June 10, 2025
Sristi Ray
“(jopappy and the sentence-makers are) eponymous as funk” by makalani bandele
makalani bandele’s (jopappy and the sentence-makers are) eponymous as funk invites readers to be students of composition in music and poetry, to enter a relationship of call and response. bandele presents a poetics inspired by free jazz and its collective improvisation, polyvocality, and constant tonal shifts. The liner notes at the end of this collection are like a crash course on Black music and its evolution: from the ‘Godfather of Gangsta Rap’ Easy-E, through pioneering black artist groups like De La Soul (credited with bringing the two main-ish strands of Black music, Jazz and Hip-hop, together), to Aretha Franklin, and A Tribe Called Quest. Song lyrics become intertwined with bandele’s composition, while a lingering spectre of the songs’ rhythms calls the beats behind bandele’s constructions of “the unit.”
“The unit” is a form of bandele’s invention, a prose poem structured around sixteen sentences, engaging with Ron Silliman’s concept of the New Sentence which disrupts conventional syntax and narrative cohesion to foreground torque, ambiguity, and linguistic materiality. Drawing from Ruth Ellen Kocher’s Gigan, a form predicated on structured repetition and recombination, the unit incorporates a formal constraint wherein the 1st and 6th sentences are synthesized to generate the 12th, creating recursive resonance within the composition. Additionally, bandele’s unit poems are numbered, and units 90-129 were algorithmically generated using a JavaScript program, further extending the form’s interrogation of chance operations and procedural composition. Meaning within the unit is neither fixed nor linear but emerges through polyvocal dissonance, associative interplay, and the destabilization of syntactic expectation.
bandele’s acknowledgment of Black poetics, particularly the work of contemporary poets like Fred Moten, Ruth Ellen Kocher, and francine j. harris, deepens the connection between his artistic vision and theirs. In his words, “my highest aspiration is to be seen as a student of your work.” He invites readers to enter into a collaborative, studious engagement with the multifaceted expressions of Black identity, culture, and resistance that these poets share. bandele’s own work challenges readers to partake in the musical play of voices and characters that the fictional band of jopappy have set out to perform: the voices and characters are many, and their synaptic overlaps are hermeneutically giving and resistant at the same time. The unit form has been described as “the first, self-consciously post-structuralist poetic form.” In his notes on this invented form, bandele traces his inspirations in pianist Cecil Taylor’s 1966 album, “Unit Structures.”
Physicality and attention to the material of construction, of language as musical notation or words on a page, is an important aspect of the reading/listening experience jopappy offers: “it’s a horn player’s world full of skin hunger.” bandele’s tribute to Cecil Taylor’s genius and his blatant flexing of the legacy of black artists is more than merely referential. Apart from song lyrics that become poetry, the structure of the book itself is telling. The units are titled by numbers and sometimes have words and numbers both. These numbered units are arranged in a random order, bringing to mind the musical ordering of songs on an album where the effect of a single depends on its place in the system: “difference is generative. it’s been a long time, i shouldn’t have left you without a strong beat to step to. anything is music as long as you apply certain principles of organization to it.”
When bandele names the three sections of the book “intuitive velocity systems,” “dissociative studio,” and “extemporaneous machine learning,” it is easy to read them as a call to attention: just like musical instruments that “talk at, talk over, talk around, talk indirectly about, completely ignore” each other, polyvocal variations in bandele’s poems make the reader enter an immersive theatre in media res.
And yet in this poetry collection, the “mixing” is seen for what it is: creative approaches that have always co-existed and influenced one another in Black America, not as separate genres in art but as composite responses to the same problems of marginal art, identity, and culture. Contemporary music buffs will understand the implication of this when I remind them that Kendrick Lamar’s “Squabble up” opened our eyes anew to the legacy of The Roots and the heritage of genre-mixing right from the band’s 1999 album, Things Fall Apart. bandele’s work doesn’t just honor its roots. It insists on an ongoing motion in tradition, reminding us that innovation in Black art has always been a practice of conversation, collision, and continuous becoming.
An important part of the project of jopappy and band is to call attention to their methodology of creation. Many poems provide some sort of information about their making: they lay bare the creative pressure/pleasure inherent in the act of making or releasing the musicality trapped within: “fucked ‘em up and made a black section in the middle of the white only. put the resonances in first and built around ‘em. boy, you should have known by now, easy-duz-it. unplug one, unplug two. something like the loosening of light streaks between electrically charged regions of a cloud.” And, later: “Give her her wide berth in her maneuvers through loving her body. pulse, pulse, pulse, pulse, pulse, and still not pulsating like we want. next level: narrative of constitutive metonymic components [...] to encourage ways of reading aware of the gaps in meaning that inevitably exist in flowering.”
