Dear Angel of Death

by Simone White

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. A meandering and dead-serious meditation challenging the centrality of Black Music to black poetry and black critical theory, Dear Angel of Death proposes disinvestment in the idea of the Music as the highest form of what blackness "is." This long essay includes many forms: philosophical divergence on the problem of folds for black life, a close reading of Nathaniel Mackey's neverending novel From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, and an impassioned defense-cum-dismissal of contemporary hip hop's convergence with capitalism.

Genres: Poetry, Music, Essays, Nonfiction

160 pages, Paperback

Published June 1, 2018

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am going to need to re-read this, I think. It has been a long time since I read this sort of academic prose, and I found it hard going at times. It has also been a good ten years or more since I read Baraka, which didn’t help either. The poetry was excellent, and the whole text is well worth engaging with, I just found myself lacking a bit at times...

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spring Poem

Unless there was a turn in the way of things
all would continue to vibrate
with foreboding. Hazard littered
the pink tree bud.
Hazard would ruin the festival of the peony
if nothing was done, and soon.

An odour of scorched broccoli
followed you down
Fulton, then Clinton, then Second Avenue.
The olfactory sense pricked up
in concert with descent, its due
in the order of consciousness
coming round like psychosis
sooner or later.

Perhaps this person does not understand
the extent of my exuberance.
I was taking secret photos on the subway
that week of young black men
all in black and flowers;
trendspotting it was,
as well, an extended meditation
on the troubles
or where the testosterone package
has led. Francesca the bittersweet,

one expects to be visited in the nerves daily
by the tragedy of early middle age.
And yet. Who expects to break down
under the pressure. Not me. Ha.
Oh Lord. One resents His invocation
in the poems of others.

It was frustrating
my wish for a biscuit, a true biscuit
of White Lily flour
as I’m living now on cake
and meatballs.

[Wendy Liu]

I read this because it was mentioned in Jesse McCarthy's spectacular n+1 article on trap music. Unfortunately, I was woefully underequipped to understand most of the poetry, not to mention the essay at the end which turned out to be situated squarely within a dense academic tradition of which I am completely ignorant. Still, I appreciated the writing, even if most of the references were lost on me. (I also had to speed-read most of it due to the imminent closure of the library where I found this book marked for in-library use only.)

[Griffin Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

The eponymous essay that makes up the last half of this book is everything and yet it is only the beginning. The poetry here is unsurprisingly sharp and tender, unexpected and thrilling in its combination of everydayness and aspiration toward revolutionary difference in what could be the everyday. The essay though, it knocked me on my ass the first two times I tried to read it, and it was only this past reading in which it all clicked—going in, it would be invaluable if you have read at least one of Nathaniel Mackey's novels (From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate: Bedouin Hornbook, Djbot Baghostus's Run, Atet A.D.), some of Fred Moten's theory work (namely In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition or Black and Blur), have some knowledge on Baraka's writing on jazz/blues, and also have at least some interest and knowledge of contemporary trap/rap. These are all heavy reference points and a working knowledge of these things will prove invaluable to know what it is that White is up to, what traditions she is engaging in with what is actually a poetic/stylistic approach to theory (and its imitations of style as a means of authoritative repetition and its concurrent breakdown), and how she manages to take on existing popular culture as meaning in a way that is neither entirely laudatory nor reductive. This is a modern classic, and more than that it is actually important, and it will be read and referenced for a long, long time.

[Serena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hour in which I consider hydrangea, a salt or sand plant, varietal,
the question of varietals, the diet of every mother I know, 5 pounds
feels like 20, I have lost ... I have lost, yes, a sense of my own
possible beauty, grown external, I externalize beauty. Beauty occurs
on the surface of plants; the sun darkens the skin of my child, he
is so small, he is beautiful (I can see it; it is obvious) and everything
about him is beautiful. Because he is small, the bite of some insect
—its venom—makes his hand swell. He appears to feel nothing.
He smashes his skull against the floor. He screams. I hold him in
my lap on the kitchen floor in front of an open freezer, pressing a
pack of frozen clay against his forehead. He likes the cold. I see;
it is so obvious. Hydrangea. When I move, when I walk pushing
my child's stroller (it is both walking and pushing or hauling,
sometimes, also, lifting; it is having another body, an adjunct
body composed of errand and weight and tenderness and no
small amount of power), I imagine I can feel this small amount of
weight, this 5 pounds like 20, interfering with the twitch of every
muscle in my body. As an object, a mother is confusing, a middle-
aged mother with little spare flesh, I feel every inch of major
muscle pulling against gravity and against the weight of my child,
now sleeping. This is the hour for thinking hydrangea. Let no man
look at me. I stop to brush the drowsy child's little eye. His face.
He barely considers his mother. I am all around him. Why should
he consider what is all around him? Perhaps what is missing is a
subtle power of differentiation. I am in, therefore, a time of mass
apprehension.

[Lyra Montoya · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poetry in the first two sections took a little while for me to get into as this was my first time reading White's writing. Responses to her poetry are less organized in my mind, so I won't try to put them into this review.

