In a feature for the Bennington Review, poets Phillip B. Williams and Donika Kelly trade musings regarding fathers, performative joy, divinity and Williams’ latest collection Mutiny, among other things. At one point in the conversation, Williams fixes his attention on the prolonged life of imagery recycled from poet to poet, from generation to generation. Williams digs, “I love the moon [….] I think it is a beautiful image. I want people to keep writing about deer and moons and all that. [But] [a]lso, what if we couldn’t anymore? If someone said, this is the last time you could do that?”
Mutiny, Williams’ first collection to follow his award-winning debut Thief in the Interior, is an unabashed montage of goodbyes. Nearly half of the 40-plus poems in Mutiny adorn their titles with “final.” There’s the “Final First Poem,” “Final Poem for the Deer,” “Final Poem for My Father Misnamed in My Mouth,” “Final Poem for the Moon,” “Final Poem for Grandma Elizabeth’s Cancer” and so on. Williams is saying goodbye to images and items that have captured the imagination of poets across time and poetry classrooms, to poetry pop-culture phenomena that annoy him, to familiar burdens weighing on his mind, to muses – it is both catharsis and confrontation. The personal cleanse also works as a plea for subversion: refuse power structures and learned social norms that keep you in repetitive, inauthentic (and one can even say soulless) performances. “Final Poem of Persona” exercises the interests of the collection in the form of an inquisitive persona with an unyielding curiosity:
Who summoned me? Who thinks my gaze
is a wheel of thread to sew wings onto backs
that never had wings? Who traced the maze
sunset makes on the water to lead me back?
The air is caustic here and rotten milk
spills from the flowerbeds. The earth is iron-
stenched. There is blood like unwound silk
ribboning from a body. Whose child has learned
their history? Who’s found the door but can’t get out?
Whose words do I perform from my sealed mouth?
The mind portrayed here is acutely aware, knowing … subversive. Freshly, Williams liberates the persona from existing as a literary device alone and empowers it to stand as a representation of inquiry and seeking. The persona says I know the air is caustic, I can see the blood spilling from the body, but who is drawing me here, who is that behind me? In forgoing a more typical or compliant rendition of persona, Williams employs a highly sentient one, satisfying the innate desire for renovation that this collection leans towards. As Williams attempts to take a step away from performative work in this collection, so does the persona, who exits the stage of the poem conscious of the performance it has been institutionalized to play, who exits subversively with a “sealed mouth.”
Williams isn’t being a contrarian for the sake of contrariness. He is searching, which has as its prize the chance of discovery, and is a right Williams feels we all too readily toss away for the sake of clinging to the familiar. It is fine to love an image, but also significant to ask if this love has you stuck. The image makes your wheels turn, but sadly you’re just a really nice-looking tire in the mud.
To say the book is only about saying goodbye would be amiss. Williams prefaces the book with a quotation from singer-songwriter Solange: “I got a lot to be mad about.” Elsewhere in the same song, Solange croons, “You got the right to be mad … Be mad, be mad, be mad.” Anger is not only affirmed but honored. Williams’ poems seem to assert that one of the ways we can be wise with anger is to value it as legitimate human expression. His speaker listens to the anger, and takes their time with it while also inviting others to do the same. In Mutiny, there is a call to refuse black joy as a superficial regurgitation of “overcoming,” and reach for true joy by spreading your hands over real wounds that need real balm.
Williams possesses hands full of skill. Throughout the collection, he operates with a cool, fluent dexterity: manipulating vowels and consonance just as a painter manipulates paint — or as a professional athlete manipulates the movements of a ball in front of an opponent. An example of his deftness, play, and precision may be found in the “maybe” sonnets of “Mushmouf’s Maybe-Crown.” The sonnet-conscious poem, which is also a tautogram, consists of three 13-line sonnets and a sneaky 14-line one. It also playfully fuddles mushmouth into mushmouf, which provides great interplay for why the conformity-challenged speaker might fumble at keeping a sonnet form. An excerpt of the sonic feast reads:
Manacled Man mangled, moreover made
Menace-masked, maybe molded moribund,
Mostly manipulated. Magnanimously marred,
Mired mush-mouthed. Moor moored more.
Manacled Man meanly measured,
Man-monkey mixed midst murky mirrors.
‘Merica’s Man-Man, ministrel-married
Mophead, magnum man, mama’s mine.
Mite-munched, Manacled Man mimics
Martyr movements, moshes
Minus music, muses: “Murder
Made manifestations:
My madness my master.”
In his sonnet trials, Williams finds a suitable metaphor for mutiny – and gives readers a dramatic sequence that enacts rebellion and achieves subversion.
Perhaps the true mutiny in the collection is renunciation — and the longed for destination is renewal. Perhaps that is why a collection filled with so many goodbyes finishes with a poem titled “In the Beginning,” like a final suggestion that mutinous thinking can lead towards something new – humbly waiting for you to find it.
[Published by Penguin Books on August 3, 2021, 260 pages, $$27.99 hardcover]