Many such instances seem to hint at how the genre demarcations as well as value significations we place on theory and practice, on critical and creative work, on art and politics, can often and must be the same thing: “fingers dance with valves. start in the middle of meaning and blow in both directions at the same time. do it again in the next phrase and people think you meant to. do it again in the riff after that and people know.”
Along with the formal desire in bandele’s works to be material units forged by hands, and ones which carry the mark of their making on their body, it is important to pay attention to the outcome of this desire: what do these poems mean? We know how to read them, but when we are done, what are we left with? Students of poetry are often asked to read without looking for meaning. However, this exercise can be an institutional double edged sword; it is not a wrong way to read, but it can become grossly inadequate. In times when critiques of style and idiosyncratic craft choices are denied to artists of color (in favor of reading them into an identity catalogue), jopappy shows a way out of the double bind of meaning and experimentation: “just be sensitive to it, suspend the ringing in your ears, you are the metaphor in this corner you backed yourself into.”
Intrigued by bandele’s use of “corner” and the grammatical act of parsing, I traced “parse” to the Proto-Indo-European root pere (“to grant, allot”), which also forms words like apartment and bipartisan. jopappy’s argument suggests that parsing a poem is an act of self-cornering, where the real knot in meaning is the reader’s own limitation. Meaning, then, is neither redemptive nor restrictive but shaped by awareness of constraint: “risk is the reason it proliferated.”
While meaning itself may not be the focus, its function in craft is. jopappy’s poems foreground the systematization of material, revealing how cognition transforms randomness into memory: “sheep don’t know they are sheep, that’s the first rule of sheepherding. going places where my thinking is obscure to me.”
The making continues to comment on itself in a way that such commentary begins to read as a self-learning machine teaching itself, refining its ethos. A knowing happens in this process of making: “our welfare, mental and otherwise, depends so much on this nonlinear line going a long way to be a quest engine.” The nature of a discontinuous knowing outlined in “unit_1” (“do it again in the riff and people know”) begins to be read as a signature of the project in “unit_93 quick installing bootloader,” the first poem wrought out of JavaScript: “what’s play don’t what up comes. introduce subjectivity and execute randomness. she was seeing the transitions early. where is this taking place in your mind?”
The visual art further shows the way in which this knowing happens. As visual material registers, they provide training in reading where reading letters of a language is not as important as reading the shapes that make something up. “Fig. 4: fabrication of a singular texture” shows a black and white image of a stainless steel grille patterned in diamonds, their vertices welded together to make a mesh. In my reading of the figure alongside the poems, I could easily rename it “a meeting of angular things.” In retrospect, my reading at the moment was responding to the work’s desire for knowledge through artifice or “fabrication” where truths are relayed relativistically and sensorily. The shapes in the image say something about the push and pull of difference, and how our desire to know and understand the other benefits from contact that is both “singular” and “angular.”
“unit_63 for the player in you” describes the effect thus: “once you recognize a picture as not a picture and begin to consider that it might not recognize you either.” And a few lines later, “just curious but did i just see you put your mouth on a dark ledge full of watching? [...] sometimes you just have to curtis mayfield that thang to get it to sang, other times it’s so disorienting that you have to feel along the wall for its meaning.” These lines show the working of free jazz in the meeting of the ‘you’ and the ‘i’ which happens in the room of song, in the heady yet ‘watchable’ and ‘feelable’ space of free play.
This method of building and accretion is a jazz method which bandele exemplifies in his units. The only connecting thread in this method seems to be the idea of solidarity. Harmony as music is coterminous with privilege, while art at the margins chooses to coexist in solidarity: “there is no such as infallibly straight. any description is loaded with ideological biases [...] can i get a what, what, a bright junction of corollary, an ineluctable forest of authorial choices? [...] speculative flight 1855 requesting permission to land.” Solidarity becomes both method and meaning—a refusal of fixed hierarchies in favor of a chorus of voices, always in motion, always in dialogue.
Improvisation is the base of accretion in jopappy. Despite being a good student of the poets and musicians bandele names in this book, he is decisive about the gaps that he as an author can creatively enter, take advantage of, and blow up. In this sense, the organizing principles of free jazz with its unrelenting drive to change, improvise, and call attention to the body that plays, are what make the book successful in its investigation of Black culture. “suspect, unit_24, a unit with priors” says, “dash; impetus, ardor: to chance going meta with great elan all while acknowledging irony everywhere” —jopappy’s open agenda to brandish the malleable material of sound-word with pride and sincerity is exciting and brashly jazzy.