Song & Dread, Otoniya J. Okot Bitek
Talonbooks, 2023
Referring to it in her acknowledgments as her “littlest-sister title of poems,” Kingston, Ontario-based poet Otoniya J. Okot Bitek’s third full-length poetry title, following 100 Days (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2016) and A Is for Acholi (Hamilton ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2022), is Song & Dread (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2023). I’m fascinated in how Okot Bitek’s book-length structures favour the extended sequence, and the cycle; composing individual poems that come together to form something far larger than the sum of their parts. The poems and poem of Song & Dread loops and swirls through language, song and thread, returning regularly to earlier points, allowing the structure of the extended sequence to propel that much further, forward. As editor Peter Midgley wrote as part of his foreword to the collection: “Otoniya Okot Bitek started writing these poems on March 14 – Pi Day. The first series of poems in Song & Dread – a set of fifty pi day poems – recounts the days of horror through repetition. Where her earlier collection, 100 Days, was a response to the one hundred days of the Rwandan genocide, here she considers a different killer: COVID-19 (“this thing,” she calls it). Song & Dread is a searingly honest response to the pandemic. We remain struck by the ever-increasing number of deaths, and by the futility of these days: the repetition, the repetitiveness. But most of all, as we read Song & Dread, we are struck by the author’s ability to make sense of the ordinary amid the extraordinary.”
pi day 6
as i was brushing
my hair today
i remember the
story about
hair as a vector
in spreading the virus
about some people
in wuhan
thinking about
shaving off beards
about how we used
to have our hair shaved off
as a sign of mourning
While “pi day” is a substantial element of the collection, as Midgley suggests, it is still less than half of the total work included in Song & Dread, sitting amid the first of the two sections of poems, and bookended by two shorter poems. The second section, itself, is constructed out of an equally-stretched section of shorter poems that cluster and gather, set in conversation and note-gathering, offering commentary and observation across a sketch-taking form that holds only what is important, essential, haunting and ethereal, as Okot Bitek continues to draw solid notes across this long trauma of pandemic. She writes on death, dread and loss, as the first part of the eleven-part sequence “before & after this city” reads:
there’s a dead a
dread a bed full of monsters
a led tongue a
lead tongue a church an address
at one church
square a bear now dead now dread
now led away away
into a circus a red ball
a trapeze artist
at one church square a dog a log
many logs many
many logs a forest a cathedral
now gone a dread
again a dread again a dread
It is notable to see, unlike other Covid-era works I’ve seen over the past few months, from Nicholas Power’s chapbook ordinary clothes: a Tao in a Time of Covid (Toronto ON: Gesture Press, 2020), Zadie Smith’s Intimations: Six Essays (2020), Australian poet Pam Brown’s Stasis Shuffle (St. Lucia, Queensland: Hunter Publishers, 2021), Lillian Nećakov’s il virus (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2021), Lisa Samuels’ Breach (Norwich England: Boiler House Press, 2021) and Nathanael O’Reilly’s BOULEVARD (Co. Tipperary, Ireland: Beir Bua Press, 2021), Song & Dread is infused not simply with a sense of isolation but one of real and substantive loss, as well as an attention to a population far too easily set aside. “for the rich / a dilemma,” the poem “pi day 36” begins, “the headline says / whether to quarantine with staff or do their own chores [.]” Through Okot Bitek, the pandemic doesn’t so much introduce trauma so much as it revealed. One that hears and sees and feels and understands those losses all around her, both immediately and culturally, especially within the realization that so many of those accumulated losses could have easily been prevented. “four new deaths yesterday / new deaths / deaths as a new / as news,” she writes, to open the poem “pi day 27,” “four brand new / as good / four deaths as good news as relief // all sixty-one dresses worn by villanelle / from killing eve [.]”
