day pulls down the sky / a filament in gold leaf by Okwui Okpokwasili and Asiya Wadud

day pulls down the sky / a filament in gold leaf is comprised of Okwui Okpokwasili's song lyrics and Asiya Wadud's poems written in response to them. These pages contain both a collaboration and two parallel texts, with Wadud's "a filament in gold leaf" heading the pages, and Okpokwasili's lyrics for "day pulls down the sky" footnoted by the musical sign for coda. In writing through Okpokwasili's music, Wadud wrote poems as she listened to particular songs and wrote the entire suite of poems listening to the album's sixth song, "follow me." The grey scale coda signifies the presence of "follow me" throughout the entirety of a filament in gold leaf, and the black coda marks a more singular association between specific poems and songs.

Praise

In day pulls down the sky, poet Asiya Wadud writes through the song lyrics of multidisciplinary artist, Okwui Okpokwasili. We are told in an introductory note that the musical sign for coda is scattered throughout the book, “in order to express the connection between Okpokwasili’s lyrics and Wadud’s poems.” The result is an energy filled with motion – and emotion. It’s difficult to not be roused by the charged quality of this project.

— Jennifer Firestone, Tarpaulin Sky

You might think about it as a text for performance, like a libretto. It’s a book that thinks deeply about what song is, and poetry’s relationship to song. What is a chorus? What does it mean to be in a multivocal performance mode or composition mode? What does it mean to have a single voice? Those are very interesting questions, and they’re very profoundly realized in the book itself.

— Simone White, Five Books

Links

Named one of the Best Poetry Books of 2019 by Simone White for Five Books

Reviewed by Jennifer Firestone for Tarpaulin Sky

Stream day pulls down the sky on Spotify

Okwui Okpokwasili is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist. Her work includes two Bessie Award winning productions: Pent-Up: a revenge dance and Bronx Gothic, which premiered at Danspace Project and was co-commissioned by Performance Space New York (formerly PS 122). Other performance works include Poor People’s TV Room and Adaku’s Revolt. Okpokwasili is a 2018 Doris Duke Awardee and a 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellow.    

Asiya Wadud is the author of Crosslight for Youngbird, published by Nightboat Books in 2018. Her book Syncope (Ugly Duckling Presse) is forthcoming later in 2019, and No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body will be out in 2020. She teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School and leads an English conversation class for new immigrants at the Brooklyn Public Library. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.