“font-family: Verdana; line-height: 13px;”>Quincy Troupe’s new collection of poetry is titled with a word that Troupe invented and uses throughout the poems: “font-family: Verdana; line-height: 13px;”>Errancities
He adapted it from a French word,
“font-family: Verdana; line-height: 13px;”>errance “font-family: Verdana; line-height: 13px;”>, which means “to wander” or “a wandering life,” with the connotation of risk. Troupe writes in a brief headnote that he prefers his invented word to “font-family: Verdana; line-height: 13px;”>errance
because of
the way
“font-family: Verdana; line-height: 13px;”>errancities
rolls off
his tongue and for its sense of “plural wanderings of many lives,
rather than one life.”
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>All of this rather perfectly prepares the reader for these 58 poems that Troupe has written and that Coffee House Press (Minneapolis) has published.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>Troupe wanders in these pages. A substantial number of the poems are situated on one of the two islands where Troupe and his wife Margaret have homes, Manhattan and Guadeloupe. But he also visits cities of his past – St. Louis, Los Angeles, Port au Prince – and wanders as far south as Oaxaca, Mexico and up to the Pacific Northwest with poems based in Port Townsend, Washington and Ashland, Oregon.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>It’s not one man walking here. More than ever, the presence of a life companion, a wife, is noted. And the “plural wanderings of many lives” is felt through the poems’ abundant dedications and references to other friends and artists: his St. Louis-based core (Miles Davis, Hamiet Bluiett, Kelvyn Bell, K. Curtis Lyle, Eugene B. Redmond, Oliver Jackson, Donald Troupe, Donald M. Suggs) but also the New York painter Todd Stone, the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, Edouard Glissant (the writer from Martinique from whom Troupe gleaned errance), the New York-based poet Sekou Sundiata, and even Michael Jackson is the subject of a long poem of love.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>With Troupe having gone local on tropical Guadeloupe, a far cry from gridlocked Manhattan or gritty North St. Louis, he also does a bit of inter-species wandering. In “Listening to Black Birds,” one of the collection’s finest moments, he listens to the birds in his backyard in Guadeloupe and their “jabbering” reminds him of “black people gathered on corners,” of “improvising / solos split from lips.” He also races chickens and rats to the ripe mangoes in his backyard in two surprising poems.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>The “risk” in these poems, to my ears, is mostly remembered by a poet who now seems to live a satisfying and safe, if not exactly settled, life. In “Where Have They All Gone,” Troupe remembers his fellow wildcats from the Watts Writers Workshop, Ojenke, Eric Priestley and K. Curtis Lyle, “the spiritual six-fingered witch doctors,” and his wondering where they have gone indicates an absence of that earlier kind of dangerous, creative craziness in his mature life.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>Troupe also looks back to the risk inherent in street corner games of craps he observed (and, presumably, played) during his youth in St. Louis. Here, Troupe makes a significant contribution to contemporary poetics by creating and introducing a new form, the Seven/Eleven, with the title being a reference to a roll of the dice. Practicing poets will want to own and study Errancities to read Troupe’s full anatomy of the form and how he works with it in the 12 poems he cast in the form. Since hearing Troupe briefly describe the Seven/Eleven last year during a gig in St. Louis at the Metropolitan Gallery, I have worked extensively in the form and found it to be a suitably offbeat alternative to the sonnet.
“font-size: 9.0pt; line-height: 115%; font-family: Verdana;”>Troupe – and thanks to his innovation, we – owe this new form to his St. Louis childhood when he “watched older and younger people – mostly men – gambling when they played the game of dice.” Troupe has traveled an amazing distance in experience and accomplishment from those St. Louis street corners and given two generations of poets an impressive model for how to do this thing: poetry, being a poet. Even from the safety and security of his success, we expect more roving, risky poems from him, cast as Seven/Elevens or in any form of his choosing. For, as he writes in describing the Seven/Eleven, “Even if one approaches life conservatively, there is no way to predict what will confront you while passing through the daily activity of breathing and living.”
