prose block in the poem in etude op. 15, no. 03 from my second collection, under the aegis of a winged mind.
11 I love how a nondescript, inconspicuous sentence like this in the right framing can possess so much metaphorical possibility. ‘She’, ‘good stuff’, and ‘home’ can reference so many different things.
12 Using the words from sentences 1 and 6 is fun when you allow yourself to push the boundaries of sense. I have no idea what it is, but I love the notion of a ‘dark ledge full of watching’. This sentence is enormously suggestive and almost has as much metaphorical potential as the one before it.
13 This sentence forms sort of a compound, complex syncopation of Parliament-Funkadelic song lyrics and the language of literary theory. The lyrics come from Funkadelics’s One Nation Under a Groove. The most obvious reading of this is a clue to how to read unit poems and what is theoretically operative in them. This pointing toward the complicated or complicating of narratives speaks to poststructuralist theory.
14 As I have said before, the best poems teach you or leaves clues for how you should read them. This is a clue, pay close attention to the types of sentences, discourses, and voices that the sentences are in. Also, one of the fundamental questions when deconstructing a work.
15 Put your L’s up. I love all the l’s in this phrase, so it is fair to say, sound was a critical factor in my choice. This is another general statement with rich metaphorical possibilities because it is indefinite; its lack of specificity lends itself to a kind of abstraction consistent with the Free Jazz performance I am trying to simulate.
16 This is ars poetica, suggesting that meaning is not easily extracting from unit poems. I have a few ideas for what I mean by ‘feel along the wall for its meaning’, and hopefully the reader sees a multitude of valences as well. I will say, I very much like the idea of deriving meaning from feeling. The structure of the sentence is rooted in a syncopation or a variation of a song lyric (the bridge) from Shake Your Thang by the infamous female Hip Hop group Salt-N-Pepa.
unit_72, building 11
1because i said so. 2the switch she make you go get, when mama don’t play. 3variously structured is the way to deconstruct it. 4you are now rocking with the best anti-narrative. 5look up and e’erybody on five different substances. 6in one ear and out the other. 7inadmissible but transmissible with your league minimum self. 8them’s the hitters. 9black women pay a higher emotional tax at work than everybody else. 10must have been a cold night, jack. 11matters are as changeable as matter. 12she said no in another ear, because i couldn’t feel her algorithm exploring the other one. 13do you have sand in your craw or has it become fiberglass insulation? 14stop trippin’. 15there is no subject matter-to-image correspondence here, or as ke’shawn would say aint no elevens on this muhfucka. 16necessity is a mutha of keeping that thang witcha cuz it’s necessary.
Notes on unit_72, building 11
One of the central elements of all genres of Jazz is the idea of a musical conversation. The instruments talking to or communicating with one another. Thus, listening is one of the most important skills that jazz musicians must learn to cultivate. I understand for most readers the disjunction, ambiguity, nonsense, and lack of central theme in these poems is alienating. The same incoherence, disjunction, and cacophony turns many listeners away from Free Jazz. But there is a great deal to profit when one listens closely to Free Jazz and picks up on the conversation that is going on between the instruments. And there is quite a reward for reading these unit poems closely to tease out their multiple discourses. I would also like to add that life in the 21st century seems to be increasingly chaotic, divergent, and full of ambiguity and contradictions. The unit form embraces this epoch and possibly acclimates the mind to the destabilization of our world.
In the unit form, the idea is that the sentences are listening to each other. There is something in the previous sentence that gives rise to the sentence(s) after it. Sometimes there is a word, its sound, or its denotation, sometimes its connotation that sparks the next sentence. Because there is sometimes not any apparent association or connection from one sentence to the next, does not mean there is no association. To an extent, it is fair to say that unit poems are word and/or semantic association games. Sometimes it’s the type of sentence (i.e. imperative, interrogative, simple, compound) that sparks the next one. Because, I believe Thelonious Monk once said, and I am paraphrasing him, ‘music is the right mix of variation between the familiar and the unfamiliar, long with the short, the simple with the complex, the melodious with the discordant.’ And it is for this reason that in the units, I was very conscious and intentional about making sure each unit struck a balance between the different types of sentences, and myriad of discourses and styles (i.e., statistics, direct quotes, lyrics, AAVE slick talk, dictionary definitions, etc.). Then, there were times when I made no attempt to associate consecutive sentences in an effort to be discursive and promote disassociation and dissonance.
