Few Poets seem to have more fun than Patience Agbabi. Few poets succeed so well—or started so early—in merging the sonic patterns of Afro-diasporic performance, of hip-hop gone syncretically international, with European page-based formal tradition. For more than two decades, Agbabi has woven the in-your-face bravura aesthetic she gets from the former into the most challenging, puzzle-like parts of the latter. But the importance of Transformatrix and of Agbabi’s work doesn’t just lie in the way she shows her sources to go together; it’s also in the way that she takes herself and her experience as the norm. European verse tradition must bend to fit her, to accommodate her British Nigerian experience and varieties of spoken language, never the other way round.
In Britain, she’s known both as a writer of books and as a spoken-word poet, with dynamic delivery and a recognizable buzz cut. Her poetry shows up on national high school exams; she’s read at the National Gallery in London and on the BBC. Since 1995 she’s published four books, the most recent a concise, attractive retelling of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with stanzaic and metrical variety to match Chaucer’s own. That book, Telling Tales, gave her a following among medievalists. It is the only one she’s gained, so far, in North America.
That should change. Agbabi is one of the handful of poets—and often seen as one of the first—who can not only use but also adapt and render distinctive both the rhythms and references of hip-hop and the strictness of page-based European forms. She’s no more a radio-ready rapper than she is Algernon Charles Swinburne, but she has virtues common to both: the energy, the in-jokes, the personality, the array of characters, the social protest, and sometimes (as with Swinburne) the kinky sex.
You can find all these virtues in her second book, Transformatrix, published in Scotland in 2000. The collection begins with a page-long boast: “If you join two words you get multiplication. / My school of mathematics / equals verbal acrobatics / so let’s make conversation.” Next up are stanzaic poems about invented characters, such as the Afrofuturist verse “UFO Woman (Pronounced Oofoe),” a Nigerian-accented woman from space now living in London: “Meandering the streets paved with / hopscotch and butterscotch, kids with crystal / cut ice-cream cones and tin-can eyes ask ‘Why / don’t U F O back to your own planet?’ ”
It’s a rude pun and an old problem for immigrants facing “streets paved with NF (no fun) graffiti. / Nefertiti go home from the old days.” (The NF is the racist British group the National Front.) Agbabi’s Afrofuturist becomes a kind of punning Afro-pessimist, deciding to seek a better fate off-planet: “Why wait for First World Homo sapiens / to cease their retroactive spacism?” Instead, she readies herself “for lift-off / in my fibre-optic firefly Levis.”
The comedy in Agbabi’s “Wife of Bafa” is less verbal than situational. “Mrs Alice Ebi Bafa,” like Chaucer’s wife of Bath, has had five husbands (one at a time) and taught the last one to behave: Mrs. Bafa threw her husband’s porno mags in the grate; he hit her; then she “beat him till he screamed for his ancestors. / Now we get on like house on fire.” “Some say I have blood on my hands,” she shrugs, “’cause I like to paint my nails red / but others call me femme fatale.” Like the Chaucerian originals, Alice has an ulterior motive: “Would you like to buy some cloth?”
Transformatrix is not a perfect book, and what might be Agbabi’s best individual poems aren’t even in it. The volume does not contain, for example, her polyrhythmic rewrite of Chaucer’s “General Prologue,” where each line hurtles towards a funky spondee:
though my mind’s overtaxed, April fires me
how she pierces my heart to the fond root
till I bleed cherry blossom en route,
to our bliss trip; there’s days she goes off me,
April loves me not; April loves me …
Nor does it hold her later poem “Josephine Baker Finds Herself,” whose tour de force of sexy mirror writing (the poem reads the same, line by line, forwards and in reverse) has to be read or heard whole to be understood. At its center: “I worship / the way she looks. / The way she looks / me up and down. I worship / twenties chic.” Baker becomes Agbabi’s precedent for a queer black artist who takes over a white cultural hub and makes herself the sometimes gleeful, sometimes melancholy center of attention.
A poet of personae, Agbabi is also a poet of forms and strict constraints, not only the mirrored line order of “Josephine Baker Explains Herself” but also the six rotating end words of her sestinas. Transformatrix includes seven sestinas, all with the same line endings: child, boy, end, dark, time, girl. One portrays a time traveler, another a woman’s memories of her tattoos:
I rolled up my sleeve like a child
giving blood for the first time.
Tracy Loves Darren. It was girl
power, 1979. He was my aerosol boy
and the swelling inscription, my lifebuoy.
We lasted a month.
There’s also Leila, the eternal principle of the feminine, whose name in Hebrew and Arabic means “night”:
If she were a time
she’d be midnight, big hand on little, girl
surrendering to womanhood, the fierce end
of needles pointing blood. She’s yesterday’s child
ticking red ellipses, leaving a trail for boys
to find her. And she controls the dark
as if she were princess of the dark.
Here are women and girls reclaiming the stereotypes that have made us mysterious and kept us down. Here, too, are women and girls reclaiming blackness as a source of power right alongside (rather than displacing) European traditions. In the final poem, the title poem, Agbabi inflicts her pleasurable discipline (she’s a transformer and also a dominatrix) upon a client called the English language: “without me / she’s … rigid as a full stop.”
Agbabi’s characters—her Josephine Baker, her fast-living teens from council houses, her night goddess—set their own terms for their own life and speech. Agbabi does too: such terms feel both contemporary and virtuosic. Reading her work can feel like meeting somebody way cooler than you will ever be but also like watching somebody who has mastered something intrinsically hard by following rules specific to her art, like a great DJ, trumpeter, or gymnast. And when those rules operate, whiteness and white language—even to a white reader—no longer seem normal, standard, or unmarked; in Transformatrix Black British language and Black British sounds are the new standard, the ground from which so much else springs.