A large part of the namesake essay was difficult for me to follow since I haven't read any of Nathaniel Mackey's writing. I am attempting to read Moten's In the Break currently, and having White's interpretation and reading of the early portions was quite helpful. The argument that White makes regarding hip hop and rap is totalizing: the note of class distinction and investment in (re)creating the racial fold that instantiates stereotype/ racialized behavior and identity leads her away from conceiving of a people and their music as the same, as well as away from thinking of music as a way "up and out." White invokes a simultaneity of the music and history, collapsing hip hop and rap into a singular event/ style. Perhaps it's that the music White is expressing frustrating still seems more "alive" than that of opera or the orchestra which seem near fully captive to the artifice of empire despite numerous attempts at their reformation. This pessimism towards music/ improvisation as liberatory praxis certainly resonates, and the concern that there is no in but not for, only being in, is a shared perennial anxiety.

[Andrew Maxwell]

Loved the loose and piercing lyric poems in the first section of this book, though found the titular essay that composes the latter half of the book to be tough-going … digressive and difficult … though the essay itself announces and interrogates its own difficulty at multiple points.

Ultimately, the field of inquiry seems to be how one might posit coextension or collaterality between black music and black theory – though these terms are occasionally conditional and bracketed – with multiple approaches performed and tested by the essay itself. The structuring problem is announced mid-way through (p. 103): “how to improvise in the presence of what has already been recorded” in search of a “language of feeling” that becomes, citing a propitious equivalence by Cecil Taylor: “self-analysis (improvisation)”.

Or simply put: “I just want to know what else might be available.” The poems themselves in this volume seem to be a good first answer.

[Austin · Rating 5 out of 5]

first half a series poems about motherhood and divorce that "forbid pathos" and yet still full of feeling, tenderness, and emotional rigor...
second half an essay investigating / questioning the centrality of music in Black studies as well as meditations on trap music and R&B...

just phenomenal.

[Samantha]

This book was too smart for me.

[Vinay Khosla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can I give a book 6 stars? To read Simone White is to never stop reading her. Expansive. Let me start from the beginning again…

[Jas · Rating 2 out of 5]

Did not finish. The section with the poems was great! A little messy but relatively earned 3 stars. The essay afterward...not for me. They seem so disconnected.

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

I’ve never read “literary criticism” that can come close to what Simone White accomplished in this book. Everything is anaphoric. No need to nerd out about it online but the last 75 pages present some of the most challenging and almost impossible questions regarding the intersection of articulation/presenting blackness vs living as a black personality/the music. The last 7 or so pages on rap music left me quite upset. I’ve never read anyone who writes on Mackey so clearly. Anyone who has an extra-romantic attachment music needs to read Simone White. I wonder how many times I will re read the last 70 pages.

[Nikita Ladd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved the first poems in this collection, on new motherhood and nursing. They were also just easier for me to understand and take in. The essay that makes up the second half of the book, about the role of music in contemporary theories and discussions of blackness, was harder for me to stay with as I was reading. Throughout that essay Simone White is in direct conversation with many theorists and philosophers, most of whom I haven't read, so there are large chunks of context that I'm missing. Brilliant book though, and obviously brilliant mind.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first half of the book is comprised of two free verse sequences, while the second half is a long essay with Amiri Baraka's "The Changing Same in Black Music" at the center of its critique. This latter is "Dear Angel of Death," written, at least partly, in the weeks following Baraka's death. The Baraka essay to which Simone White responds makes progress of a very rich and singular kind. Written in 1966, in the midst of his break from Black Mountain poetics, from the liberal-centered New Jersey bohemian background to his first two poetry volumes, and the two plays that made his name, "The Changing Same" embodies both a bringing together of scattered arguments still exigent in the response to Blues People (1964), as well as an initial proposal for the black aesthetic in music, where "The Changing Same" could no longer ignore, as Blues People had, the phenomenon of James Brown's band, which was filled with gifted jazz musicians as well the musicians who with their bandleader would work out funk. Baraka's essay at once creates a specter of forward prognosis in musical "free jazz" spirituality at the same time acknowledging as part of this "changing same" "what the cat on the block digs." What is uncanny in this is that "freedom" is sine qua non of the new music, always a projection of where black artists are moving, while at the same time, Baraka can seem quite fussy and even pretentious in his contempt for the connoisseurs of black rhythm and blues that was just then being co-opted by white rockers -- called out in "The Changing Same" for cultural appropriation -- namely, the Stones, the Beatles, Dylan, and the Butterfield Blues Band; how this calls out Constance Rourke's insight into the origins of the minstrel stage-characterizing of Thomas Rice, at just the moment when the American Abolitionist Movement (this was the late 1830s) was beginning to imagine a post-bellum freedom for the slave, is one of the stranger ironies Baraka's theory of what Simone White will call a "folded" or reflexive ontology to Black Music stages. White reads quite appreciatively here her two poetic fore-runners, Nathaniel Mackey and Fred Moten, both of whom have written about what Moten will call "the break" in tradition Baraka's criticism, following from DuBois' color line, urged on the militants of the black aesthetic. This critical tradition is one of the treasures of American letters. White is quite adept in joining Mackey and Moten in their argument with Baraka. Here is nowhere to evaluate it. White's critique is rather like Melvin Tolson's saying (around the same time Constance Rourke published American Humor): "Somebody has to black hisself | For somebody else to stay white." In this reflection, White argues, "The color-line is not of this world," and she goes on, "the color-line has no soul and cannot inhere ever in the human being."