Throughout The Poetics of Prophecy, I have described the figure of prophecy not as a voice of certainty and assurance, but as a voice of weakness and instability, with the power to block, undermine, and unravel hegemonic powers. For example, in Isaiah 6, prophecy destabilizes aesthetic sublimity by interrupting the singing of the seraphic choir with a sinful human voice, crying out the hurt of history, thereby “reject[ing] euphonic closure.”Footnote ¹ While The Poetics of Prophecy mapped out a poetics of strength and weakness throughout the long nineteenth century, this mapping remains a relevant model for understanding late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century poetry. Moreover, and more importantly, it continues to provide a vocabulary for making visionary language legible.

Prophetic weakness – in the form of the stutter, the glitch, the torn-open text, the leaky body, and the wounded speaker – can “untune” the false closures and consolations offered by patriotism and national unity, by the “lyric I” of Western poetic tradition, by the deceitful neutrality of the English language – tainted by crimes such as the transatlantic slave trade – and by the militaristic-pragmatic veneer of modern Hebrew, which is punctured by apocalyptic thorns. Prophecy, rather than providing a monumental mode of strength, assurance, and certainty – facing the future resolutely – turns paradoxically to the past, to “defend the dead,” to remake the self, and perhaps to offer a qualified, difficult form of redemption.Footnote ²

Mid-twentieth-century critics have mistakenly taught us to read glimmers of the prophetic in modern poetry nostalgically: as diminished gestures, or faint echoes of past grandeurs. We have seen this nostalgic pattern throughout this book, from Robert Lowth, who thought the Jews had lost the pronunciation of biblical Hebrew and thus the knowledge of its meter, through Julius Wellhausen’s reading of Ezekiel as an epigone of the former oral prophets, to Harold Bloom’s reading of Blake as an agonized modern in the shadow of the biblical Ezekiel, and finally to Dan Miron, who reads H. N. Bialik and Moshe Greenberg as modern poets walking on thin ice, where once – possibly in the eighth century bce – there had been the solid ground of certainty, faith. However, many allusions to prophecy or to the figure of the poet-prophet in contemporary poetry do not function as backward glances to a visionary golden age, shards from the explosion of a once-powerful vatic past (either Romantic or biblical) survived into our disenchanted era. As I have argued throughout this book, weak prophecy is not a nostalgic or anxious reaction to strong prophetic power; rather, it uses its weakness as resistance.

The stakes of the question are political. If we argue that the prophetic genre – as a Romantic phenomenon – belongs only to the nineteenth century, we cut off contemporary poetry from the genealogy of weak prophecy as critique and struggle. Miron, for example, argues that Hebrew poets after Bialik and Greenberg “left a record of regret and hankering after the lost prophetic genre.”Footnote ³ In contrast, if Romanticism is not bracketed to England and Germany during a short period after the French Revolution between 1785 and 1830 (or even extended by a few decades to allow for the “time lag” of minor languages), but rather redefined as a transhistorical and global movement that “renews itself at any given movement of perceived social crisis,” then social and political critique become a continuous and fundamental principle of poetry since the French Revolution or earlier.Footnote ⁴ Julie Carr and Jeffrey C. Robinson’s 2015 anthology, Active Romanticism, traces various avant-garde poetic innovations – which have usually been read as rooted in modernism – as “a development from experimental Romantic poetry and poetics.”Footnote ⁵ In the spirit of Carr and Robinson, then, I propose to trace the figure of the poet-prophet, especially its weak manifestations, into avant-garde poetic innovations. In a manner of speaking, the poets presented in the next few pages demonstrate that we have never stopped being prophets.

The selection of recent prophetic poetry below – from the 1980s through the early aughts – is not meant as a comprehensive survey of all recent English and Hebrew poetry in the prophetic mode, but rather to demonstrate the kind of work that can now be done with visionary poetry, with attention to the key dialectic movements mapped in this book. I focus on poetic avant-gardes, finding there poetry that unsettles, destabilizes, and resists structures of power. The prophetic moments sampled below answer or extend conversations developed in the chapters, considering the weakness and instability at the heart of the formation of the poet-prophet. Specifically, issues regarding enthusiasm and regulation raised by Robert Lowth, discussed in Chapter 1, are continued and troubled in Anne Carson’s work. The construction of the modern Hebrew subject, discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, is unsettled by Hezy Leskly’s uncanny object-based prophecies. And overarching ideas about the role of the prophet in catastrophic history, which have reverberated throughout the book in its Benjaminian language – especially in the Introduction and in Chapter 2 – are extended through Rob Halpern’s and M. NourbeSe Philip’s poetry.

Rob Halpern’s 2012 Music for Porn offers a template for a kind of prophetic untuning. The entire book, a mix of poetry and prose reflections blending memoir and scholarship, is constructed with and against the eroticization of the American soldier, an emblem of American capitalist desire, vacuity, and destruction. The section titled “Notes on Affection and War” is an explicit reflection on the poetry of Walt Whitman, who Halpern perceives as marshaling queer affections into an overarching patriotic sentimentality. In Drum-Taps, written during and after the Civil War, Whitman – as Halpern argues – links “a certain unsingable tenderness for a dead soldier’s body” to “over-coded attachments love of nation, fervor for democracy.”Footnote ⁶ In this sense, Whitman, although seemingly humanistic, acting as a literal as well as metaphoric wound-dresser, becomes part of America’s militarizing machine:

The way in which Whitman prosodically organizes an experience of war, tuning together its sounds and emotions, is especially apparent – Halpern argues – in his “Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice.” Here, Whitman imagines a majestic voice of consolation proclaiming a modern version of Ezekiel’s oracle of dry bones.Footnote ⁸ In his vision, the human fragments left on the Civil War battlefield cohere as a voice announces a resurrection of men from different states, forming them into an “invincible” army of comrades who are to populate the reconciled, postwar republic – even at the price of repressing the causes that led to war.Footnote ⁹

Halpern’s self-appointed task – which I argue is a prophetic task – is to resist Whitman’s symphonic organization: “all my queer affections, like those aroused in Whitman’s poems, are used like sap like cum to bind our national interests, even as I refuse them.” Halpern’s poetry explicitly evokes Ezekiel’s call narrative, but it also implicitly echoes a more troubling prophecy – the sign-act that opens the book of Hosea, whereby the prophet is commanded to marry a prostitute or adulterous woman.Footnote ¹⁰ Halpern’s pornographic transcriptions share in the disturbing strangeness of Hosea’s marriage, a marriage which seems like an intervention in language itself. Because the Israelites have metaphorically whored, worshiping strange gods, Hosea must marry a whore, literalizing the metaphor, living out the abjection of the language itself. Likewise, in mapping his erotic relation to the bodies of soldiers, Halpern does not remain distantly, clinically apart, but rather implicates his own body in the abjection of war. Even while he is attempting to represent the soldier’s body as a site of “insecurity, vulnerability, risk,” his transcriptions of his erotic imagination turn his own body and sex drive into a site of insecurity, vulnerability, and risk – and even further abjection.Footnote ¹¹ Like Hosea, Halpern must live out the metaphor: here, the alienations engendered by porn and war in late capitalism – “what it means to love inside a system that has made love monstrous.”Footnote ¹²

“Notes on Affection and War” is structured around a series of questions posed to the self: “How to unbind this eros from martial interests, wrest an openness to penetration away from sovereign ends?”Footnote ¹³ “What might it be like to subtract my affects from the wars to which they have been unwittingly contracted?”Footnote ¹⁴ “How to register all the distortions, frustrations, and amplifications that fallout in the effort to lend a sound figure to this inaudibility?”Footnote ¹⁵ The piece proceeds jerkily, through self-doubting questions, disturbing images – interrupted by seemingly urgent italicized abstractions – as if the prose itself can’t settle into a comfortable rhythm, skidding to a stop before a tone of prophetic resonance. It ends on a series of questions that suggests another sound besides Whitman’s voice of prophetic consolation:

The piece ends with a dim and qualified “utopian longing,” with a sense that there is the possibility of another sound to be heard, though this sound exists just beyond the active agency of the speaker; it is sensed passively, through the poem itself.Footnote ¹⁷ This making of sound, or listening for a sound, underneath the pageantry, the “hum and buzz” of war, could be termed a “poetics of patiency” – a poetics founded on “receptivity, vulnerability, penetrability.”Footnote ¹⁸ Halpern’s agonized, self-doubting striving toward a demilitarized utopian future – even a future currently occluded – is ultimately a prophetic gesture, an attempt to see, hear, and listen for an alternative political reality, using not only the voice, but the entire body.

Halpern’s poetry “untunes” Whitman’s strong prophecy of national consolation. How would a prophetic “untuning” look in modern Hebrew poetry, which is equally, if not more, overshadowed by the prophetic subject, as shaped by Bialik? While Bialik created a new type of subjectivity in Hebrew poetry, and a new, flexible palette of affects that contained both strength and weakness, the poets of the generations that followed tried to undo the grand pathos Bialik instituted. They wished to return, as it were, to the primal scene of modern Hebrew subjectivity through undoing the figure of the poet-prophet. How to disentangle the individual from national destiny? How to slow down the prophetic-messianic machine, which had turned into a messianic nightmare? In “Pro & Con,” for example, Meir Wieseltier, an Israeli poet of the 1960s generation, writes:

In place of “prophetic posturing,” Wieseltier tasks the poet with a disciplined, secular minimalism. He should

Still, sometimes the poet is drawn to the grandiose spectacle, confessing “sometimes I can’t control myself, and like a pervert / I sneak up on the wax figures’ display.”Footnote ¹⁹ Similarly, Yehuda Amichai casts himself as an impoverished prophet. In “I am a Poor Prophet,” he writes:

Although these lines position Amichai as “weak” in the sense of diminished or disenchanted, other poems by Amichai paint prophetic power as a dangerous, lurking possibility that must be repressed. As Gershom Scholem’s famous 1926 letter to Franz Rosenzweig puts it, the Hebrew language, despite its seemingly secular revival, contains an “apocalyptic thorn” that cannot be removed. The religious meaning inherent in the seemingly secularized religious language is an abyss (ein Abgrund) that could “break out” to annihilate the next generation, because “Hebrew is pregnant with catastrophes.”Footnote ²¹ In “What Did I Learn in the Wars,” which appears in the same book as “I am a Poor Prophet,” Amichai’s speaker declares:

The merkabah is, of course, Ezekiel’s chariot-revelation, but it is also modern Hebrew for a type of tank. The “work of the merkabah” is a rabbinic phrase, derived from Ezekiel 1, referring to esoteric mystical teachings (literally: the work of assemblage).Footnote ²³ In Amichai’s poem, the fusion of the prophetic, military, and mystical becomes a monstrous beast which must be trapped and concealed. Rather than revealing his vision, the poet’s task is to hide it and thereby prevent its activation.

Yet because Bialik’s national subject is already inscribed as weak, seeking constantly to untune it by producing a more minimalistic, personal subject, as Wieseltier and Amichai attempt to do, is in some ways a trap. Bialik himself fought against becoming the national poet, and so this act of resistance is already written into the pattern of Hebrew poetry. The Hebrew “lyric I” can become more and more sensitive, self-aware, and individualistic – that is “weaker” – and still be co-opted into the national story, the national subject. In Chapter 4, I discussed Nitzan Lebovic’s notion of melancholic Zionism, but as Lebovic argues, this seemingly oppositional voice was eventually folded into mainstream Zionism, evolving “from a symptomatic voice of the frustrated individual to the oppressive voice of an official narrative.”Footnote ²⁴ The slogan “Shooting and Crying,” for example, originally identified with the post-1967 generation, was meant to express the melancholic sensitivity of the Israeli soldier, who struggled greatly with the moral dilemmas posed by Israel’s wars. Yet “over the years the trope of ‘shooting and crying’ has become just as much about remorse and moral dilemmas as it has become about self-justification and the creating of a masculine, warrior subject.”Footnote ²⁵ The example of “shooting and crying” shows how becoming a “weak subject” does not necessarily allow one to opt out of the collective national project.