1 As in most units, I intended for the 1st and 16th sentences to have ars poetica readings or overtones. So read those two sentences as tips or instructions for reading/writing poems. I love beginning poems with because when I can. It activates the readers imagination as they have to wonder about what gave rise to the because.
2 Ostensibly, the 2nd sentence speaks to the ethos and phenomenon of how African American mothers have historically disciplined their children. It relates to the 1st sentence which might be something a black mother would say to her child after being asked ‘why’.
3 This is what happens when you play around with the word structure to see if you can create a sense of repetition even though you have only repeated the root of the word. This sentence pointed me in the direction of the title. This is an example of some of the ways deconstruction is operative in unit poems.
4 Pun of a very familiar phrase in hip hop music. The addition of the term ‘anti-narrative’ would seem to come from some association with postmodernism, deconstruction, and poststructuralism suggested in the previous sentence. I would argue that many of the units work as anti-narrative. They tell a nonconventional story of a musical conversation. The dialogue is discursive and athematic.
5 This is not an imperative, the you is implied and is declaring what happens. It is the imperative-like construction that I was looking for here to break the pattern of sentences with declarative constructions. I think the original phrase that I swiped from a conversation I overheard was, “look up and e’erybody on five different medications.” To make this sentence more abstract and broaden its possible interpretations, I changed ‘medication’ to ‘substances’.
6 Popular idiom or cliché. This incomplete sentence was also employed out of sense of rhythm. I felt like a short clause or phrase would work well rhythmically at this point in the poem. As a poem rooted in music, anytime we can utilize words related to sound, hearing, speaking, singing it builds up that context.
7 Another incomplete sentence, I was interested in the repeated sound of the root ‘missible’. I love dealing in contradictions and paradoxes in the units. Is it me, or does life in the 21st century seem to be filled with more paradoxes? Don’t things sound contradictory in Free Jazz performance? Maybe it is better described as juxtaposed instead of contradictory.
8 This is a standard AAVE construction. I can’t give you a logical explanation for why this is here. It is a feeling, the conciseness, directness, and expressiveness of the phrase drew me to it. “Hitters” is slang in Hip Hop’s drill culture for killer or assassin. I feel like these short, concise phrases like this ‘hit’ hard and really give unit poems a punch and an energy.
9 There are statistics to back up this statement, but I just stated the fact. In other units, I state the statistics, and in a few I state the fact and the statistic. One of the reasons, I experiment with facts and statistics in these units is to push the against what is conventionally considered the domain of poetry.
10 No logic or reason to this. This is a feel thing. It sounds good, and creates space for multiple interpretations, some arguably connecting sentences 9, 10, and 11 into a semantic block.
11 Trying to play with the repetition of the word ‘matter’. This is the third time I have employed this linguistic maneuver in this poem, the last time will be in the last sentence. I think of this type of wordplay as being kin to syncopation in music. The way a musician changes the syncopation in a melody to make it sound different is like what I am doing changing suffixes and prefixes, or the order of some of the letters in a word.
12 Recombination of the words from sentences 1 ad 6. It is still really based in the in one ear and out the other construction of sentence 6.
13 This poem was way overdue for an interrogative. I imagine fiberglass insulation (which is a product of (silica) sand) rubbing against the skin is more of an irritant than sand.
14 Similar to sentence 8, this was a choice I made based on what I felt like this short imperative does sonically and rhythmically for the piece. Even though sentence 5 has an imperative construction this is the first imperative in the poem. Since the first interrogative and first imperative follow each other, I probably looked up and realized I had been dealing too much in declaratives and needed to switch it up a bit.
15 Often in these unit poems I play with notions that pertain to visual arts. The first clause of this sentence begins with something that might be heard in a review or critique of a work of visual art, while the second clause might be heard in a dice game in an alley. This should also be read as ars poetica, because there is a lot of subject matter-to-image divergence in these unit poems.
