For almost eight years now, I’ve lived with a false memory of the first poem I ever heard Jake Adam York read. The me of eight years ago sat on the floor of my high school English classroom, listening to a poem about a photograph, watching black men turn into white men, watching white men turn into black men in my mind as Jake read couplet after couplet about townspeople gathered to witness their version of the justice system. A photographic negative will do this, will invert an image, will invite the viewer, so carefully grasping only the very edges of undeveloped film, to see an invented world, a world with witness and victim not only reversed but replaced.

We talked about language that day and about structure, how a poet can engage the formal qualities of a poem in pursuit of explication, representation, illumination. The image and the structure remained with me, though I forgot the poem’s title. It was only when I was writing a eulogy for Jake that I returned to his first book, Murder Ballads, to find that poem, its name. “Negatives.” The poem about John Lee, burned alive, a crowd of w[h]it[e]nesses. Couplets.

            But let us imagine
            just afterward, the camera slung

            on the taker’s shoulder, 
            and at its heart a thousand blacks

            staring into this cloud of light,
            for a moment neither 

            gathering toward nor
            descending from heaven,

            but waiting in their adoration
            and blessing each with its glow—

            a vision of these thousand whites
            turned dark for an hour

            and praying, terrified, to this pillar
            for the rectifying light

            and then imagine,
            their prayer, the paper

            slowly darkening in the light
            until they are restored, white from dark. (Murder Ballads 60)
        

But this isn’t the image I remember. I remember two men in the center of the photograph. I remember rope, not smoke. But I remember Jake reading from his book, straight from its pages.

When I was asked to write this, I knew there were things I would not have the ability, the capacity, to discuss. The craft of poetry. The Civil Rights Movement. The South. If I were to even address the details of the photographic process to which this poem refers, I would need to ask Jake about that process. I would need to ask for a refresher course on how film is developed, how chemicals and paper and light become something. 

When I was asked to write this, I went in search of the right poem. I found it, but not where he’d left it in my memory. “Double Negative.” The image that has been seared into my brain all these years: Jesse Slayton and Will Miles hanging from the branches of a tree. Another photograph. Another evocation of the photographic process, of the ways in which chemicals and paper and light not only become something but destroy something. Destroy the version of the world that allows nothing but leaves to hang from trees.

“Double Negative” was published on the Connotation Press website in October of 2009. It doesn’t appear in Murder Ballads. It doesn’t appear in any of Jake’s published books. It appears on its own, online, in an archive, and it appears as a poem called “Negative” in my memory. My reality insists on a version of these two poems as one poem published in Jake’s first book and read to my class in 2005. When I was asked to write this, when I discovered that my imagined reality was only that, imagined, I looked inside Jake’s work itself to ameliorate the sense that I’d done violence to these poems by imagining an impossibility.

At the end of Jake’s most recent book of poems, Persons Unknown, he leaves the reader with a highly specific note of something like instruction. He informs his reader that the poems in this volume are “dedicated to the memories of the martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement,” explaining:

In the broadening conversation about the Civil Rights Movement, racial violence, hate crimes, and unsolved murders, more than eighty additional martyrs have been identified.

As that conversation expands, so does this project.

I have endeavored to link this body of work to the previous volume A Murmuration of Starlings. The reader is invited to take this book, to split it between the first and second sections, and to insert the first section of Persons Unknown into the text of A Murmuration of Starlings before its central poem, “Tuck”; and to insert the second section of Persons Unknown into the text of A Murmuration of Starlings after the poem, “Tuck” but before “For Reverend James Reeb.” (Persons Unknown 99)

I’m not trying to write about Jake’s poems. I’m trying to write about Jake’s conception of Jake’s poems. In this note, found in the back of his book, Jake is, as always, extremely careful with his language. He does not invite the reader to simply imagine these two books as part of a whole. Instead, the reader is invited “to take this book, to split it.” A physical rupture. A suggestion of breakage that becomes more physical than conceptual when Jake continues, “and to insert the first section of Persons Unknown into the text of A Murmuration of Starlings.” Splitting and inserting imply a kind of physical rearrangement of these two codices that violates their physical containers, their binding.

I knew Jake to be a lover of analog, of the physical object, of shooting photographs on film, of hand-binding chapbooks himself, no staples, no careless crafting. Did Jake actually intend for his readers to take a penknife to his work, to extract portions of one book, “split” it open, widen the binding of another, “insert” the poems inside? Likely he did not. But his gesture toward this move in the language of his endnote says more about Jake’s work than it might seem upon first read, and it ameliorates the potential problem inherent in me confusing two of his ekphrastic poems about photography and atrocity.

Jake arranged his work carefully, in order, with reason, always. But part of that ordering involved leaving space for re-ordering. Part of his work was about accessing the past from different angles, from unexpected places, inserting himself into history in order to write in the forgotten parts, the parts that have been erased, violated, and disappeared. So to allow this space to exist in his work—this space for rewriting, for restructuring, reorganizing—was to further the project he pursued thematically, linguistically, and formally in the poems themselves. To leave space for a different order to things, to un-solidify order, to un-solidify history, to allow uncertainty to exist as a positive force in writing and remembering.