Kyle Dargan

A poet’s final barbed compilation that pierces the inherited and self-inflicted experiences of masculinity The keen and jagged blade that is Kyle Dargan’s eye is drawn in Panzer Herz: A Live Dissection, the final poetic compilation of a lived and inherited masculinity. Dargan targets the armored heart, or “panzer herz”—a site where desire, violence, family, politics, blackness, and capitalism all intertwine with gender. Pierced with the question—What if the heart, in the aforementioned capacity, was not a constricting vessel, struggling to withstand internal and external pressures, but instead was a space of release?—the collection opens a cishet masculinity to the inquiries and explorations that the traditional conscription of gender discourages and often vilifies. I long to abandon this violent / vagrancy, but the roads . . . teem with other men who know / no training, who see upon me / my teachers’ marks and ache / for the elicitation of drawn steel. The denser blades of compassion and accountability are Dargan’s arms of choice to carry, and not conceal, the weapons he uses to probe his own heart and the hearts of the men and women who shaped him into a man that has been . . . and is unbecoming. The poetic paring of layered lines, the nicking of the process, these poems crimson the page—and not for scarlet spectacle. These versed incisions and sutures are the oeuvre dedicated to the outgrowing of the writer and the “man” that began it.

Anagnorisis, a concept Aristotle describes in his Poetics, refers to a moment in a play—a tragedy specifically—when the hero gains recognition of the true nature of his own character, condition, or relationship with an antagonistic entity. Watching—repeatedly, on a digital loop—the rampant state-sponsored murder of African-Americans over the past five years has lead the poet to a recognition that James Baldwin reflected as a prospect over thirty years ago. That being that an African-American, never has been and, in no current lifetime, will likely not be considered an equal citizen of this country with an equal right to life. Instead of responding to that reality with sadness or hurt (or even anger) the poems in the collection book operate in “functional disillusionment”—a vocal, sustained and actively manifested disbelief in the social, economic and legal systems black Americans are subject to. The poems speak back to America: “we no longer have faith in you and will not until you give us reason.” The poems are not concerned with gratitude. They are not concerned with coddling the sensibilities of the country’s racial, class, sexual majorities. “The white man believes you when you go to him with that old sweet talk, ‘cause you've been sweet-talking him ever since he brought you here,” Malcolm X once said. “Stop sweet-talking him. Tell him how you feel. Tell him what kind of hell you've been catching[.]” Though it may have been perceived as a threat initially, it is more of a crucial communication strategy, for how can a country get better for a people when those people are constantly asked to temper and carefully couch (or silence) their honest laments? The poet recognizes the hell we have been catching. These poems aim to allow readers to know how catching that hell feels.

In this his fourth collection, award-winning poet Kyle Dargan examines the mechanics of the heart and mind as they are weathered by loss. Following a spate of deaths among family and friends, Dargan chooses to present not color-negative elegies but self-portraits that capture what of these departed figures remains within him. Amid this processing of mortality, it becomes clear that he has arrived at a turning point as a writer and a man. As the title suggests, Dargan aspires toward an unflinching honesty. These poems do not purport to possess life’s answers or seek to employ language to mask what they do not know. Dargan confesses as a means of reaching out to the nomadic human soul and inviting it to accompany him on a walk toward the unknown.

Attempting to stitch a quilt of language for the new millennium, Kyle Dargan finds himself in his third collection propelled forward by a mélange of voices—individuals passed on the street, journalists, philosophers, movie and cartoon characters, hip-hop emcees, and fellow poets—all of which build to a self-diagnosed logorrhea dementia. Dargan’s voice channels an America mentally fatigued from a decade of foreign conflict yet cautiously hopeful about the promise of the country’s renewed introspection. In these poems, rife with the anxieties of the aughts, Dargan seeks to destabilize social and cultural landscapes believed to be settled—breaking and clearing ground to lay the foundation for a new American perspective.

Kyle Dargan's new collection of poetry reflects his many passions as a poet, his deep engagament with what it means to work in the African American literary tradition, and his lively voice, infused with hip-hop sensibility and idiom. Skillfully blending vernacular and elegant diction, his clipped and reflective phrasings create animated poems that take on a myriad of concerns. Moving through such subjects as a midnight wait in the Washington, D. C., bus station, men on exhibit at the 1904 World's Fair, the sights and sounds of an Indiana karaoke bar, and an imagined escaped slave turned to stone, Dargan's work continually shifts lenses to examine an America increasingly stifled by dogmas and inept social categories. At the core of the book is compassion for the individuals who populate it, and from that compassion grows a hunger for the old identities, in which we encase ourselves, to come undone. From "Palinode, Once Removed": The day we pursue metaphor, I will / teach them about the brain—how there is a center / to catch discrepancy between the expected / and the perceived. Stimulate the mechanism. / you are working in metaphor. / Though surprising / I am not a metaphor. This is: I am a period, / small and dark. If you read me correctly, / you are to stop. Pause. Breathe.

Kyle Dargan's debut collection of poetry, The Listening, searches through the cluttered surface of contemporary life to tune into the elemental sounds within the marrow of living/life. Throughout the collection, Dargan interweaves elements of his heritage with the present day—jazz influences blend with hip-hop; neoslave narratives run parallel with the intimate tale of civil rights leaders; post-9/11 America is juxtaposed with family portraits of the sixties and seventies—to reveal the continuous, though ever changing, music of the world around us. Whether capturing the famous Ali-Frazier fight in Manila or a trip to the local barbershop, Muddy Waters or boyhood blacktop games, Dargan gives voice to the most poignant and fleeting aspects of our everyday existence. With singular incisiveness and vigor, these poems act simultaneously as psalms and elegies, praising life at the same time they lament its inevitable passing.