"I admire so much in the poem “Splitting St. James Infirmary: Cab Calloway Orchestra | Yo-Yo Ma and The Silk Road Ensemble,” the aesthetic and typographic risk-taking; a wide cross-cultural intelligence, a historical knowing, the poem’s ekphrastic edges, the textured language that honors the poem’s iconic musical genius and his energetic performances. Like Calloway, Alexander judiciously hits notes that are formidably lyrical, possessed, and sustaining: “like taking turns pulling our eyes through [her] batoned swagga?” This is what it means to possess a “tongue of faith.” I enjoy most the writer’s confidence in us to make use of the poem’s indeterminate acts of language; here is a generosity that I find refreshing. We stand at the poems’ thresholds of meaning, but also relish how the poem teases us forward like the sinuous, melodic lines of the poem’s eponymous song."
Words from Major Jackson on our 2025 Peseroff Poetry Poem
Splitting St. James Infirmary: Cab Calloway Orchestra Yo-Yo Ma and The Silk Road Ensemble
By Michelle Alexander
Cab Calloway, like a mutinied song… What was it that we bit off
together? What is it that we can’t forgo… like taking turns pulling
our eyes through your batoned swagga? The fate of this question
rumbles, the engine of cool magnificence.
Among us, a saint’s shadow grew tremulous. The limbing light of
an eclipse, an interior as dark as a tuxedo. Cray dancer, your mic, a
medium of easy speaking specters, scatted to unriddle what’s
beyond meaning. No longer and again “cotton,” play it hot, and
we become Harlem. Making broth with your salvation bones was
how we got through winter. We will milk the stars raw for you—
Stand before us, gone apeshit without any shame. Pantomime our sounds around your tip-tapping blessings, such as puppetry of
fingers, bass picking, and drumming allies. You, a tongue of faith,
the coriander of sultry devils. But what we can’t forgo—is how you
are pointing toward serrated love and mouthing its contours. How
your ecstasy is
the slick dusk of
a pipa, a Chinese plucked lute, a scene of laundry lines spooling
within Yo-Yo Ma’s face. As midnight, we slide around him,
sounding like it being a good chance we’ve played with thieves.
Sounding familiar, that is. For years, we’ve played to score a
memory of ancient Chang'an, to drive westward, to become a
riverlet of silk running to Antioch and Rome.
Unlike the back rooms of these regions, our music thanks the time
of day for its cracks… Unlike the dusty tracks, we feel secrets long
after they’ve been given.
What was it that we bit off together? We are taken in by the east.
Our Silk Road trips in a hard and luscious way. A way borne with
bruises and melody like our spike fiddles.… Once more, we can sign
with our hands how we will raise hell as we go along. Who wants us
to beguile her the way a dice snake describes a circle with its body?*
Without an Armenian double reed to spare, we plotted along
keeping time with
our mortal machine.
*as in Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebook