LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, TWeRK, Belladona, 2013.
TWERK unveils an identity shaped by popular media and history, code switching and cultural inclusivity. The poems, songs, and myths in this long-awaited first book are as rooted in lyric as in innovation, in Black music as in macaronic satire. TWERK evokes paradox, humor, and vulnerability, and it offers myriad avenues fueled by language, idiom, and vernacular. This book asks only that we imagine America as it has always existed, an Americana beyond the English language.
"Here it is: a dope jam of dictions; a remixed, multicultural, polyphonic dance of vocabularies; a language of high stakes, hi-jinx, and hybridity. TWERK is subversive, vulnerable, and volatile. TwERK twists tongues. TwERK tweaks speech. Reading these amazing poems mostly makes me say, Wow! Open your ears to take this music in, open your mouth to say it out loud. And: Wow!"—Terrance Hayes
"Tweaking parallel languages, rebooting and putting them to (hard, hard) work, TWERK's non-stop shimmy-shimmy embarks on an animé-iigjag idio-lingual-lectical booty-roll and doesn't come down until the break of dawn. La Reina de Harlem responds to Lorca's Big-Apple-opolis heteroglossia with her own inimitable animations, incantations and ululations, twisting tongues so mellifluously that you don't even realize you've been dancing on Saturn with Sun Ra for hours and still could have begged for more. Welcome LaTasha Diggs: this is her many-splendored night out!"—Maria Damon
"From this time forward, TWERK, can refer to a collection of cultural coordinates of a radically transformed Americas. TWERK—is rare poetics, a vine enmeshed onyx slab of gypsum glyphs inscribed. Cut, swirly, and nervy, N. Diggs's fractal-linguistic urban chronicles deftly snip away at the lingering fears of a fugitive English's frisky explorations. In her first major work, N. Diggs doesn't so much 'find' culture as she conjures up the new emerging happy peoples herein. Five thousand updates—download now!"—Rodrigo Toscano
When Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution came out in 2007, I marveled at not only Hong’s word play, but also how she married languages and dialect to create another language. The book, which reads as part poetic sequence, part science fiction, offered a blending of genres and how we even imagine a poetry collection. Hong’s book became groundbreaking more than anything because the author was not afraid to take risks. LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, author of the upcoming poetry collection Twerk from Belladonna* Books, deserves as much initial fanfare as was given to Hong. Making its debut in February of 2013, Twerk is an experimental phenomenon in that each poem stands at the precipice of a new beginning, ready to leap into neoteric meaning, sounds and symbolisms. I call the reading experience an explosion of sound.
There is much to like about this work, how the language gets in your bones, and your insides start doing the happy feet. The integration of languages, of idiom and vernacular create myriad avenues. For instance, the poem “gamab click the bedouin remix ii” which includes lines in italics come from Aimé Césaire’s Notes of a Return to my Native Land, exhibits some of the range of Diggs:
Within the same section of “no me entiendes,” which wonderfully plays off the unknown in Diggs work, are what I call bilingual contrapuntals, allowing the reader to marry language into another language. Within this structure Diggs plays (as in Derrida’s play) with the idea of the freeing of constraints through the villanelle “¡cucumber!”:
In Diggs’ work, there never is a complete ending, only a door to another ending. This is not a drive by book where you think you are going to read it in one sitting. Oftentimes I found myself caught in another world, a world authored by a poet unafraid to mix languages for the sake of something new and indeterminate. This book is a giver, it keeps giving.- Randall Horton I am slain, felled, sweetened up and served by Latasha N. Nevada Diggs’ TwERK. It’s like an almanac-zodiac-aphrodesiac-cum-emetic: it’s going to make the language come out of you, and the knowledge, too. At the bargain price of 15 dollahs, this book, fetchingly wrapped in a crunk doily designed by Doug Kearney, delivers page after page of astounding and invigorating rhymes, rhythms, inflections, infections, connections, inventions, allusions and sluices. It’s freaky-deaky, freaking alluvial. It’s brainy and broad and plays its own killer jingle and drives up in its own truck. Watch, children!
