Book Review: There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé by Morgan Parker

Reviewed by Ryan Boyd

There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé
Poems by Morgan Parker
Tin House Books, February 2017
$14.95; 80 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-194104053-9

One way (of many) to describe how good poetry operates is to say that it reorganizes reality in some pleasurable or bracing manner. In concert with a reader, it enacts a spacious, flexile, indeterminate vocabulary for paying more attention to the world, for italicizing human and natural events, for vocalizing selfhood. It offers new visions of old spaces. There is a long humanist tradition of saying this, but it bears repeating under market capitalism. Moreover, it suits Morgan Parker’s new collection of poetry, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, very well.

For an American poet who wants to write honestly, this reorganization entails uneasy questions about race, gender, and sexual identity; in particular, who gets to describe them, and how. This would be true of any era, but in the shadow of Donald Trump these questions are especially grave. Parker, who completed her graduate work at NYU and now lives in Brooklyn, is young, African American, and a woman. Identity alone would not necessarily make her a keen observer, of course, but fed into the kind of lyric arsenal she has, lived experience makes for a vivid, nimble mode of poetic cultural critique, one that encompasses far more than the poet’s single self.  

Beyoncé Knowles, as you might guess, hovers over the volume like a demiurge or guiding mythos. She appears in various guises and moods, different situations and positions, never quite the star we think we know from her public appearances. In one poem there is even a white Beyoncé. Behind it all is the suspicion that Knowles, like us, is hurting and vulnerable, and that this produces both art and alienation. As the speaker of “What Beyoncé Won’t Say on a Shrink’s Couch” asks, “what if I said I’m tired / and they heard wrong / said sing it”?

Dominant though her presence is, Beyoncé takes her place amid a larger network of famous African Americans: Audre Lorde, Tina Turner, Jay Z, Nina Simone, Michelle Obama, Fred Hampton, Billie Holiday, and Amiri Baraka, among many others. In turn, the constant scrutiny under which the famous labor mirrors the broader surveillance of black bodies across the United States. This racialized economy involves great material violence (witness the disproportionate killing of black citizens by police or the obscene reality of America’s prison system) but also conceptual and imaginative distortion by discourses of politics, economics, ethics, medicine, and historiography. (In “All They Want is My Money My Pussy My Blood,” “They ask me about slavery. They say Martin Luther King. / At school they learned that Black people happened.”) Such erasure can be enabled by literature, too. Think of how little Jim gets to talk in Huckleberry Finn; think Kipling’s “white man’s burden”; think about how Saul Bellow’s later fiction depicts black people. Indeed, language entangles its users even when they mean to be honest: the way “The President Has Never Said the Word Black” interprets it, codes of racial silence and fatuous civility muzzle the biracial leader of the free world—“When he opens his mouth / a chameleon is inside, starving.”

Thus, Parker’s restorative project—her vision of democratic and psychological health—comprises many smaller battles over how to describe, archive, and remake the world. She has as much faith in the human imagination as Wallace Stevens, to whom “13 Ways of Looking at a Black Girl” explicitly alludes, ever did. A new poetics might point toward a new politics.

Our bodies are always on our minds. Women’s bodies in particular remain a site of intense conflict, with various institutions, often dominated by men, seeking to survey and administer them. Here too the poet seeks a counter-discourse of what you might call exuberant anxiety. Parker’s typical speaker is an edgy, loquacious introvert, alive to the world, especially its cities, but wary of its terrible shocks and slow-motion losses. “I am an elastic / winter,” asserts “Hottentot Venus.” The speaker of “Afro” is “glowing like / treasure in my autopsy.” “Black Woman with Chicken” centers upon a “Blurry / princess, self-narrating,” who in turn finds the world to be a “wondrous glut.” “It’s Getting Hot in Here So Take Off All Your Clothes” (named after the hook to a Nelly song) is narrated by someone who escapes men that “shout like lizards” and finds ecstatic annihilation: “I step into a volcano / & melt like the witch I am. I want to be flawed // all the way to bed.” That same speaker concludes with a challenge to would-be lovers, declaring “How, even with flaws / under these clothes I could be the boss // of you without them.”

Parker’s power doesn’t emerge from ideological hectoring or topical reportage. Nor does it consist in blunt confessional disclosure. These poems are not essays with line breaks. Hers is a poet’s labor, which means that it is more broadly aesthetic and imaginative than any journalistic prose could be, and stranger. What does it mean to have an embodied mind in America in 2017? What if that body is black, or a woman’s, or some other marginalized individual’s? What if it isn’t? Poetry and the police both drag their subjects into view, but the former is much more likely to have the citizen’s best interests in mind.

Ultimately, Parker conceives of contemporary, technologically mediated selfhood as a messy, contingent endeavor rather than something governed by theoretical exactitude. It never ends, and you never get the results you want. “I am a tree and some fruits are good and some are bad,” concludes the first poem. The best we can do, suggests “Another Another Autumn in New York,” is pay attention and sing when the world deserves it:

              I bless
the dark, tuck
myself into a canyon
of steel. I breathe
dried honeysuckle
and hope. I live somewhere
imaginary.

Parker has been taking detailed notes; her lyric exegesis of life in America is unlike anything I’ve read in a long time. One could list forebears: Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank O’Hara, Adrienne Rich, William Carlos Williams, even John Ashbery. But Parker has created her own voice. There are many things more beautiful than Beyoncé, or as beautiful, and a whole lot of them ended up in these pages.

Ryan Boyd (@ryanaboyd) is a poet and critic living in Los Angeles, where he teaches at the University of Southern California.