Uche Nduka explores the nature of eros and the political in terms of our present world. Desire that points to any utopic vision of an alternate world is often compromised by cultural and ideological factors. Pleasure is often tainted by class, power plays, and gender wars. We are a product of our time and perhaps there may be no escaping that. But as Nduka writes: “Beyond the headlines” is where “the shape of liberation shimmers.” Love is the key to revolution. Sex is “the beautiful tangent. Illumination in coitus.”
He knows that longing and the poet’s art of listening have an ethics all their own and so his writing gives him sustenance and strength to navigate the complex realities of our time so beset by racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia. Desire is complicated and in retaining that complexity in his work, Nduka gives it the sense of a life in the process of living, a mind moving in the language and examining the world on its own terms. As John Yau said, he “doesn’t walk around his subject. He exposes it.” Instead of easy answers, he complicates the questions, something that the poem gives voice to, and thus can embody. Longing and eros is stronger than control. It is open ended and resists closure and finality.
Nduka writes: “There’s no such thing / as a nation / without bloody hands.” The order of things is maintained by erasure, destruction, induced lack of memory, detention, punishment; the visible, as the State, is given priority over the invisible, the person of color, the immigrant, the queer person, the trans person, and asserts its dominance. Instead of viewing the world as bounded by walls it is more imaginative and revolutionary to view it as multiple, borderless, stateless, and changeable; because the territory is not the map. He writes: “Beyond the pale? That’s where you have the best of everything” We must collapse these vertical distinctions which enforce a duality of inferior and superior, and hack the power grid; imaginatively interrupt and redirect the flow of knowledge, moving through fissures and gaps, to arrive at a new language. That’s part of the revolution to come.
A kind of streetwise sensibility runs through these poems, a sensibility little valued, now, when most of the major decisions about who to study or what we should be thinking about in poetry or politics, are made from behind a desk in an institution far removed from the concerns of the real world and not drawn from “facts on the ground” as Olsen once put it. David-Baptiste Chirot, in an essay about Amiri Baraka’s essay, “Why American Poetry is Boring, Again” writes, that for Baraka, in these times, “a poetry of ‘the outdoors,’ of the actual, is being eschewed. Instead, there is a desire for belonging, safety, all the comforts of Homeland Security.” Nduka writes: “the duty of each generation is to horrify the previous generation.” Furthermore, he writes: “Your rigorous analysis means nothing to my power of refusal.”
Nduka is interested in those things that are “beyond design interventions,” and which cannot be measured, that exist outside time, but is open, changeable, like the shape of clouds; he is interested in those spaces which contain all things as if in a potential state, not yet articulated. In these utopic states, things are constantly in motion, without fixed boundaries; everything is possible in multiplicity but not marred by being fully actualized. He does not accept that which is regularized, formalized, predictable, but instead values those things which are disregarded, tossed away, considered marginal, not perfect: “How long did it take to discover that perfection is lethal.”
I’ve been thinking about the discussions concerning the nature of music and free improvisation during the 70s. Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music was useful to me as an examination of “noise” as a political tool. The dominant system always preserves a recording of its power to preserve itself, yet these musicians who practiced free improvisation were against recording a performance on record. There would be no documentation, no trace, the music would vanish in the air. It was a deeply personal music, and it belonged to a secret utopia of musicians, that flourished in the 60s and 70s. Search the traces, the fragments, and they will lead you to the secret place, rather than relying on logic, reason, convention, the accepted path. The reason: because “polish is a phantom.”
Nduka writes: “The revolution is always beginning. / Pessimism is cheap.” Following the news on social media can only lead to frustration, depression, anger and pessimism at the state of world. But pessimism is cheap. “How did happiness get so distorted?” And where is joy to be found? Nduka insists: “You’re more than that pain.” His “Purpose is not on the clock. It goes beyond time.” In this sense Nduka is a kind of metaphysical poet. On his blog he writes: “I see poetry mostly as a spiritual mission. Poetry exists with a view to fraternity. The politics of literature pigeonholes poetry.” Furthermore, he writes: “we’re hardwired / from birth to taste the light.” For him, this spiritual experience is not an intellectual one, but one grounded in the experience of the erotic, the body. So he is a metaphysical poet of the body: “How the spirit has the audacity to be raunchy is wonderful.” For Nduka the body and mind are not separate. And we all know that Descartes would change the course of philosophy and create a rift between thought and the physical body. Writers like Artaud, and more recently Pierre Guyotat and Guillaume Dustan, have recognized this problem and in their writings the body is a central concern, the physical body that is not divorced from the very act of writing, thinking. But Nduka writes: “A body can say things that words cannot.” In this way, his poems lead us outside into the world. Direct experience of the world and of other bodies is crucial in this time of the internet/social media where simulations threaten to take over our sense of reality.
I’m thinking of Dhanveer Singh Brar’s Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century. Brar writes of the relation between dance and the envisioning of a city mirrored in the Architekture of the body as it moved in the “battle circle”: “the accompanying Pythagorean alignment of upper limbs and torso operates as a repurposing of turned over ground, to the extent that the battles start to generate choreographic designs for buildings that await realization.” This is what is meant by a sonic ecology; to a greater or lesser extent all the producers of this music relate to each other and their environments, envisioning an alternative space inside their neighborhoods, far from the financial world, and whose foundation is new kind of Architekture. But all this occurred during a time of unrest in the poor neighborhoods on the West and South side of Chicago. All this activity was bound to incite the anger of those who are interested in maintaining their territories through law and order; they also attempted to repress these musicians from the outside, because internally they seemed to flourish. Alex McFadyen writes in “Trace the origins of one of America’s most unique musical exports, via Red Bull’s unrivalled lecture archive”: “The story of footwork is entwined with the experience of living in the West and South sides of Chicago and the suburbs beyond (where Rashad grew up). In the city’s housing projects, besieged by poverty and generational unemployment, attacked and undermined by racist policing and corrupted politics, and coping with the effects of mind-numbing levels of violence, black communities nurtured creativity in music and art as a positive influence on the younger generations.”
