Poetry: As a Prominent Scholar Praises the Grace Jones Cover of “She’s Lost control,” I Consider Our Blackness within the Punk Aesthetic
In “As a Prominent Scholar Praises the Grace Jones Cover of “She’s Lost Control,” I Consider Our Blackness within the Punk Aesthetic,” the speaker reflects on the complexities of experimenting with the avant-garde or Punk scene while Black; ultimately, the poem finds a scene and society that “is always running from you.”
As a Prominent Scholar Praises the Grace Jones Cover of “She’s Lost Control,” I Consider Our Blackness within the Punk Aesthetic
Free enough to be lonely.
Aunt Sybil would be proud.
You, Bev, in your cape,
the hippest alien in Paris,
transmitting pure signal,
pure consciousness.
I, too, have been free
and lonely, wandering through
genre, lonely lonely, wondering
about the space in which I truly
belonged. If we could sing like
our mothers, would this all be different?
You, on the cover of a magazine
in which you can’t be seen.
What is space, Bev, if it
is always running from you?
Kwame Opoku-Duku
Kwame Opoku-Duku is a Ghanaian-American poet and fiction writer. He is the author of the chapbook The Unbnd Verses (Glass Poetry Press), and his work has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review Online, BOMB, Apogee, Bettering American Poetry, and other publications. He currently lives in New York City where he is an educator.