TwERK hollas at you from the very first page, opens up by inviting you into a profane dialogue, Elizabethan in its innovation, its linguistic voracity, virtuosity, swift pace, killer instinct and bawdy humor (please be aware: this is not the correct spacing/layout for this poem– only as close as I could get on blog interface):
Mista Popo said: oh bodacious Zwarte Piet,
How does the butterfly thrive
for my big ole kettle belly?
An extra scoot never too robust for my flying carpet.
So croon,
holla at me Jynx, holla at me Jynx,
holla at me Jynx w/some soba on the side.
Let’s fly away!
Mista Popo want that corn husky hair.
What inmate of the twenty-first century, what language-loving carbon based life form could not rejoice in the presence of such a pliant, flexible virtuosity as LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs’s? In the above passage, a zesty and ribald momentum opens its throat for a wash of dubious figures from global culture, and the page is both a party and a scrum: Zwarte Piet, the blackface figure and holdover from colonialism who accompanies Santa Claus in Dutch culture; Jynx and Mr. (here ‘Mista’) Popo, literally cartoonish icons of blackness from Japanese anime culture who in their ‘Mista’-ness also call up the history of such images in Western culture; the iconic ‘flying carpet’, the fetish of Orientalism which hovers over and behind Western obsession with ‘Arab’ cultures and bodies ; even the casual imperialism and race politics of the 50’s Rat Pack tucked into that lyric from Sinatra’s ‘Come Fly with Me’. This poem is racy; this poem is rapier; this poem is sick and sic; this poem is fun! To me it suggests that the vicious vivacity of racist thinking is both the signature of our contemporary global imperialist culture and also its weakness, a circuit back through which lawless bursts of energy may possibly be made to reverse, amplify, over-dub, loop and surge, not unwriting the damage of globalism but defibrillating it, re-animating it, converting the damage to something else entirely: something next. LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs has a lot of language at her disposal, more, I would guess, than most other North American humans. This book speaks Japanese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Urdu, Maori, Hawaiian, Samoan, Swahili, Runa Simi (Quechua), Yoruba, Portuguese, Cherokee (Tsa’lagi), Tagalog, Chamorro, Papiamentu. Some poems are written in an English so alive with Diggs’s ingenuity it feels like a new fabric (“Sunspot”); others mobilize Caribbean-inflected dialects; others are in multiple languages which incorporate translation, change, and doubleness into their very format, so that the reader can feel the languages touching and making out and mutating in ‘real-time’—that is, in the art-time of Diggs’s voice and brain– into an irresistible scintillating new element which is as valuable as a smart-metal but which can be enjoyed without being mined, bought, fought for, bled for, or sold. Something virtual:
knee deep as I speak, kino body rock.lehelehe wit the glock
of menehune. freak of the week. you’s a pua‛a at a lû’au.
my hand lima blazes like Ka‛ahupahua.
make dope-a-delic like Redman in a hula
let me tell it:
I’m taking cheek papālina,
poli breast feedin’ malihini dust schemas.
In charming, generous endnotes which really read like rich and plentiful poems of their own, Diggs informs the reader that this poem was an experiment in scoring rap form for the page, and also that it makes use of Hawaiian language for various body parts with the translation of the body part “literally beside it (either before or after the word).” Just that explanation is an example of Diggs’s brainy, breezy brilliance; to be ‘literally beside it’ is to be in ecstasy; to have one body part ‘literally beside it’ on the page is for the two languages to ‘literally touch’ through a ‘literal’ double body. The circuit happens in and as a surplus, and so much life and energy and language pours through this light relay that it the entire current is transferred to and through the reader as joy.