Uche Nduka writes: “My anger is not for sale.” Who knows what the future will look like? How about the architecture of buildings based on the anatomy of the body in motion? We can dream as poets: “What will it take to actually live our dream? A perspective shaped by the sweetness of long walks.” Reading Bainbridge Island Notebook gives us the chance to really imagine something wild and beautiful.
He writes: “Rarely do the powerful hold the hands of the powerless.” I think of those immigrants fleeing a country at war and seeking asylum in the United States, and the situation at the southern border, where, under the previous administration, children were unfed and unbathed, where people lived in unsanitary spaces or rather, prisons. As long as they are not American citizens, white, naturalized, they are at risk of infection or death. They do not exist in the dominant “white” narrative (“I don’t like snow / that has anything to prove”) leaving them unable to mobilize. Perhaps it is this fear of reprisal that prompts authorities to act. We must collapse these distinctions which enforce a duality of inferior and superior, and hack the power grid; imaginatively interrupt and redirect the flow of knowledge, moving through fissures and gaps, to arrive at a new language and way of perceiving the world. But if one focuses on the horror of the news on social media, one will forget to “give thanks you’re alive.” The threat of physical and psychic death is all too real in this unstable political climate. Furthermore, Nduka writes: “I’ll keep bearing witness to their crimes against humanity.”
Nduka writes: “How long did it take to discover that perfection is lethal.” As I write at my desk, I see a wide lawn before me and the shape of the tall trees in the distance that reflect the light that gives them a golden hue at dawn. I hear the complex sounds of the birdsong have become rarer now as winter approaches. I am thinking of how the ocean waves that crash against the shore continually change their shape; none is similar to another; their movement does not function like a piece of machinery with a constant rhythm. They are irregular, imperfect. Nature is neither silent nor static. In The Stones of Venice, John Ruskin writes: “Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom, – a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom, – is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. All admit irregularity as they imply change.” Nduka writes: “I salute you, Impermanence.”
Recently I read the Arabian Nights. In the second volume I found the following poem:
Visit your beloved with no thought for what the envious may say.
In love affairs the envious are no help.
I dreamt I saw you sleeping here with me,
As I kissed the cool tips of your lips.
In all I saw certainty and truth.
In spite of envious foes, I shall win through to it.
There is no sight more lovely to the eye
Than that of lovers lying on one bed,
Embracing each other and clothed in content,
Each pillowing the other with wrists and arms,
When their loving hearts are joined,
All others are found striking on cold iron.
You who blame them because they are in love,
Can you set right a heart that has gone astray?
One single hour of pure delight—
That is your goal; live for that single hour.
Reading Uche Nduka’s book I came across the following lines that I think go well with the above:
And that joy of the return to the body. We fucked in
the open with respect for the sacred. There is some-
thing positive about keeping karma in motion….
Under the threat
of hell, what have poets got to lose?
Eros is a central part of the revolution. Pleasure, sex, ecstasy are what the powers of the State want to repress. Nduka: “We didn’t come from nothingness. We have everything. Pilgrims on the trail of exquisite love.”
Nduka writes: “It’s everything at once. There’s vitality in joy.” To perceive all things as different from each other, as well as the same, is what certain spiritual teachers maintain is a fundamental truth, although one difficult to fully understand, despite its apparent simplicity. Holy men are thought to have bright and glistening auras. But members of certain occult traditions set out to absorb all experiences, which they regard as equal. This produces an interesting metaphysical reaction: their auras appear darker, less “pure,” which is the hallmark of real experience and wisdom. Uche Nduka offers optimism instead of pessimism. Bainbridge Island Notebook is a “Poetry against misery.” We need this book more than anything now. And I am glad it’s in the world.
Bainbridge Island Notebook, by Uche Nduka. New York, New York: Roof Books, October 2023. 148 pages. $20.00, paper.
Peter Valente is a writer, translator, and filmmaker. He is the author of fourteen full-length books. His most recent books are a collection of essays on Werner Schroeter, A Credible Utopia (punctum, 2022); his translation of Nerval, The Illuminated (Wakefield Press, 2022); and his translation of two books by Antonin Artaud: The True Story of Jesus-Christ (Infinity Land Press, 2022) and The New Revelations of Being & Other Mystical Writings (Infinity Land Press, 2023). He is also the author of a collection of essays on Artaud, Obliteration of the World: A Guide to the Occult Belief System of Antonin Artaud (Infinity Land Press, 2022). His most recent book is a translation of Nicolas Pages by Guillaume Dustan (Semiotext(e), 2023). He has a forthcoming book of essays, Selected Essays 2019-2023 (Punctum books, 2025), a book of essays on filmmaker Harry Smith that he edited, The Occult Harry Smith: The Magical and Alchemical Work of an Artist of the Extremes (Inner Traditions, 2025), and a translation of Artaud, The True Story of Artaud-Momo (Infinity Land Press, 2025). Twenty-four of his short experimental films have been shown at Anthology Film Archives.
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Heavy Feather Review 