A decade younger than Wieseltier, the poet Hezy Leskly goes a step further in the work of radical untuning.Footnote ²⁶ Rather than staying focused on the quotidian and the banal, Leskly –whose first name is the diminutive of Ezekiel – consciously returns to the dangerous work of the merkabah, the mystical assemblage. At first glance, he is, like Amichai’s impoverished prophet, concerned with diminished remains of past glories, collecting the butts of the great (and nervous) smoking prophets. Leskly’s poems are full of mythic echoes, rusty halos, a half-broken radio that produces strange long beeps, as if stuck on an old channel of National or Army Radio, emitting – as Samuel Taylor Coleridge might have put it – “Ancestral voices prophesying war!” In “Messengers” (Shliḥim), the speaker asks:

As opposed to poets like Amichai and Wieseltier, Leskly does not try to create an individual subjectivity against national bombast. Rather, his “merkabah work” aims to untune subjectivity itself, posing a prophecy of objects rather than subjects. In this sense, Leskly builds on the weak aspects of Bialik’s prophecy, which already exploited the confusion between object and subject in the biblical text.

Jean Baudrillard writes: “We have always lived off the splendor of the subject and the poverty of the object. It is the subject that makes history, it’s the subject that totalizes the world … The object is shamed, obscene, passive, prostituted … Who has ever sensed the foreboding of the particular and sovereign potency of the object?”Footnote ²⁸ In his early poem, “Table” (Shulḥan), Leskly describes a call narrative centered on the object, which is charged with a “particular and sovereign potency”:

We seem to be in an empty office. The “prophet” here has not only no sender (as Baruch Kurzweil remarked, regarding the prophets of the Hebrew revival) but also no audience.Footnote ³⁰ Yet, as he approaches the table, minute revelations occur: he hears a long noise, or beep, the drawer of the table opens, the thumbtacks leave behind a “rusty halo,” he pierces his own finger with a tack, and finally, “the surface of the table shone / and I understood that I was beyond this life.”Footnote ³¹ The events seem to follow the structure of a prophetic call narrative, however, everything that can be associated with prophetic affect, from majestic resonances to woeful cries, has been emptied out, like the emptied-out drawers of the table. The objects of the poem too, products of an industrialized, mass-produced world, are emptied of aura and of hidden significance. In fact, the speaker too has become a kind of object among objects: alone in an office, pierced with a thumbtack – for a moment both prince and sleeping beauty – yet still flat and incurious as a tabletop.

In this poem, prophetic revelation occurs on the surface: “Suddenly, the surface of the table shone [hivhiḳ] / and I understood that I was beyond this life.” The affect of the speaker-prophet is also surface level: he exhibits no hidden emotions, motivations, or inner world. We can contrast this surface-dwelling epiphany to an Israeli national obsession with depth, archeology, excavation, and (constructed) continuity with the past. Leskly’s poetics/prophetics of surface works against strong readings: against interpretation, hidden meaning, future apocalyptic revelations: “I am not curious to know where my new life will lead me.”Footnote ³² His prophecy of surfaces also resists cause and effect, literal and metaphorical genealogies.

In a later series of poems titled “Hebrew Lesson” (Shiʻur ʻIvrit), Leskly tries to invent a new language “by the light of the burning table,” an allusion to Ezekiel’s first vision.Footnote ³³ In “Lesson Gimmel” (Third lesson) he imagines a new kind of origin story: “this time I will not permit a man to birth me. / I will birth myself.”Footnote ³⁴ Leskly’s “rebirthed” speaker reinvents a new language by the water and its reflection: “The stinking waters and their stinking reflections will then speak / a new Hebrew,”Footnote ³⁵ alluding to Ezekiel’s call to prophecy by the Chebar canal (Ezek. 1:1). In “Lesson Ḥet” (Eighth lesson) the speaker continues to imagine a new kind of language, one which emerges through the speech of the object, the table itself:

In this new language, Hebrew breaks open into elemental sounds of sighs or grunts, or perhaps the word ba, which means “came.” The father’s anger continues to exist, but when the son stops speaking Hebrew, the son will have disappeared. Perhaps, through the metamorphosing power of poetry, the son will have become the table, which can better endure the anger of the father. In Leskly’s poetry, the perspective of objects allows an escape from the language of the father, from Hebrew as the language of the father. Prophecy becomes the revelation of this new kind of burning, the burning away of the Romantic subject, the searing away of the Jewish-Hebrew-national-subject. So, in Leskly’s poetry, the fetishistic regard of the “obscene, passive, prostituted” object allows him to slip the trap of subjectivity.

While the voice of the poet-prophet has often been associated with a strong – if not bombastic – subjectivity, the Canadian poet Anne Carson, in parallel ways to Leskly, reorganizes what is self and other, inside and outside, through an explicit engagement with the figure of a prophet, specifically Isaiah. Her “Book of Isaiah,” written a decade after Leskly’s prophetic-object experiments, is unusual in her oeuvre: Carson, a classicist and translator from Greek and Latin as well as a poet, often stages complex dialogues with poetic tradition through classical figures, including Cassandra. In her 1992 poem “Book of Isaiah,” Carson uses the biblical prophet to think through questions of regulation and self-regulation. In this sense, Carson’s poem is part of the genealogy of the prophetic figure in Romantic poetry which originates with Robert Lowth, the scholar with whom we began this book. One of the questions Lowth contended with was the problem of self-control, or self-regulation. On the one hand, Lowth valued the way the sublime force of prophetic composition “strikes and overpowers the mind” and “excite[s] the passions.”Footnote ³⁷ On the other hand, he was wary of the way prophets could get carried away and enflame their audiences into vulgar enthusiasm. For Lowth, and arguably for many of the Romantic poet-prophets to follow, literary prophecy became a way to balance these affects – to engage in the project of (self-)regulation. While the prophetic persona in the poem could express great storms of destabilizing emotions, the highly crafted language of the poem continued to signal its literary and therefore aesthetic status to readers. The body, especially the female body, remained mostly outside the purview of this strong voice.

Carson’s “Book of Isaiah” attempts to negotiate a “new contract” in the self-control necessary to the poet-prophet, and more broadly, in the self-organization of the Western self. The poem can be linked to an essay that appears directly after it in her collection Glass, Irony and God. At the end the idiosyncratic and brilliant essay, “The Gender of Sound,” Carson ruminates on the Greek concept of sophrosyne, restraint, or self-control, which she shows to be closely linked with male voice, order, and logos, and in opposition to the female voice, chaos, and eros. The essay – like the poem – tries to untune these deeply engrained dichotomies and find a different way out:

The poem itself “untunes” Isaiah and the book of Isaiah by introducing two moments of prophetic lack of control, envisioned as metaphorical and literal leakages: a painful howl and the miraculous lactation of the male body. These leakages transform the relations among God and Isaiah, Isaiah’s self and body, and the readers and the book of Isaiah – suggesting, through a mode of weak prophecy, “another human essence than self.”Footnote ³⁹

First, the howl. Isaiah’s howl is the sign of a painful, ugly inability to connect to a love object. In “Book of Isaiah,” despite “a great attraction between them,” and despite their former intimacy, God seems to misunderstand Isaiah.Footnote ⁴⁰ “Isaiah and God saw things differently,” the poem states, and this difference leads to an enormous amount of pain, anger, and distance.Footnote ⁴¹ Isaiah’s howl comes in response to a longing to be close to God, like in the old days, when they had an easy friendship, conversing nightly:

