<em>eponymous as funk</em></br>makalani bandele

Recipient of the 2022 Other Futures Award, selected by Futurepoem staff editors. 

(jopappy and the sentence-makers are) eponymous as funk is a frenetic multimedia jam session of discursive lyric arranged and produced by poems written in bandele's invented prose poetic form the unit. The form gets its inspiration from virtuoso pianist Cecil Taylor's groundbreaking 1966 album Unit Structures, insofar as it desires to embody the feel of collective improvisation encountered in Free Jazz as poetics. Through the application of Free Jazz aesthetics, the language is pushed toward a heightened ambiguity, as wildly different subjects and source materials are played right after, alongside, and over against one another generating new valences and surprising, even playful suggestions that are at odds with common interpretations of phrases. With a marked polyvocality, these sentences or "bars" are organized by how they sound against (with) one another as much as by how they might relate to or enrich one another semantically. Enter here to experience Free Jazz as a groove theory, a language model, and an underlying approach to artistic expression.

An Affrilachian Poet, with fellowships from the likes of National Endowment for the Arts and Cave Canem Foundation, makalani bandele has multiple books of poetry and his work has been anthologized frequently and published widely in literary journals and magazines. (jopappy and the sentence-makers are) eponymous as funk, recipient of the 2022 Other Futures Award, is his third collection of poetry. 

Winter 2024
124 pages, 6 x 8 inches
Paperback Poetry
979-8-9889439-4-5