Abide

by Jake Adam York

In the years leading up to his recent passing, Alabama poet Jake Adam York set out on a journey to elegize the 126 martyrs of the civil rights movement, murdered in the years between 1954 and 1968. Abide is the stunning follow-up to York’s earlier volumes, a memorial in verse for those fallen. From Birmingham to Okemah, Memphis to Houston, York’s poems both mourn and inspire in their quest for justice, ownership, and understanding.

Within are anthems to John Earl Reese, a sixteen-year-old shot by Klansmen through the window of a café in Mayflower, Texas, where he was dancing in 1955; to victims lynched on the Oklahoma prairies; to the four children who perished in the Birmingham church bombing of 1963; and to families who saw the white hoods of the Klan illuminated by burning crosses. Juxtaposed with these horrors are more loving images of the South: the aroma of greens simmering on the stove, “tornado-strong” houses built by loved ones long gone, and the power of rivers “dark as roux.” 
Throughout these lush narratives, York resurrects the ghosts of Orpheus, Sun Ra, Howlin’ Wolf, Thelonious Monk, Woody Guthrie, and more, summoning blues, jazz, hip-hop, and folk musicians for performances of their “liberation music” that give special meaning to the tales of the dead.
In the same moment that Abide memorializes the fallen, it also raises the ethical questions faced by York during this, his life’s work: What does it mean to elegize? What does it mean to elegize martyrs? What does it mean to disturb the symmetries of the South’s racial politics or its racial poetics?
A bittersweet elegy for the poet himself, Abide is as subtle and inviting as the whisper of a record sleeve, the gasp of the record needle, beckoning us to heed our history.

Genres: Poetry, Race, History

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Jake Adam York is the author of Murder Ballads (2005), selected by Jane Satterfield for the Fifth Annual Elixir Press Awards Judge’s Prize, A Murmuration of Starlings, selected by Cathy Song for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry (2008), and Persons Unknown, forthcoming as an Editor's Selection in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry (2010).

His poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Oxford American, Greensboro Review, Gulf Coast, New Orleans Review, Quarterly West, Diagram, Octopus, Southern Review, Poetry Daily, and other journals as well as in the anthologies Visiting Walt (Iowa University Press, 2003) and Digerati (Three Candles, 2006).

York is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Denver, where he directs an undergraduate Creative Writing program and produces Copper Nickel with his students.

Reviews

[Alarie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Abide was a bittersweet beginning to my new year of poetry reading. I simultaneously discovered a new favorite poet and learned that Jake Adam York tragically died of a stroke in 2012 at age 40. Now I want to read his other books, but know there won’t be enough of them.

How wonderful that the book began with one of the most beautiful and fitting cover designs I’ve seen on a poetry book: a bird bent over a turntable, it’s beak seemingly playing a record. Turntables, music more commonly celebrated by York’s father’s generation, and musicality of language flow through book, as though to soothe our spirits from the hard-hitting theme: the martyrdom of Black people in this country. York felt torn between his mission to elegize those murdered during the Civil Rights Movement and his feeling that a white man may give some offense by striking the wrong tone. This book should be a highlight of reading lists for Black Lives Matter.

Multiple poems are dedicated to some of the victims, like “John Earl Reese, a sixteen-year-old, shot by Klansmen through the window of a café in Mayflower, Texas, where he was dancing, October 22, 1955.” Many poems were titled “Abide.” Sadly, repetition is appropriate to this topic.

In “Foreword to a Subsequent Reading,” which appears at the end of the book, York says:

To elegize the martyrs of the movement requires delicacy,
requires reflection. For a white man to elegize men, women,
and children, murdered by men whom I resembled,
demographically, by men to whom I may be related or for
whom I may be mistaken – for this man to elegize these
martyrs requires hesitation, a stutter, a silence in which
the ghosts of the murderers may be sloughed from my
skin, even if only for a moment.

