By all outward appearances, it would make sense that I review Tyrone Williams’ Stilettos in a Rifle Range. Tyrone was a close friend and colleague at Xavier University for forty years—he arrived in 1983, three years after me. At least some of the poems in this “last” collection were written not long after Tyrone’s move from Detroit to Cincinnati, following, according to the crucial Author’s Note, his breakup with a longtime girlfriend, “fueled by my sense of isolation (I knew no one in Cincinnati, hadn’t met anyone aside from my colleagues at work, etc.), to say nothing of the requisite anger and frustration endemic to relationship breakups.” This was also the period when, as the two poets and specialists in modern American literature in the Xavier English Department, we were gradually getting to know each other, and as the song goes (and as all of Tyrone’s friends would attest), to know him is to love him. But although we were almost exactly the same age, we were living different lives. I was married, with a wife who was changing careers, and two very young children. With a heavy teaching load, domestic responsibilities, and a furious desire to pursue my writing (and get tenure), I had little time for socializing. Tyrone was somewhat more footloose, and as these poems indicate, he was hanging out in Cincinnati bars and traveling back to Detroit and to other cities with some frequency. He was also watching lots of film noir, brooding over the figure of the femme fatale, and thinking deeply about relations between the sexes in the working class Black milieu from which he came, especially as represented in the corrosive comedy of Richard Pryor.
Apart from our friendship, however, my reviewing Stilettos isn’t the slam dunk some would assume. True confession: I have often found Tyrone’s poetry frustratingly difficult, despite my familiarity with “innovative” or “experimental” contemporary poetry. I get some of his allusions, but some are lost on me. I’m comfortable with his use of vernacular, but stymied by the ways it is framed in fragmented, seemingly offhanded structures. I love his polysemous language and jarring puns, but find myself put off when his poems end abruptly, and I often wish that he would follow through to a greater extent. Nor does it help very much to think of Shklovsky’s insistence on defamiliarization (for years Tyrone and I alternated teaching Literary Theory), or of the textual materialism of the recent avant-garde (he was friends with a number of the language poets, who greatly admired his work). Nope. Many of Ty’s poems drive me up the wall: just as I think I’m about to grasp them, they elude me. (Do I hear a ghostly chuckle? You bet.)
And yet there are poems in all of his books which come across loud and clear, and will always resonate for me. The sequence Futures, Elections, first published as a chapbook (Dos Madres Press, 2004) and then reprinted as a section of The Hero Project of the Century (Backwaters Press, 2009) contains some of the most moving religious poetry by any of my contemporaries. (Tyrone, to the amazement of many of his friends, was a founding member of the Winton Community Free Methodist Church in Cincinnati, where he taught Bible School and preached.) Another sequence, the provocatively titled “I am Not Proud to Be Black,” from c.c., his first full-length collection (Krupskaya, 2002), reads like an anthem for Tyrone’s generation of Black writers and intellectuals. Here are the first two sections:
1.
Hope ends and thinking breaks out,
uncertain violence which is not despair—
or, if despair, sublime despair,
disfigured hope. The table, already broken ,
gets cleared. Double consciousness gets swept aside
by polyentendres, duck-rabbits, wavicles.
Neither waving nor drowning, we tread water
like a page turning in a book.
We trace the arc of Icarus. The sky only
seems to fall—and then, only sideways
like a page turning in a book.
And in the larger arc of Daedalus, hope
settles in another country, ending
thought. We neither wave nor drown, we turn
2.
the page. We begin outside the book
but the text is everywhere we turn,
a finishing fable: cowboys “in the boat
of Ra” who “marvel at this curious thing”:
hearsay circulates as he-said/she-said
to the put-down dubbed as he-said/he-said.
New commandments overdub the old ones.
Skin grows back over old bones :
Disfigured hope. The table, already broken,
dysfunctional , is finally institutionalized
as a work of art—or the black sheep
sold down the Jordan or the Nile,
another country cobbled out of continents,
extant and not: February, Juneteenth, Kwanzaa ...