Carson’s description of Isaiah’s howl echoes the terrible unregulated female sounds described in “The Gender of Sound,” such as that of the Gorgon, “a guttural animal howl that issues as a great wind from the back of the throat through a hugely distended mouth,” the howl of the Furies, the deadly voice of the Sirens, and the babbling of Cassandra.Footnote ⁴³ All are voices that are chaotic, unregulated, and uncivilized. The “howl” also ties Carson to the tradition of the American poet-prophet through Whitman and Allen Ginsberg. Yet Carson works to untune Isaiah’s howl from the literary Romantic tradition of the poet-prophet. The howl here isn’t quite a perfect storm of passion and poetry: there is something in its description that remains flat-footed, jerky, unwilling, or unable to be swept up in the literary storm.Footnote ⁴⁴

The passage describing the howl is built on syntactical parallelism – like the poetry of the biblical Isaiah – and filled with images of everyday agricultural life. Partially, its awkwardness has to do with the gratuitous repetition in the parallelism: “the howl ran along brooks to the mouth of brooks, or “rolled like a rolling thing.” This somewhat clumsy repetition might be forgiven if it weren’t for the ungainly abstraction of the simile “like a rolling thing.” Furthermore, the parallelism of the intricate, Bruegel-like portraits of everyday life – the fishers, the weavers, the slain men, all depicted in wonderfully short, blunt, Anglo-Saxon words – is interrupted by cumbersome Latinate words like “networks” and “purpose” that break the iambic meter of the previous two lines. Finally, the prophetic howl, which rolls and runs, full of majestic resonance, apparently going somewhere grand, comes to an abrupt stop in a ditch.

There’s something irritating about this howl. It’s cut short. In an interview published in The Paris Review, Carson says: “I do think that something of the effect that I have on people is to put everything on an edge where they’re both charmed by the person or the writing, and also flatly terrified by a revelation or acceptance of revelation that’s almost happening, never quite totally happening.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The howl in the ditch is a type of revelation that “never quite totally happen[s],” as well as, perhaps, a response to the pain of the revelation (or love) that never quite totally happens between Isaiah and God.

The distance between Isaiah and God – you could call it interspecies love – leads to pain, vulnerability, and ultimately risk on God’s side too. As Isaiah tries to plug the hole where his howl had broken off, God watches: “God was shaking like an olive tree. / Now or never, whispered God.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Later God also leaks bodily fluids: “Isaiah was watching sweat and tears run down God’s face.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The key, though, to their new contract becomes a regendering of Isaiah’s body:

As Isaiah is opened to a new form of prophesizing that occurs in his/her body, he/she is forced to reorganize the boundaries of what is inside and outside. The self is no longer regulated according to self-restraining logos. This new kind of leakage, in contrast to the painful howl, becomes a form of generosity and care, rather than a quality to be feared and regulated.

Though Isaiah’s transformation through lactation only temporarily frees him from a fierce misogyny – and his prophecies continue to feature such phrases as “clickfoot woman shame” – Isaiah’s untuning allows us to read the biblical text as well as the Romantic prophetic tradition together with a rhizomatic countertradition.Footnote ⁴⁹ God engraves two words on Isaiah’s palms:

The two engraved words correspond to the Hebrew words ṣedeq and ṣĕdāqâ, both meaning “righteousness” in biblical Hebrew. In the biblical text, the male form of the word is often paralleled with words having to do with justice, while the female form is sometimes paralleled with redemption or peace. Perhaps an illustration to the subtle difference between them can be found in Isaiah 45:8, where the two words appear together:

In the second, female usage, the noun is paired with rescue and redemption, as well as images of fruitfulness, and seems to come as a result of the first, male righteousness.

We can read these dual engravings as metaphors for reading the biblical text. First, TSDQ, which splits the oak tree, suggests a strong reading, reminiscent of the rabbinic saying about Moses: “Let justice pierce the mountain.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The feminine TSDQH, in contrast, becomes a way to interpret the undergrowth of the text, the afterlives growing in the wake of its grand gestures. If we look at the underbelly of prophecy, at the gaps and pauses between words, at the richness of the Hebrew roots, there is a possibility of “setting up” a maggoty “livelihood”: a reading based on “a river of silver, a river of pity.”Footnote ⁵¹ Carson’s multilayered scholarship, translation, and revision of classical and biblical texts can be understood as the setting up of a livelihood within the empty muscle of wood of the patriarchal text. The chance of a “livelihood” – a mode of communal vitality, sustenance, and even mutual care – is made possible by the release of the ugly, unpoetic, unaesthetic howl, and by the reorganization of the prophetic body and its new, porous meeting place with the divine body.