I cannot shout loud enough about Latasha N. Nevada Diggs’s TWeRK. Language is not a neutral tool, and the history of the peoples who belong to these language and the hegemonic forces that would distress, suppress or obliterate both the languages and their peoples is what makes these poems so fierce, fraught, bladey and mobile. The showiness and flaunt of these poems are like the fierceness of the drag balls Diggs’ salutes in one poem: a visible weapon, a tactic simultaneously offensive and defensive, a wargame for the whole body. Diggs’s poems truly work the whole body of the poem, the whole body of sound, the whole body of history, the whole body of voice and ear, the whole body of language and the ability of the page to be its own sonic syntax; they articulate and rotate joints that seemed fixed; they are bawdy and triumphant and they more than work. They TwERK. - Joyelee McSweeney
There is much to like about this work, how the language gets in your bones, and your insides start doing the happy feet. The integration of languages, of idiom and vernacular create myriad avenues. For instance, the poem “gamab click the bedouin remix ii” which includes lines in italics come from Aimé Césaire’s Notes of a Return to my Native Land, exhibits some of the range of Diggs:
light up di egrets plumage
dey sky needles di record on dey turntable of epiphany proudfoot
blazin’ pele’s bass line over runneth di clouds wit kravitz’s arrows
in di rain di blanc-mange seeps from dey dirt
in di mountains maestro spare a seed n sow in peyote stitch
ink loves dey ache; loves dey gamab magma
so listen sparrow hawk who holds the keys to the orient.
dey sky needles di record on dey turntable of epiphany proudfoot
blazin’ pele’s bass line over runneth di clouds wit kravitz’s arrows
in di rain di blanc-mange seeps from dey dirt
in di mountains maestro spare a seed n sow in peyote stitch
ink loves dey ache; loves dey gamab magma
so listen sparrow hawk who holds the keys to the orient.
Within the same section of “no me entiendes,” which wonderfully plays off the unknown in Diggs work, are what I call bilingual contrapuntals, allowing the reader to marry language into another language. Within this structure Diggs plays (as in Derrida’s play) with the idea of the freeing of constraints through the villanelle “¡cucumber!”:
Lucid to ‘awapuhi que ósa bautizaba ngahuru
Lucid and ginger like lagoons baptizing autumn,
Que tanja iglú flirtatious – corría
like tangerine igloos flirtatious – flowing,
te llama pikaka loli, tu eres onaona ni nalu
your name is jasmine cucumber. You are fragrant like waves.
Lucid and ginger like lagoons baptizing autumn,
Que tanja iglú flirtatious – corría
like tangerine igloos flirtatious – flowing,
te llama pikaka loli, tu eres onaona ni nalu
your name is jasmine cucumber. You are fragrant like waves.
In Diggs’ work, there never is a complete ending, only a door to another ending. This is not a drive by book where you think you are going to read it in one sitting. Oftentimes I found myself caught in another world, a world authored by a poet unafraid to mix languages for the sake of something new and indeterminate. This book is a giver, it keeps giving.- Randall Horton I am slain, felled, sweetened up and served by Latasha N. Nevada Diggs’ TwERK. It’s like an almanac-zodiac-aphrodesiac-cum-emetic: it’s going to make the language come out of you, and the knowledge, too. At the bargain price of 15 dollahs, this book, fetchingly wrapped in a crunk doily designed by Doug Kearney, delivers page after page of astounding and invigorating rhymes, rhythms, inflections, infections, connections, inventions, allusions and sluices. It’s freaky-deaky, freaking alluvial. It’s brainy and broad and plays its own killer jingle and drives up in its own truck. Watch, children!
TwERK hollas at you from the very first page, opens up by inviting you into a profane dialogue, Elizabethan in its innovation, its linguistic voracity, virtuosity, swift pace, killer instinct and bawdy humor (please be aware: this is not the correct spacing/layout for this poem– only as close as I could get on blog interface):
Mista Popo said: oh bodacious Zwarte Piet,
How does the butterfly thrive
for my big ole kettle belly?
An extra scoot never too robust for my flying carpet.
