On Inheritance by Taylor Johnson (a letter)
        Kondo Heller

Dear Taylor Johnson,

One afternoon after reading Inheritance, I took a silent walk and sat under a tree. I looked beside me and saw a wet pinecone, then I looked at the ground, the earth was covered in pines. The silence is an invitation for listening, a reminder of “Knowing where I’ve been. Knowing where I have to go.”

I re-read your poems again to remember, this time by the cascading waters, where many have hidden all their sounds in the water. The water protects their sound from getting stolen. Water is a palimpsest of sounds to be remembered. “Water is the first thing in my memory,” writes Dionne Brand in A Map to the Door of No Return.  I hear the sound of the water washing their breath, misting their skin, carrying the notes of all that has been in this, in their pores. I was sitting there reading your poems, hearing it all, listening. The water crashing down foaming at the edge between falling and landing, between flight and running, between reaching and holding, I read the line “It’s like we are holding hands now at the edge of white silence, from which we are to make a music of our being here, of being moved. Wherein our music compliments and holds close each other’s sound.” (Johnson, 3).

As I attune, I make an equation: 

Sound =                                                     Inheritance 

Inheritance =                                                                        listening 

listening =                                            Sound 

                                                                                    Inheritance=listening


I will open my review for the collection as follows: 

The transitive properties of Taylor Johnson’s collection, Inheritance, gives way for understanding inheritance as a form of listening—listening to a vertical, poetic, rhythmic movement. To feel and understand the essence of what June Jordan means by “rhythm as vertical event… as in palpable momentum.”

My friend and I go to the waterfall, and I put my arms around them. Their presence brings me so much joy -I need to touch and feel them. - Do you know that moment you want to touch? Have you been touched like that? Like a contact that has passed encounter, there is no counter but touch. Later that day I read a note that I made for the review:  

• My skin feels a polyphony of sounds punctuated by where the lines break,     and the next line rushes in. A continuum of sound, a circular breath in water each exhaled bubble holds a note to another note – a circled mouth blowing into a Black hole and there it is the whole of space, all this space but not enough money to build a house. 
  
  
  
• Thank you for reminding me that I can always find a can of beans, rice and some coconut milk –and eat home. Taste what I no longer have but my stomach is full. 
  
  
  
• Does the water orientate itself? Till it meets another stream, a tributary forming a confluence of movement, whose shape holds all the multitudes. Just as Go-Go carries wholly the sounds of drum, funk, RnB, soul, jazz, gospel, the call and response. If the river meets another river and in the movement of meeting there is one stream that is referred to as coming from an endangered river called the Anacostia River (indexed in the present as the forgotten river), then the movement contains the existence of that which is now referred to as forgotten. In the confluence of sound (Go-Go), just as in these waters we hear the anguish that NourbeSe Philip speaks of caused by a muting language that wants to settle tongues. When English settlers colonised a place they got rid of sounds and words of local languages that they could not settle.

A speaker that carries the waves of Go-Go plays at the intersection -- a place where things cross or the act of crossing -- between Florida and Georgia Avenue. Every day the sound of Go Go moved omnidirectionally there out of the speaker's mouth in a spiral flow.  The sound held truths of the name of the place that the settling gentry knew could unsettle -- so they muted it…


‘You shaken down to what the drums give, and 
I found myself, I found myself inside this
homeless groove you can’t name’


   - The drums say “come think with me.” Is the drum a poiesis of an “usness we make” (Johnson, 16)? I listen back to the making of the drum in the poetic manual by Kamau Brathwaite, this undoing of self, inside the voice of drums that                                                                    
 “stretch further than hope
further than heaven, that will 
reach deep down to our gods where the thin
light cannot leak, where our stretched hearts 
cannot leap.” 


The poem speaks about the stretching of loss into something that goes beyond hope, a stretching movement that reaches further than heaven. That does not leak the 

“Light that did fall on me, made much of me. Light that sings through me” -(Johnson, 3).   

I hear this song and dance in the gathering of your poetry. Your poems call for an aural engagement. 


