Devotions
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'Devotion: Guitar': From Tuscaloosa west to Mississippi then north to Memphis through country as unmusical as I was unloved by the decorous ardor of the South and the voice of one whose griefs were Cherokee, absentee, left in the Chevy and secret. She didn't love my love like Shiva's everywhere and blue and many-handed, some with knives and some with billet-doux. She wouldn't sacrifice the better judgment I'd want of her. Like stopped clocks (black hands, white faces) the geographic cure was true two times a day. All time else I was wrong and blued like the notes of the guitar, drum, saxophoned songs I was receiving: a magnet wound around a steel coil - a Les Paul - the quavers I converted to an electric boil that simmered into the sweet, fry-oil air. I can be mortified anywhere, everywhere. In the hands of Bruce Smith, devotions are momentary stops to listen to the motor of history. They are meditations and provocations. They are messages received from the chatter of the street and from transmissions as distant as Memphis and al-Mansur. Bulletins and interruptions come from brutal elsewheres and from the interior where music puts electrodes on the body to take an EKG.
These poems visit high schools, laundromats, motels, films, and dreams in order to measure the American hunger and thirst. They are interested in the things we profess to hold most dear as well as what's unspoken and unbidden. While we're driving, while riding a bus, while receiving a call, while passing through an X-ray machine, the personal intersects - sometimes violently, sometimes tenderly - with the hum and buzz of the culture. The culture, whether New York or Tuscaloosa, Seattle or Philadelphia, past or present, carries the burden of race and 'someone's idea of beauty.' The poems fluctuate between the two poles of 'lullaby and homicide' before taking a vow to remain on earth, to look right and left, to wait and to witness.
Bruce Smith is professor of English and creative writing at Syracuse University and the author of four books of poems. His book The Other Lover, also published by the University of Chicago Press, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.