In “Postscript” for Medgar Evers, York tackles this duel between what he wants to accomplish and what may be impossible to do. “This” means the poem and what his words tell.

“I didn’t want to write this,
even to think of you,
afraid the thought would curl,
would tangle and make you
common and factual as light….

This is not the afterimage
but the image of the day
on paper, in its pores,
new light that shows the edges,
so nothing can be hid….

Again, today, the light is new,
and because you are nowhere
you are everywhere,
in the face of which I’d ask
how can I say anything,
in the face of which I ask
how can I say nothing at all?”

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jake Adam York had already become a major poet when a stroke robbed American letters of a necessary and bewitching voice. In a project that he had begun to refer to as Inscriptions for Air, York set out to elegize the martyrs of the Civil Rights movement, a work that would have been compelling and important even in the hands of a moderately gifted poet. York's gifts were enormous, and in his final collection they are deployed with skill, precision, and a style equal to the jazz geniuses (Monk, Sun Ra) he writes about so beautifully. Whether invoking Latin poets or Ike Turner, York is deft and knowing, and there is a great deal to be learned from this collection. This is no mere display of brilliance and erudition, however, but one of the most searching, powerful, and beautiful collections of poetry in recent memory. Abide with these poems, and they will abide with you.

[Kacy · Rating 5 out of 5]

When discussing the departed, Victorian novelist and poet George Eliot wrote: “[M]ay I join the choir invisible / Of those immortal dead who live again / In minds made better by their presence.” In Jake Adam York’s collection Abide, readers are given a magnum opus — a final collection that proves that even in death, words, like a good melody, will forever resound.

York, who previously authored poetry collections Murder Ballads, A Murmuration of Starlings, and Persons Unknown, died in 2012 following a stroke. While York’s collection was completed before his death, it remained unpublished until this year. The collection, which features 30 poems, demonstrates York’s love for music, rhythm, and last but certainly not least, the High Priest of Bebop — none other than the late and great Thelonious Monk.

The collection is undoubtedly solid with rich imagery, figurative language, and lyrical movement on every page. There are many choice poems throughout, including, but not limited to, “Letter written on a Record Sleeve,” “Postscript to Silence,” “Dear Brother,” and “Postscript (Already Breaking in Distant Echoes).” But “Epistrophy” is arguably one of the best pieces within the collection, and a nod to Monk (much like the title of the work). In the poem, York expresses the delicate nature of music — the record in itself — as well as the energy that flows outward once needle meets vinyl. “The sleeve sighs from the jacket, / the record from the sleeve. / The needle takes its breath. / I know what’s next — / the horns, the hymns / that spiral back to silence / after the room fills with the sound / of another room, the sound / of steel as it fills the groove.”

Much like the aforementioned poem, Abide offers glimpses of York as a young adolescent growing up in the South. York’s eyes are aglow and his ears are open as he patiently waits for the enchantment that is a record being removed from its sleeve and played for the first time: “The world a book / of such vibration I could see / what I needed. And I needed / this, this music, whosever it was, / this elsewhere / I pulled from its sleeve and spun” (“Letter to Be Wrapped Around a 12-Inch Disc”).

York’s collection is enjoyable for a multitude of reasons, but in particular, it is his passion for music that seems to inspire much of the work. In York’s death, every musical reference and rhythmic sequence within his poetry becomes even more significant — making his enthusiasm for life and music a map for the world to follow. Like listening to our favorite record, York’s pieces remain in our memory, flooding in when we return time after time again to his collection still there on our lips.

Kacy Muir of The Weekender / Times Leader / Songs of Sirens @ Wordpress

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Abide's poems are both beautiful and smart. These meditative lyrics seem to slow dance in their love for language, lingering on certain words, certain sounds, but York never loses sight of his vision of America and its people.

[J & J · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't connect to any of these poems and they didn't inspire me to write. I also didn't see much use of craft.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

6/31

Jake Adam York: his poetry project, his kindness, his generosity, his clarity, his refusal to turn away: all the time.