-I write: 

However, these are not the only things heard in this collection, as with every reading of the poems and viewing of the labanotation that dance across the pages, something else becomes felt/heard. The poems seek out a conversation, as lines stretch across the page, reaching for other lines that move in the opposite direction, and slowly fade away, giving space for the next movement or poem.



use­d to tell me that when his mother was dying, she dragged him to a tarot reader every week. Who conjectured answers for her based on the cards, answers that gave her one more day with the possibility of answers. I have been hesitant to be among the cards; I sometimes pull a card and I know that it is not a card from myself, but instead is in service or speaking to another.

I pull your poem ‘Conjecture on the Nature of Inconvenience’, a poem that proves the truth in the false. The Justice card in the Tarot signals absolute honesty (Pollack, 96). And after this acceptance of honesty comes a peaceful surrender, or acceptance, which is shown by the Hanged Man. The poem begins with the condition or “if” of pulling “the hanged man’s card on new years eve, then I am telling on myself” (Johnson, 39). The four lines that follow this if-then statement all contain ‘is’ -- which is a result of the conditional equation that the poem builds:

“if the body is said to be either     or      , then there is a liminality unaccounted for.” (Johnson, 39) 

In this I find proof in the unquantifiable space of neither and nor of Audre Lorde’s poem “I Die for All Mysterious Things”:

The poem that precedes’ ‘Conjecture on the Nature of Inconvenience’ is ‘Lorde Blue’, and I smiled at that when I saw the full inheritance of those two poems. To hear and see the full call and response on the pages is something that Inheritance gives the reader/listener, and it is in this giving that we inherit.

In these two pieces, I recall the poem “Afterimages” by Audre Lorde. The force of the image inherited, as Lorde opens it with:


To circle back to your poem, ‘Conjecture on the Nature of Inconvenience’, you write a conjecture that is a theory or statement without sufficient proof, yet that poem produces a proof in the conditional equation that you craft in “if-then” conditions. The conjecture as proof: that your neighbour called the cops on you based on her conjecture that is within the proof of the conjecture, which is your poem. The poem also holds proof of ancestral protection that resides in the soil, and of bodies that know your name. This again takes me back to the poem ‘Lorde Blue’, because here you speak of your “capacity to demand from the knowledge of the afterlife” (38). This knowledge of the afterlife is something the Hanged Man card also speaks of, as he is not dead—he is alive and rooted—and the notion of this card echoes through ‘Lorde Blue’. Moreover, in the Rider and Waite pack, the Hanged Man is wearing a long-sleeved blue shirt. In the poem ‘Blue Lorde’, I hear the echoes of the card and then it appears in another poem. Is it the sound that makes the image? In your poem ‘Lorde Blue’, I hear Audre Lorde, and her pulling the card that you will pull in the poem that follows. 

Johnson’s usage of syntax is an alchemy of becoming the cry, of decline, of scream or of unfurling. I hear this in the grandmother in your poem ‘States of decline’, whom no one will come for. 

The poem is made up of seven couplets that visually decline in line length, depicting the slow fading of the life of the grandmother.

‘[...]Losing the use of her legs. / Needing to be turned like a mattress. / No one is coming for her.[...]’.

The poem does not only visually fade by becoming smaller on the page;

the lilting sonic texture of words the lilting sonic texture of words
the lilting sonic texture of words
the lilting sonic texture of words
the lilting sonic texture of words the
lilting sonic
texture of words
the lilting
sonic texture
of words
the
lilting
sonic
texture
of
words’


adds another layer of listening to the syntax of the poem.

Johnson has said that they became a reader through listening. This is a practice that readers of this collection inherit, for to read this collection is to listen.



‘I listened to the light. I listened for muscadines swelling in the ditches on the waterlogged sides of the highway. / I listened to the quiet narrow as we entered the city.’

The light is in the pine tree, known to symbolise survival and longevity due to its ability to grow all year round, regardless of adverse environmental conditions. Listening more deeply to the poem reveals the limitation of language as a form of knowledge: the poem itself is inherited from Deanna Lawson’s photograph ‘Trap Car’, and hums a trembling emotional syntax that runs through all the poems of this collection.

‘I counted the pines / and put my voice inside them’




are in an amongness. In the few poems that I have mentioned, I re-call an inheritance that I think/move/be with in the work of Dionne Brand, Kamau Brathwaite, and Audre Lorde. But I am also inheriting form, such as the form of review as sketch, depicted in poetry. This form exists in Johnson’s poem ‘This is a Review for Blue in Green by Miles Davis’. Johnson makes the instruments heard, ‘The horn asks: How long has it been since?’  The review is an invitation, a possibility to listen to works in otherwise-ways. 

In the collection, I also inherit place, and think of movement in a place, even before I know that it is a place. Which correlates to what fahima ife choreographs and maps in their book maroon choreography, where they write ‘If dance is the city’s mother tongue, as Fred Moten says, then what secret lives inside the city, in us, before the city, as us, before the clearing, inside air?’ (ix). 


                                        Brooklyn, 8th & Ingraham

    Pennsylvania Ave. SE
                                                                              Club 2718, W 177th & Broadway

                DC                               Temple, GA

                              Sage St          





in the breaking of lines. 

Johnson localises us in spaces in ways where we feel the landscape, voices, and engage in the motion of circular breathing that sustains the tone of the collection. At times this breath is held and shallow, as in the concrete blocks of prose poetry in the poems ‘June, DC’, or ‘Hunger’, a poem that is about the need for food,

‘I wish our intellect / could materialize into food. I want to cook us a full meal.’   

I recently was asked at a film festival, what I would call my films. The person that asked the question  said that they had not seen anything like my film before before. I responded and said that I would not call it a poetry film, that it was a film by a poet – in that my film is part of an inheritance of poetry.

“I’m going to show a film now I’m going to show a film now:”


Your collection is a moving of language that in turn also is a moving of images. I think back to the video on loop in the poem ‘This Sign is Available’ of the young girl that “trembles with joy  after killing her first buck”. The line breaks are jump cuts. In her1987 essay Why Black Cinema by Toni Cade Bambara she talks about the importance of Black cinema, and how traditions of Black storytelling inheritance are recognized in Black cinema. She writes “And we notice that as a weaving device, blending together seemingly disparate elements, the handing down from generation to generation, in baton relay form, our mouth to ear memory speak (an absolute signature in all of Haile Gerima’s films where the whole structure is always “relay”). Another very obvious feature of our classical form is repetition[…]” (Bambara, 200). I recognize this in your movie or poem ‘Art Movie’ in the repetition of “trees” and “red” in the first lines followed by the layer of light that repeats. The poem carries the mouth to ear speak that Bambara speaks of,

 “[…]I keep you in my ear and give you, 
how I’m doing and what I want to eat were I not a train […]”

- ‘Art Movie’, Taylor Johnson


Thank you for the smoke breaks--I don't even smoke, but appreciate you for sharing your emergency stash, in a time when I knew that money was tight. Thank you for taking us to the woods to watch the smoke travel, and to learn about self-reliance from the trees. It made me listen closely to the Baobab trees that I grew up around. Through listening to them, I was able to remember, and study with them about, their fire-resistant properties. Have you ever tasted baobab seeds? The fruit texture is dusty, almost like ash. We would coat the fruit in red food color and add sugar and suck at the seeds, the food color smudging our tongue to fire. Once we had sucked it all, we would spit out a black seed, covered in all our saliva, one of those seeds--once dried--could grow into another tree. I think that having tongued and held that seed in my mouth, of the joy of sucking all the sweetness imbedded that seed. The seed gave me sweetness and I return it to the soil, filled with my mouth. I think about this… forgetting the fire-resistant properties.


I go to my first class in the US, with your book filled with my notes, questions, appreciation and folded pages. I tell the class “This book is incredible; you should read it!” Someone takes a picture of the cover. Our professor puts her hands to her heart and says, “Aww yes Taylor… incredible!” Somewhere else, in my memory, in London, my friend sits by my window drinking nettle tea and reading Inheritance.

This letter perhaps is an “Extraordinary limitation playing freedom” (‘Derrida/Coleman’, Johnson). So, I will end here.  If anything, if only this line is what reaches you, then all these are ways to say: Thank you for this dose of light, that your collection Inheritance is. 

Kindest wishes, 

K