If Carson’s cultural work can be imagined as the work of “mushrooms and maggots and monkeys,” setting up a livelihood within the text of patriarchy, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008) is syncretic divination, whose materials include iron, salt water, blood, entrails, and bone. Her bone work turns to “defend the dead,” confronting, mourning, and redeeming the horrors of the past.Footnote ⁵² The book-length poem, is a response to the “story that cannot be told”: the Zong was a ship that sailed from Africa to Jamaica in 1781 with a cargo of 470 slaves; the captain, who had got lost due to navigational errors, threw 150 men, women, and children into the sea in order to commit insurance fraud and make his journey profitable.Footnote ⁵³ Philip’s book (written with the guidance of the voice of the ancestors, Setaey Adamu Boateng) is an attempt to retrieve the voices of the drowned, unnamed slaves. It makes its difficult – almost impossible – poems from the words of the documented court case between the owners and the insurers. Philip envisions a homeopathic identification with the victims of the massacre: “My intent is to use the text of the legal decision as a word store … I would lock myself in this text in the same way men, women, and children were locked in the holds of the slave ship Zong.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Throughout the text the image of an oracle, seer, or visionary reoccurs, as well as the language of omens and oracles. In her notes, Philip frames herself as a wrathful, African sangoma – a Zulu healer – taking revenge on the English language:

In this description, the sangoma-prophet is both a murderer and a healer, undoing the language of oppression and terror, and making from it new meaning.

In addition to the sangoma-prophet, though, the penultimate poem of the book suggests another prophetic figure: that of Ezekiel, specifically, his vision of dry bones, his practice of bone work. “Ferrum,” which begins with an epigraph from Ezekiel 37, is both a resurrection of the dry bones and a throwing of the bones. The bones of the dead Africans on the Zong are metaphorically gathered up from the sea, dug out of the court document, and made to live again. They are given names, and their voices are sounded in the text. The English legal system and language – as well as time itself! – is forcefully untuned and disjointed so that we can finally hear the oba sob, belatedly mourning their murder:

The sangoma-prophet-speaker here resists syntax, resists meaning-making, “snaps the spine of time” to do her bone work. If Ezekiel’s biblical vision was of a resurrection of bones to flesh, death to life, here the prophetic work is both a resurrection and a destruction of language itself. Paradoxically, this disintegration allows for the redemption of the tainted English language, or at least the possibility of a more capacious presence within it. Philip writes:

The weak prophecy that Philip offers – the language of “the limp and the wound” is a syncretic visionary poetry. Ezekiel resurrects the dead bones, but perhaps this bone work is also throwing the bones, a form of divination practiced by African sangomas. Indeed, the words on the pages of Zong! begin to resemble less and less a narrative poem, and more and more scattered bones on the page (Figure 9).

Figure 9. M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong!, as told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 2008), 141

What can the bones of the past tell us? How do they “live and stand upon their feet” (Ezek. 37:10)? The poets I’ve considered in this afterword have no easy consolations to offer. Yet as I offer these final pages on prophecy – splattered with pain and bodily fluids, “within and without” – and written soon after another futile and terrible round of Israeli bombing of Gaza – I hope that my turn backwards, to the long nineteenth century, to investigate the construction of modern prophecy, can contribute to breaking the spell of strong prophecy in scholarship and poetry. In its place I suggest the difficult but also generative and even healing potentialities of weak prophecy. Rather than anxiously shoring up an oppressive certainty, or nostalgically longing for the authoritative conviction of the past, weak prophecy embraces doubt and instability in the face of the vicissitudes of catastrophe.

Ein Karem

May 29, 2021

18 Sivan, 5781