#a fortune for your disaster

[tunisian]

hanif abdurraqib, from “THE GHOST OF MARVIN GAYE STANDS OVER HIS FATHER’S GRAVE AND FORGETS TO ASK FOR AN APOLOGY” in A Fortune For Your Disaster

[random-poetry-account]

[ad-ya]

[malaisequotes]

“...I'm kind of buzzed. I'm kind of buzzing. I'm kind of a hive with no begging and hollow cavities.”

It Is Once Again the Summer of My Discontent & This Is How We Do It by Hanif Abdurraqib

[quottakes]

A Fortune for Your Disaster, poems by Hanif Abdurraqib

Excerpt from One Side of an Interview with the Ghost of Marvin Gaye

[herpoetryshelf]

[Blog #3] Fall 2022, Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Fortune for Your Disaster (2019)

This week’s centerpiece is Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Fortune for Your Disaster (2019).  

Before we unravel Abdurraqib’s 103-page journey, I would love to greet anyone who happens to stumble upon this blog post.  

This is the link to my first blog post on Ada Limón's The Carrying (2018): 

My Contemporary Poetry Seminar professor assigned a poetry book collection every other week. My main objective was to dissect a few poems (4-5) that left an impression on me while using his T.R.I.F.F.I.D. method.   

Tone: the voice, mood, or attitude the reader believes the author is conveying through subject and word choice. 

Rhythm: the pattern and beat between the stressed and unstressed word syllables. 

Imagery: the details told through the five senses (touch aka physical, sound aka auditory, sight aka visual, taste aka gustatory and smell aka olfactory). 

Figure: or figure of speech, is the non-literal expression of language. Figures of speech include hyperbole, irony, metaphor, simile, anaphora, antithesis and chiasmus. 

Form: the way a poem is presented on paper or a screen. Think of how the author physically shapes the poem -- the use of dialogue, line spacing, paragraph breaks, rhythms and patterns. 

Idea Density: how the author expresses their ideas throughout their poem. Can be literal (concrete) and/or figurative (vague or hidden).  

Diction: the word choice and arrangement within a piece. 

These were the results for Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Fortune for Your Disaster (2019): 

The tone in Hanif Abdurraqib’s poem, “Welcome to Heartbreak” is nostalgic, sorrowful and bittersweet as seen in lines 1-3 when the narrator says,

it is the version of me fading in the photos that I most wish to dance with. Just once before the coughing

black makes a ghost of him. No one asks me to smile these days & so here is my mouth, again

straight line.

All 3 tones correlate to the poem’s title and message: Abdurraqib reminiscing about an old flame and missing -- not only his lover, but the happier, loved version of himself.  

He reiterated his feelings again in the last three lines of the poem when he offers the reader his perspective on love and heartbreak:

Imagine, instead: the place where you have a bed of your own & a table to sit across from someone

who laughs thick & echoing as an open palm at your smallest joy & then / the fingers close. (8-10) 

In other words, Abdurraqib describes love and heartbreak as an “open palm” -- love and “fingers close” -- heartbreak; the hand metaphor representing how sudden and unexpected feelings can change.  

One day there is love, the next day it is gone.  

Abdurraqib’s “Glamour on the West Street/Silver Over Everything” uses visual, auditory and tactile imagery, which altogether, conveys the hectic heatwave the narrator experiences (resembles and references Spike Lee’s 1989 movie, Do the Right Thing).  

Readers are shown visual imagery in physical objects such as the building, cardboard box and pizza: “from the humid brick building below my humid brick building” (1), “no cheese atop the crust & its red river of sauce,” (2-3) and “warmth spilling from the edges of a cardboard box” (7-8).  

For auditory imagery, the poem illustrates sound from dialogue, actions (yell, shout, etc.) and environmental sounds: “a woman bellows at the pizza man” (1-2), “as he shouts above the sirens of State Street” (1-2) and “man yells there are only three ingredients. you can’t even get that right” (19).  

Abdurraqib utilizes tactile imagery through the heat of the pizza/box upon skin contact: “lonely people who will seek the warmth spilling from the edges of a cardboard box & onto their laps & into their fingers” (7-8).  

Abdurraqib’s poem, “With Boxes Piled at the Foot of the Stairs, I go to see Logan” is dense with its subtle ideas of love, betrayal, trust, brotherhood and mental health (suicide) through the narrator recounting his friend’s death and funeral as well as his role in the overall matter:

my pal died not when the pill bottle

rolled empty from his unfurling

palm. It was sometimes after

that, when I told his old girlfriend

I have maybe been in love

with you the whole time. (12-16)

The readers can only insinuate from the clues given that the narrator’s friend took his own life, which the narrator insists was his (Abdurraqib) fault.  

