One poem of Barnes’s that I keep returning to starts with a minor domestic scene: The speaker finds a centipede near her writing desk. In lines that span the width of the page, broken up by white spaces, the poem proceeds to cover a vast territory—apartheid, colonialism, a fascination with the bodies of saints, bodies in extremis—before arriving at a quiet indictment of the poet herself for killing the creature she can’t be bothered to understand. The opening poem of the book, it’s a wandering lament for a basic human failing. Squashing the insect is not equivalent to the acts of cruelty, ignorance, and injustice—great and small—that bear on this particular poet’s place in the world, but the impulse prompts a recognition of their common seed.

Many of the poems in i be, but i ain’t beg to be experienced viva voce, and it’s easy to imagine them bellowed in front of the footlights, or slung coolly back and forth in front of the camera. Though to praise “performance poets” for their voice and “literary poets” for their prosody is something of a cliché—reinforcing a distinction that fits this generation poorly—Barnes has pushed a talent for enacted speech further than most of her poetry peers. In December, her play, BLKS, about four 20-something black women living in Brooklyn and looking for love, opened to glowing reviews at the Steppenwolf Theatre, in Chicago, and will move off-Broadway next spring. Poetry readers can only hope that Barnes’s growing stature on the stage doesn’t pull her too far away from the lyric she’s capable of breathing such life into.

While performance seems to suit the strengths of Barnes’s work, Layli Long Soldier’s poetry is harder to separate from the page—which doesn’t mean that it rests there comfortably. Quite the contrary. Midway through WHEREAS (2017), her debut collection and a National Book Award finalist, the speaker states, “I will compose each sentence with care, by minding what the rules of writing dictate.” The declaration is noteworthy because, up to this point in the book, as an epigraph announces, Long Soldier shows little inclination to mind the rules:

Now

make room in the mouth

for grassesgrassesgrasses

The language of WHEREAS enacts the struggle of its project: the sheer weight of representing an “I” that is both a self and a part of a highly diverse collective—American Indians—whose identity has largely been imposed from without. For Long Soldier, an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux tribe and a visual artist who has taught at Diné College, in the Navajo Nation, syntax itself strains and cracks under the burden.

The vow to compose sentences with care comes from “38,” a five-page poem that acts as a fulcrum between the shorter poems in the book’s first section and the longer “Whereas Statements” of the book’s second and final section. “38” is an account of the largest “legal” execution in U.S. history: 38 Sioux prisoners hanged, with President Abraham Lincoln’s approval, following the 1862 Sioux Uprising. The poem builds force with stark, declarative sentences, each standing as a stanza or paragraph on its own.

The hanging took place on December 26, 1862—the day after Christmas.



This was the same week that President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.



In the preceding sentence, I italicize “same week” for emphasis.

The Sioux fought because they were starving: They hadn’t received the payments agreed to in treaties with the U.S. government, they had lost their hunting grounds, and local traders refused to extend them credit to buy food. One of the traders was supposed to have said, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.” After a raid by Sioux warriors, this trader’s body was found with his mouth stuffed with grass. Some might call this poetic justice. Long Soldier goes further:

I am inclined to call this act by the Dakota warriors a poem.



There’s irony in their poem.



There was no text.



“Real” poems do not “really” require words.

Then she reconsiders: After all, the trader’s words initiate the poem, “click the gears of the poem into place.” It’s telling that even in the most straightforward portion of the book, Long Soldier deploys language to mark its own limits, to probe its utility, to take its measure against concrete and tangible actions.