Given the volume of verse I consume most days, I do well to read a text once. I’ll mention why I re-read “O Great Black Masque”*by Ted Joans.
Here’s the poem’s beginning:
O great black masque [xspace] that is me
that travels with me in spirit
your big eyes that see tomorrows
saw yesterdays [xspace] and gazes at now […]
Whoa! Does that bring you up sharp as it did me at first? What’s at work here is a cocktail of syntax, diction and punctuation (its lack) going to war with complacent reading. Something either has to be figured out, or else the poem abandoned, but glossing over violence isn’t an option. The capacity to experience movement, much less poetry, in what follows is in the balance. Why? Because the text has to earn your trust at a structural level.
You may have seen it sooner than I did: “masque” is the grammatical subject of “gazes”; “now” (usually an adverb) is nominalized (expressed as a noun) the same as “tomorrow” and “yesterday.” (We can have plural yesterdays and tomorrows, but we have only a singular now!) “[Y]our big eyes that see tomorrows / saw yesterdays” is a parenthetical — some writers might set it off with em-dashes in a prose context.
The backbone of the passage is this:
O great black masque that is me, that travels with me in spirit and gazes at now…
Later, Joans repeats his first line, but with alternate spacing:
O great black masque [xspace] that is [xspace] me […]
What’s with the extra spacing? As I voice the text I reflexively treat hyperspacing as a signal to pause, like a rest in music. Doing so somewhat rejiggers, I think, the emphasis, so has rhetorical effect. I can’t ascertain intuitively whether it goes deeper than that, into the level of meaning, but this feature of presentation (widely used nowadays) has my attention.
Further in the poem, which has 30-plus lines, Joans deftly inserts what I take to be a colorful folk saying expressed with a tinge of ethnic dialect:
O great black masque [xspace] who says that it
half past pink since white is not a color […]
“Half past pink” ricochets hither and yon in charming fashion. The Semitic languages systemically dispense with the copula “to be”. It votes in absentia. English can dispense with it as well when it wants to. Something in how the enjambment magnifies “it” helps point to vernacular speech.
And yes, why do I have to keep marking on forms that I’m “White”? Who needs to know? I go around the house chanting, “I half past pink.”
(c) 2026 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