#sealeychallenge #jakeadamyork

From “Feedback Loop”
Maybe ghosts
don't want to come back.
Maybe we keep saying
their silences between our words,

the shape of their voices
in ours, in ours
the warmth that haunts
their absent lungs.

[Kelsie · Rating 5 out of 5]

You are so missed.

[Cat Fithian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elegies of Civil Rights leaders. . . beautiful word pictures.

[stephanie roberts · Rating 3 out of 5]

Questa è poesia onirica e intellettuale.

[Oswaldo Velasquez · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book Abide by Jake Adam York is a great collection of poems that cover much of the Civil Rights Era. It is his most recent and final book as a result of his untimely death in 2012. Although he was a white male from Alabama York had a personal stake in this period in time. He used his poetic abilities to portray these historic events through his book. Poems such as “Exploded View” and “My Great-Grandmother’s Snuff Cup” give a look into his family and his emotions towards them through this time. Like his earlier books such as Murder Ballads, York gave birth to poetic elegy to honor and console many important figures within this era such as John Earl Reese, Thelonius Monk, and Howlin’ Wolf to name a few. His commemorations of jazz musicians give a sense of telling stories within a story. York is applauded by many for venturing into this sensitive subject of racial politics and history. With his personal experience and research of these events he successfully exemplified the hardships and casualties as a result of this time period through complex poetic and literary techniques. York’s final book Abide is a transformation of his earlier collections and is a must read for anyone of all ages.

[Paige · Rating 5 out of 5]

Abide by Jake Adam York is a well-crafted collection of poems that manage to move you, even if you do not originally expect it to. Abide’s content utilizes a variety of types of poetry, including elegy, lyric, narrative, and persona poems to name a few. The subjects York’s poems varied, but they generally revolve around the Civil Rights Movement, music, and family. For example, three poems in Abide, “Mayflower,” “Cry of the Occasion,” and “Inscription for Air,” are dedicated to John Earl Reese, a sixteen-year-old boy shot while dancing in 1955. In these poems, especially “Inscription for Air,” York reminds us not to forget that while Reese died, he also lived, and he wants us to celebrate that fact. “Not for the wound, not for the bullet,/ power’s pale cowardice, but/ for you, for the three full syllables/ of your name.” Not only is York’s work powerful and moving, it is also beautiful, something to be remembered long after you have put Abide down. York’s untimely death took from us a great poet, but as he reminded us with Reese, we should not mourn the fact that he is gone, but rather celebrate that he lived and what he has given us.

[Courtney LeBlanc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elegies to the martyrs of the Civil Rights movement.

from Mayflower: "and a young man's voice // becomes a young man's / silence, all // he did not say, / which nothing keeps // saying in the empty room"

from Postscript Written on a J-Card: "Of course, / my mother had two grandfathers // who were both stories by the time / I was born, // like memories passed like plates at holiday tables."

from Exploded View: "So, the furnace is a father too, / whose story you cannot follow, // a shadow sitting loud in the dark, / while the quiet hardens in his lungs."

[Brenda Vigue · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting work of this man who died at a young age. For me, although, I didn't understand all of it, I kept reading. This book, for me, needs to be read more than once to fully understand this history of the Civil Rights Movement. Thank you Goodreads First Reads, and the authors and publishing companies that provide these books, for giving me a chance to read something that I might not have picked up but have fully enjoyed.

[fleegan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really solid book of poetry mostly about music and some about the Civil Rights movement. So good that when I finished it I went straight back to the beginning and read it again. The one about being a kid and using the record player are the ones that got me right in the feels.

[Sunshine Ybarra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've always loved poetry. This collection of poems was amazing- I even shared it with some of my friends! Great writing, loved the style.

[Cathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very fine book of poetry...

[Anna Spotts · Rating 4 out of 5]

poetry.