Black Bell by Alison C. Rollins
Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp

“Black Bell”
Poetry
Copper Canyon Press, 2024
$22.00, 168 pages
ISBN: 978-1-55659-700-8

I like to think of Black Bell as, “DJ Alison C. Rollins samples and remixes history, literature and music.” That’s a reductive shorthand, of course, but the book is a performance piece, and Rollins is the conductor, the maestra. Rollins addresses themes of slavery and the plight of African-American people in the United States, tales of runaways, fugitives, escapees.  Henry “Box” Brown, for instance, a slave who shipped himself in a crate from Richmond to Philadelphia in 1849, is one of several recurring historical figures. She also takes on the idea of time and history.

Rollins samples from Sun Ra and Rita Dove, Janet Jackson (who samples from Joni Mitchell) and Emily Dickinson, Lucille Clifton and T.S. Eliot, Spike Lee and Lisle Mueller, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Phillis Wheatley, to name just a few. She incorporates images from old newspapers and posters – visual poems – notices about runaway slaves, even an ultrasound image of her womb (“Author’s Womb as Bell”) to develop her performance.

But it’s the image of the bell – “A Bell Is a Messenger of Time,” as the title of the first poem tells us – that is the central metaphor holding the collection together. Black Bell, a female figure, recurs throughout the collection, four poems with the title, one in each of the four sections, culminating in the deeply spiritual final section that deals with revelation, rebirth, redemption.

Indeed, the inspiration for the collection is a nineteenth century image of a slave woman sweeping a floor with strange headgear. The caption reads: A WOMAN WITH IRON HORNS AND BELLS ON, TO KEEP HER FROM RUNNING AWAY. Rollins titles this visual poem, “The Art of Dancing Explained by Reading Female Figures.” This is Black Bell.

Among the stage directions Rollins provides throughout Black Bell are those that instruct the reader to strike a bell before reading the “Black Bell” poems, the first “tuned to F, the note connected to the heart chakra”; the second “tuned to G, the note connected to the throat chakra”; the third “tuned to E, the note connected to the solar-plexus chakra,” and the fourth “tuned to A, the note connected to the third-eye chakra.” 

Black Bell is a complex, emotional, spiritual, physical figure.  In the second “Black Bell“ poem we read:

Your hand on my music maker.
My nipple, rings, comes to
life in your mouth.

In the third:

Black Bell is the space inside her.
Hollowed. Hallowed. Halo.

“Haunting” might be another word.

Among the most intriguing performance directions in Black Bell are those in the three “Hymn of Inscape” series of poems that occur throughout the collection, in the first of which we are introduced to Henry “Box” Brown. A list of sixty feelings, ranging from “loving” to “distraught,” and forty-eight quatrains are provided for the reader to randomly cut up and form into boxes. Audience members are invited to participate. The feelings and verses are crafted by the audience to be read by the poet.

Similarly, the poem, “For Henry ‘Box’ Brown, from Alison ‘Inbox’ @ Brown” includes performance instructions that actually include “Hymn of Inscape.”  As I say, very intriguing. Genius, really. 

Black Bell also comes with six pages of enlightening notes to the poems. Rollins explains her inspirations, sources, the samples and the strategies for many of the poems.

“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” a poem whose title is already a “sample,” taken from the famous African-American spiritual, a song that uses the theme of death to remind the audience of the glory that awaits in Heaven, opens with a sample from Emily Dickinson’s famous poem, “Because I could not stop for Death –” (“Because I could not stop for Death – / He kindly stopped for me –”). Rollins explains in her note that she “remixes and weaves” Dickinson’s poem, Sonia Sanchez’s Does Your House Have Lions?, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Phillis Wheatley’s “On Being Brought from Africa to America” in its composition. The poem starts:

Because I could not stop for Death,
I creep. In a subjunctive mood,
I travel back to the future, to the
place where I hold out for a sound.

At present—I ride shotgun,
Eliot at the wheel of the Impala
with suicide doors. Immortality
kicks the back of my seat.

Already you can see Rollins pondering the concept of time, the fluidity of events. In a later poem, “With the Future behind Us,” she writes, 

We can’t see the future, 
therefore, it is behind us.

The past is known,
hence, it lies ahead.

Rollins is also playful. Later in “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” she writes, “T.S. rolls slow with a gangsta lean,” T.S. driving that chariot.  “What the Lyric Be” starts playfully as well, mixing the English Romantic poets with a hip-hop vibe:

Wordsworth, B-boy, beatbox vocal cord
code-switching through the wheat fields at daybreak 

Rollins loves alliteration, as we’ve seen in the “Black Bell” verses. The cleverly titled “Beware the End Word” is a poem (“for Marvin Tate”) composed completely of words that begin with the letter N (“newsroom               nasty         Never, never again!….”)  In “Springtime Again” she writes, “Postapocalypse was our present tense,” again twisting the concept of time.

Rollins’ visual sense of poetry is all over Black Bell. The newspaper clippings, the posters, the diagrams, a poem in the shape of a bell, another in the rocket shape of a garret (“The Loophole of Retreat, or The Love Below, as Above,” “written in regard to Harriet Jacob’s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, where she writes of her confinement in a garret,” as she explains in her notes). In “Topography of Silence” she writes, “The word bed is in the shape of itself.” Yes! It is!  See it?

DJ Alison C. Rollins’ bravura performance of Black Bell deserves a standing ovation!