This all started when the narrator confessed to having feelings for his friend’s girlfriend -- one can only speculate that caused a betrayal between the narrator and his friend.  

Moreover, in terms of form, Abdurraqib’s poem, “With Boxes Piled at the Foot of the Stairs, I go to see Logan” is 8 stanzas, 2 couplets each. In the narrative, the poem is split into 4 parts: the narrator’s notes to the reader, the funeral, the suicide and the confession (the inciting incident).  

The first part features the narrator providing exposition about an “ending” to the poem’s subject:

I will not spoil

the ending, though

what is there to spoil. (lines 1-3)  

The second part focuses on the speaker attending a funeral and highlights how the funeral (the intended ending if the events of the poem were told chronologically) is not the main point of the poem:

but to say there was

a casket in the place

you would imagine

a casket to be.

depending on how

you define burial, ending is unspectacular. (4-10) 

The third part reveals the narrator’s friend’s cause of death (physical death) and the narrator denying it as such:

my pal died not when the pill bottle

rolled empty from his unfurling

palm. it was after that. (line 11-14)  

The final part conveys the inciting incident or what the narrator genuinely believes was the ‘ending’ -- not just the poem but of his friend’s life (emotional/spiritual/metaphorical death):

when I told his old girlfriend

I have maybe been in love

with you the whole time.  

Overall, Abdurraqib purposely made the poem out of order to showcase what he believes was the emotional gravity of the poem and of his friend’s life: the confession portion negatively impacted his friend’s love life and made him feel dead inside (numb).  

Who is Hanif Abdurraqib? 

Many of Abdurraqib’s poetry and prose works have been a finalist, nominated, long-listed and/or recommended by numerous journal and literary outlets. Reading his book, especially his poem, “Welcome to Heartbreak,” I understood Abdurraqib’s it factor: how easily he displays the euphoria, fleetingness and heartbreaks of love. 

Lastly, are there any poems that makes you feel happy, nostalgic or heartbroken?

Feel free to comment some below?

[emokingwentz]

Being on tour for the last year has been amazing. We have a handful of shows left after a week in Japan. I've met tons of fans, and some have seen us over 20 times including old club gigs. That makes me feel all kinds of things - all good, but like whoa. US? We were ready to never tour again, settle into family and retirement, and now I know why we are still here. I'm humbled.

So hi, how are you? I'm looking forward to catching up at some point.

Sending my love from the other side of the apocalypse. @tinseltownstarter

[b-blushes]

literally was just feeling comically woeful and something caught my eye and it was THE BEAUTIFUL MOON and then a BAT flew in front of it so peace and love on planet earth restored

[bleachersgirl]

i could learn to pity fools as i’m the worst of all and i can’t stop feeling sorry for myself. truly one of my favorite fob lyrics of all time.

[storm-of-feathers]

i wish more people understood the concept of activism burnout and compassion fatigue. you do like genuinely have to pick your battles, and that usually means something local that you can make a real difference with. if you get overwhelmed with every problem nothing is going to change.

[mcmcntomorii-later]

「Oh what's that saying。。。 If that dick slaps his thighs when he walks, then I shall listen when he talks？」

[tunisian]

hanif abdurraqib, from “IT’S NOT LIKE NIKOLA TESLA KNEW ALL OF THOSE PEOPLE WERE GOING TO DIE” in A Fortune For Your Disaster

[random-poetry-account]

[ad-ya]

[malaisequotes]

“...I tell my boys there is a reason songs from the 90s are having a revival and it's because the heart and tongue are the muscles with the most irresistible histories...”

It Is Once Again the Summer of My Discontent & This Is How We Do It by Hanif Abdurraqib

[gay-jesus-probably]

Donating to Ao3 is like paying for Netflix; it's just paying for an entertainment service you use. Servers are fucking expensive, and Ao3 is a really big archive. Just throw five bucks at them once a year if you can, it's really not a big deal.

Also please do NOT donate to all the Palestine go-fund-me's floating around here, the majority of them are just blatant scams. I've had one of those blogs send me two completely different sob stories a few days apart, and also had two different blogs send me the exact same sob story, right down to the fucking emoji usage. If you want to help Palestinians, donate to the Red Cross, or Doctors Without Borders. Or any organized, professional relief group that is actively working in Palestine right now, because they can actually access that money easily and use it to buy large amounts of food and medical supplies at a steep discount. Donating to THEM will do a hell of a lot more than sending a random Palestinian civilian five american dollars over the internet.

Should I donate to AO3?