So croon,
holla at me Jynx, holla at me Jynx,
holla at me Jynx w/some soba on the side.
Let’s fly away!
Mista Popo want that corn husky hair.
What inmate of the twenty-first century, what language-loving carbon based life form could not rejoice in the presence of such a pliant, flexible virtuosity as LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs’s? In the above passage, a zesty and ribald momentum opens its throat for a wash of dubious figures from global culture, and the page is both a party and a scrum: Zwarte Piet, the blackface figure and holdover from colonialism who accompanies Santa Claus in Dutch culture; Jynx and Mr. (here ‘Mista’) Popo, literally cartoonish icons of blackness from Japanese anime culture who in their ‘Mista’-ness also call up the history of such images in Western culture; the iconic ‘flying carpet’, the fetish of Orientalism which hovers over and behind Western obsession with ‘Arab’ cultures and bodies ; even the casual imperialism and race politics of the 50’s Rat Pack tucked into that lyric from Sinatra’s ‘Come Fly with Me’. This poem is racy; this poem is rapier; this poem is sick and sic; this poem is fun! To me it suggests that the vicious vivacity of racist thinking is both the signature of our contemporary global imperialist culture and also its weakness, a circuit back through which lawless bursts of energy may possibly be made to reverse, amplify, over-dub, loop and surge, not unwriting the damage of globalism but defibrillating it, re-animating it, converting the damage to something else entirely: something next. LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs has a lot of language at her disposal, more, I would guess, than most other North American humans. This book speaks Japanese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Urdu, Maori, Hawaiian, Samoan, Swahili, Runa Simi (Quechua), Yoruba, Portuguese, Cherokee (Tsa’lagi), Tagalog, Chamorro, Papiamentu. Some poems are written in an English so alive with Diggs’s ingenuity it feels like a new fabric (“Sunspot”); others mobilize Caribbean-inflected dialects; others are in multiple languages which incorporate translation, change, and doubleness into their very format, so that the reader can feel the languages touching and making out and mutating in ‘real-time’—that is, in the art-time of Diggs’s voice and brain– into an irresistible scintillating new element which is as valuable as a smart-metal but which can be enjoyed without being mined, bought, fought for, bled for, or sold. Something virtual:
knee deep as I speak, kino body rock.lehelehe wit the glock
of menehune. freak of the week. you’s a pua‛a at a lû’au.
my hand lima blazes like Ka‛ahupahua.
make dope-a-delic like Redman in a hula
let me tell it:
I’m taking cheek papālina,
poli breast feedin’ malihini dust schemas.
In charming, generous endnotes which really read like rich and plentiful poems of their own, Diggs informs the reader that this poem was an experiment in scoring rap form for the page, and also that it makes use of Hawaiian language for various body parts with the translation of the body part “literally beside it (either before or after the word).” Just that explanation is an example of Diggs’s brainy, breezy brilliance; to be ‘literally beside it’ is to be in ecstasy; to have one body part ‘literally beside it’ on the page is for the two languages to ‘literally touch’ through a ‘literal’ double body. The circuit happens in and as a surplus, and so much life and energy and language pours through this light relay that it the entire current is transferred to and through the reader as joy.
I cannot shout loud enough about Latasha N. Nevada Diggs’s TWeRK. Language is not a neutral tool, and the history of the peoples who belong to these language and the hegemonic forces that would distress, suppress or obliterate both the languages and their peoples is what makes these poems so fierce, fraught, bladey and mobile. The showiness and flaunt of these poems are like the fierceness of the drag balls Diggs’ salutes in one poem: a visible weapon, a tactic simultaneously offensive and defensive, a wargame for the whole body. Diggs’s poems truly work the whole body of the poem, the whole body of sound, the whole body of history, the whole body of voice and ear, the whole body of language and the ability of the page to be its own sonic syntax; they articulate and rotate joints that seemed fixed; they are bawdy and triumphant and they more than work. They TwERK. - Joyelee McSweeney
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