These lines deserve an essay unto themselves. Suffice it to say that the racialized dialectic of “sublime despair” and “disfigured hope,” as expressed through W. E. B. Du Bois’ notion of “double consciousness,” is deconstructed by Tyrone’s “polyentendres,” the scintillating textual play that is his signature style. The references to Stevie Smith, Ishmael Reed, and Countee Cullen indicate the poem’s self-consciousness in regard to literary institutionalization (or shall we say, canonization). Likewise, such institutionalization is seen on the level of American political history through the ironic invocations of February (Black History Month), Juneteenth (now a national holiday), and Kwanzaa (the African-American holiday invented by Maulana Karenga and originally intended as an Black alternative to Christmas). What does it mean, Tyrone is asking, when one says one is “proud” of one’s heritage? When is such a notion ever genuine, ever not compromised?
Are there poems this powerful in Stilettos in a Rifle Range? Yes, but they are in a more intimate register. “P R N D” (as in Park Reverse Neutral Drive) is a heartbreaker, a noir scenario of romantic loss. Here is the whole poem:
A downpour drumming on the rooftop,
engine running, car, idle, interior
bathed in the pungent intoxicating spices
radiating from the carryout
in the passenger seat. Inside the Taj,
neon beacon in a strip mall
dark with the common sense of folks
long gone home, red lamps
glowered. A pair of headlights
glared back. A downpour drowning
out its own drumming, so loud
I could barely make out the whispered venom
streaming from a mobile into my right ear.
She was saying something about something
as I reached across the steering column
with my left hand, as if my left ear
had been bent by the loudspeaker of the law.
Engine off, everything—the car, the carryout, etc.—
went cold. I tossed the phone into the passenger seat,
put her in reverse, backed up, out,
and drove home with my double order,
her running commentary as undertow. (44)
This poem offers a masterclass in tone, voice, diction, point of view, rhythm, and cadence. The rain, the dark strip mall, the neon and headlights, the lure of the “intoxicating” (and exotic) Indian food, the “whispered venom” of the femme fatale: Tyrone’s study of film noir serves him well. The “I” sounds detached, dispassionate, apart from itself, but the anger and bitterness is still palpable, as in the pointed “something about something,” and the “etc.”—which is to say, the self—that “went cold.” The free verse (and in some respects, this is a conventional free verse poem, unlike much of Tyrone’s poetry) seems effortlessly articulated. Metrically speaking, a poem of this sort depends largely on the balance achieved between enjambed and end-stopped lines. Most of the lines here are end-stopped, but note, for instance, the effect of “red lamps / glowered.” With “red lamps,” we hang at the end of the line, as is always the case, then move to the nice surprise of “glowered,” since we are probably expecting “glowed.” This is followed in the next enjambed line by the alliterative “glared.” Likewise, the aforementioned “etc.—,” with a pause and beat at the dash, holds us for a moment before dropping us down to the declarative “went cold.” The rhythm is intensified by “A downpour drowning / out its own drumming,” with its percussive trochees. It all adds up to the inescapable “undertow” which continues to inhabit the speaker’s (and reader’s) psyche as he drives home in the dark.
The situation is even worse when he and his lover are together, as in “A Weekend Away.” Tyrone experiments a great deal with the visual poetics of the page; he loves white space, emptiness, the suggestion of voices coming out of “nowhere.” The best instance of this is the sequence “Cold Calls,” in c.c., which consists entirely of footnotes at the bottom of the page, referring to nothing, no body of the text at all. “A Weekend Away,” on the other hand, isn’t ghostly in the least. The body of text runs from idyll to disaster:
I had never slept as well as I did that first evening.
the cottage rental
bay windows
open to the breezy amenities of Lake Superior
lazy walks
bicycle rides
and a picnic
peppered with profanities, shouts,
the afterglow of rage. (49)
Stanza structure and sudden alliteration do much of the work here. These lines are followed by white space, and then some noir prose ending with a burst of rage: “An umbrella of smog sheltered the city swelling on the horizon, a standing army of randomly assorted pawns, queens, and kings. We were almost home and our only hope was that the other would die, just fucking die.” The camera pulls back. Cut.
And when the poet seeks solace elsewhere? Consider the very funny self-mockery in the opening stanza of “Random Late-Night Calls”:
O the awkward equations of errant attachments!
O voluptuous multiple of ovals aloom!
Virally exact, a virtual face-to-face
cloaks the fiber-optic kiss-and-tell.
I open to the coo of “hoo dis?”
Dear Stranger—how are you this evening? (18)
Awkward equations indeed: hook-ups by phone (the period Tyrone looks back to predates the internet, and I think “fiber-optic” is an anachronism) produce the image of “voluptuous multiples of ovals” which “aloom” (as in “ahoy”?) in the poet’s erotic imagination. And when these strangers really meet face-to-face? Here’s all of “And the Spell Was Broken”: “And then your sister / And then your niece and brother / Walked back into the room” (33). As the poet observes in “In Cincinnati,” thinking back to his early days in the city, when he lived in the New Forum Apartments overlooking Good Samaritan Hospital and I-75 (I helped him move in), “Small wonder this evening feeds so many / With so little and satisfies so few” (3).
But Tyrone eventually found both like-minded friends, and opportunities to exercise his subversive wit—and not merely on the page. The title poem of the volume, “stilettos in a rifle range” (all lower-case) recounts one of Tyrone’s most outrageous performances, leading me to drop literary criticism for memoir—or simply, gossip. (As one of our colleagues noted at the Xavier memorial for Tyrone, our friend was a gifted gossip.) Not long after Tyrone was hired, the Xavier English Department also brought on two female assistant professors, one in Shakespeare, one in Women’s Literature, and both became close friends of Tyrone. The three were hanging out prior to an English Department party, and here is what happened:
She and she
said switch
so swish
he did, having misheard,
heard, he slid into a pair
of, slipped into an, open-
back heels and dress,
they, following suit,
she, his jacket, shirt,
she, his pants, wingtips,
tearing down the set
pieces, flipped the dinner
party; a three-ring
au pair a trois
staging the blank glint
mute smirk,
wine glasses
half-raised, lowered
to half-staff
flagging something
in the airs
chi chi noses
wrinkled with
the stiff whiff
of a flat mistake
aquiline for Roman
knock-off
defanged the gang:
“It was all a gag,”
they cried, laughed. (68)
The three assistant professors, one Black and two white feminists (one of whom was to come out very publicly as a lesbian before she left Xavier), showing up in drag at a departmental function, was, if not quite walking into a rifle range, one helluva a gag, especially given some of the old guard at that party—Catholic, conservative, male, and very suspicious of anyone who did not meet that description teaching literature at Cincinnati’s Jesuit university. Having “flipped the dinner // party” and “defanged the gang,” Tyrone and Company, this “three-ring / au pair a trois,” found themselves with both new friends and new enemies. It was a night to remember.
As should be clear by now, Stilettos in a Rifle Range is a darkly funny and at times even bitchy book, with a few poems that I would definitely include among Tyrone’s greatest hits. Tyrone himself notes that “these ‘sideline’ poems gave vent to other emotional and psychological states I was experiencing or recalling, living through or conjuring up, over that period of time [i.e. while working on other projects].” Such being the case, it’s something of a shame that Stilettos is the last collection Tyrone published before his death, since new readers usually want to check out the most recent book of a poet who is certainly going to gain a wider audience. It’s also, at least for the time being, and what with the demise of SPD, one of the more available Williams collections. c.c. is available as a PDF from Krupskaya; On Spec and As iZ, from Omnidawn, need to be special ordered from Booksmith ; The Hero Project of the Century is distributed by Nebraska ; Adventures of Pi is still at Dos Madres; but Howell, from Atelos, appears to be completely out of print. In other words, a collected Williams is necessary; we can only hope it will come into being relatively soon—likewise a selected critical prose. For the time being, I encourage you to get your hands on whatever of Tyrone’s you can find out there. And make sure to fasten your seat belt.