16 This sentence starts out punning on the idiom “necessity is the mother of invention.” Also, I am playing around with necessary and necessity. I probably got the idea for this sentence from trying to pick back up on the muhfucka (short for motherfucker) at the end of the previous sentence. Thang (thing) is an abstract term, which broadens the interpretive possibility of this sentence. In its original slang context, thang refers to a burner, pipe, pole, chopper, otherwise known as a gun.
Recommendations for Reading Poems in “the unit” Form
- Turn on some Free Jazz or Free Improvisational music (i.e., Steve Lacy, Cecil Taylor, Nate Wooley, Anthony Braxton). If it is difficult for you to read with music in the background, listen* to the music for a few minutes before you read the poem(s).
- Read the poem out loud to yourself. Listen for the music in the language (which refers not just to sonority, but also consider dissonance and even how an idea or series/collage of images might excite the reader’s imagination to dance), sound is one of the primary criteria for what sentence goes where.
- A good rule of thumb (though not always operative): read the first and last sentences as statements of ars poetica, including clues on how to read unit poems.
- Make special note of the 1st, 6th, and 12th sentences. Consider how 1 and 6 created 12.
- Put on your postmodern/metamodern thinking cap.
- In his essay Reading a Poem: 20 Strategies, Mark Yakich states “[P]oetry depends on pattern and variation—even non-linear, non-narrative, antipoetic poetry. By perceiving patterns and variations on those patterns, your brain will attempt to make order out of apparent chaos.” With that being said, pay attention to the types of sentences (i.e., interrogative, imperative, compound, simple, etc.). The sentences have been organized with an ear to how alternating sentence types create different rhythms and music feels.
- In the same way, pay attention to the voices and/or the discourses of the sentences (i.e., AAVE, song lyrics, nature imagery, cliché or its reformulation, statistics, etc.). The sentences have been organized with an ear toward how alternating these discourses creates different kinds of melodies and countermelodies both sonically and notionally.
- Read for metaphor, which is another way of saying, read deep down into the New Sentences. Each sentence was crafted to entertain multiple (often competing) lines of interpretation, as well as to confound meaning when taken in aggregate.
- Look up words and phrases you do not know. (Google, urbandictionary.com, genius.com, http://onlineslangdictionary.com)
- Embrace open borders, incongruence, non sequitur, and non-representation. There is a payoff for lovers of language, and an array of literary and rhetorical devices. Contrary to the disjunction and entropy in ‘the unit’, there is as much intentionality and control in these poems as there is in most conventional lyric or narrative poems
* Despite all the dissonance, there is a conversation going on between the instruments. Pay very close attention and see if you can’t discern how the instruments are responding, answering, addressing, confronting, agreeing, and disagreeing with each other
the unit form has visuals!!! vandals at the gate is a collaborative project between videographer and photographer Andre’ Howard, musician and composer Chris Pitts, and poet makalani bandele. In this collaboration, all the mediums operate within the modality of abstraction/non-representation—detail without context—as it might be understood in each’s respective discipline. The product of each discipline’s part could also be said to be working from free improvisational principles. Therefore, the visual language in the videos is brief, discursive, and disjunctive resulting in non-narrative shots(still & moving); each poem is in the unit form, and the music composition is Free Jazz. The videos produced in this collaborative will accompany the collection of ‘the units’ entitled vandals of knock city. Below is an example of one of the videos in the collaboration.
makalani bandele is from Louisville, KY. He is an Affrilachian Poet and Cave Canem fellow. He has also received fellowships from the Kentucky Arts Council, Millay Colony, and Vermont Studio Center. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame with a BA in the Program of Liberal Studies, as well as a graduate of Shaw University with a Master of Divinity in Biblical Studies. and the University of Kentucky with an MFA in Creative Writing. His work has been published in several anthologies, and widely in print and online journals, African-American Review, Killens Review of Arts and Letters, and Sou’wester to name a few. Most recently work from his second book, under the aegis of a winged mind, which won the 2019 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, appears in Prairie Schooner, Foundry, 32poems, and North American Review. His collection of poems hellfightin’, his only other full-length work, was published by Aquarius Press in 2011.