Of Being Dispersed

by Simone White

Poetry. African & African American Studies. "I get this pinwheel relationship to wisdom & history when I read Simone White. I'm in her dream, but it's a remarkable solidly packed one informed by the quotidian rarity of for instance a prose disquisition on lotion and skin and haircare especially in winter. Like Dana Ward's, her work sends me searching. Like what part of speech is here. As I'm wondering Simone sometimes exits first, and I even feel that a real piece of her poem is adamantly not here and that is her privacy, her power & her skill so what kind of quest is it, this beautiful complex & alive work. Here's my best guess. OF BEING DISPERSED is an ur text of the fourth wave of feminism which we come to realize is ocean and women are now standing on it and amidst this clatter of voices Simone White walks." Eileen Myles "In Simone White's poetry the action is always multiple, palpable, sounding as thought, coming forward through this highly sensitized plane, sudden and hovering, exchanging centers, afflicted and added to by company. The continuous listening company demands company including imaginary self, receding boundaries, the horseman on the night's street, the live, the loved, the drunk, the words, the turnstile, the endless destructive projections people force and the rendering of that listening into irreducible depths of tone, wit, and perception constitute much of what makes OF BEING DISPERSED a masterful book. Buzzing word-love marking time beat by beat, being the ground inside and out, makes up the rest." Anselm Berrigan "Macaronic plenitude of language instantiates places and states of mind. If Edouard Glissant says that we write in the presence of all the world's languages, then we have in Simone White's OF BEING DISPERSED, an underground stream reaching the surface of the page in lines acrobatic and limber, fluent in code switch, mood shift and modes of inquiry. I read White's volume as a poetic lens on the specificities of the diaspora and the 'dispersed, ' written with baroque skepticism, feminist vision and attention to the complications of a Black yet to be storyed any/where." Erica Hunt"

Genres: Poetry, School, Essays

88 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2016

Reviews

[mark mendoza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Floored with this. One of those books I know I want to reread well before I'm done the first time.

[Griffin Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

When we talk about literacy there cannot be
one without concessions.

A poet who can pivot faster than you'd expect doable. Troubling the profound, the comic, and the expectation of what poetry sets out to do within it modus operandi. These words are explosive, or at least hold the potential to be--like a carefully beautiful diagram for a bomb awaiting the hands to hold the book and the tongue to lash it together.

[Kristine · Rating 5 out of 5]

i think i finally understand poetry omg

[Vinay Khosla · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasted going to Penn by never taking a class w/ her. First listen closely and realize that it’s not enough. “Publicly and for money, you are in service to explanation.”

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

It Must Be Shameless

Apart disclaimed wicked pea, split soft skin
of the principle princess, who writhes,
a little blood passes her perineum every night,
grey linen sheets flax talisman plot luxe
to strip and scrub all gore
a plain bar of secret white soap
it is a pine tree, it is an orange blossom, it is a rose hip
under a baby tongue, blood cuts
punisher, swear it closed, closes it

She's amazing. Read another excerpt here.

[Jayjay · Rating 4 out of 5]

i've been in a mood thinking about surfaces. lotion never quite spoke to me before.

[juch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sneaky

[Tessa]

I don't think my brain is developed enough to process these poems but somewhere in there my brain knows they're beautiful

[Dallas Swindell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thought provoking and deeply enthralling collection of poems fills the pages of Simone White’s Of Being Dispersed. The poems within ring out in the duality of the root before the seed, the circular process again encircled, the invagination of self across the linked dimension of time and space. Simone White pushes individual words to bear the often poignant burden of diffuse meaning: is to be dispersed to be shorn apart and scattered, to seek new fertile lands, to espouse the memory of those living and dead, of the necessity of each possible meaning? White crafts terse yet politically charged questions and meditations within Of Being Dispersed, all centered in the meanings, pleasures, and vivisections of the female person.

This exploration is wrought often via her own black female body through which she connects the reader to the world she encounters and inhabits. The quotidian isn’t prosaic in her poems, it fills pages with immense pressure and nuance, and challenges the reader to re-observe, reabsorb, and redefine moments which might elude a less critical eye. In all of this is power reclaimed and put on display. Simone White pours out the power to study, the power to control, the power to exist on ones own terms.

[Jas · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is not for me. Everyobe seems to really love it but I cannot deal with books that make me so frustrated and she writes like this in all her books. Whatever she is saying is elusive to me.

When I do half-understand a poem, I tend to like it but the topic gets away from me so quickly—people call it word play but what is she playing with? What is she saying? It feels jumbled. It feels like words on a page. I'll return to this later.

[Seth Shimelfarb-Wells · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Publicly and for money, you are in service to explanation. One possible metaphor for microagression is aphorism. You cannot come back from explanation to explain the poetry of poetry”

Incredible collection. She really bodies the long poem form. She builds off herself so well. She solos? She’s special. I like her writing. I love her prose.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like a thunderstorm, there’s always action in these poems, but quite often it is muted or diminished by distance. Flashes and great noises leap that distance intermittently, but much of this book seems to be taking place at a level I can’t quite reach nor precisely locate.

[Octavia Rose]

Enjoyed learning about different kinds of poetic structure and a few poems definitely resonated~

I don't feel like I personally have enough context and understanding to rate the collection as a whole.

:)

[Layla Elqutami]

poetry like i’ve never read it before. & i feel i’ve read a lot! a study in directing one’s own reality.. it felt like being in a bath full of other ppl and crawling one’s sole way out..

[Julia Amsterdam]

need to read this again

[Mic Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to buy as many copies as I can of all White’s books and give them away to friends, strangers, enemies, everyone. It feels very necessary.

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fantastic collection bursting with personality. Each section showcases a different style and aspect of Simone White, and it would be a challenge to find a bad turn in any of them.

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

love her language and the things she pays attention to ... is there a higher praise for poetry?

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

In which Simone White tries to work her poem out. Having put out Unrest in 2013 and finished her PhD (forthcoming as Dear Angel of Death in 2018) these six poems include three sequences, an essay ("Lotion") and two proems. The first of the two poems, "And then I began to hear the call of Los Angeles," is a dazzler, as is the essay; both counters to the linguistic freight of running this particular satirist and intellectual's medium in the poem. They are funny, they revise in crucial ways recent existing views of well-established subject matter (the diaspora of the African American in Los Angeles; the anoints of skin: "What is ashiness? Ash is a gray of evident decay, most striking in contrast with darker skins, brown skins, tending to black"), they project a "cool" in relation to poetry's cultural cut. Of the sequences, suffice to say the one to her husband will not join the canon of her work. This leaves the title sequence and "Preliminary Notes on Street Attacks," the latter with perhaps my favorite section of the book, its middle panel where -- does she cop to sincerity? -- at the very least this reluctant occultist admits "a nightmare is a dream where you are in service to a rich woman of indeterminate ethnicity" wherein the "you" is "an excellent profiler of need." This is the drama of the gifted child, for sure. But finally the gifted child knows she is a gifted child, and "one possible metaphor for micro aggression is aphorism." The gift here is the wit to parry, dozen, talk shit. That's why "dispersed."

[Robert Rauschenberg]

Recommended by Jen Hofer (Antena).