Orders of Service by Willie Lee Kinard III
Reviewed by francxs gufan nan
Whenever I open Orders of Service: A Fugue (Alice James Books, 2023), Willie Lee Kinard III's glorious debut, and read their poems of remembrance and reclamation, somewhere I hear a choir singing. Kinard writes poems that spring from the intersection of growing up Black and queer in the Bible Belt. Their first standalone poem, "Self-Portrait as the Cricket," serves as a prelude to the subsequent four sections, introducing motifs that recur throughout. Climaxing in lines that echo Jericho Brown's duplex form—daisy-chained couplets in which the first line of each pair mirrors the second line of the previous stanza—Kinard's speaker sings:
My own name is a church of fields.
I listen for it when I put a man on his back.
A man on his back is a call & response.
My own name is a choir of churches.
My own name is a chorus of strumming.
Some nights, the only refrain I care sung.
Through repetition and variation, Kinard's couplets create a cadence similar to the call and response rhythms of many a Black church. The speaker's name is at once "a church," "a choir," and "a chorus"—both preacher and singer, in the same way gospel can mean music or the Word. Yet, at the same time, Kinard's speaker couples "a man on his back" with the spiritual metaphors, queering the lot. Even as their poems draw from classical and Biblical antecedents, Kinard sidesteps expected patterns of poetry and storytelling. Typically, an order of service is a prescribed process in pamphletized form for how to perform a rite or ceremony (such as a funeral, worship service, wedding, etc.). But Kinard's title, Orders of Service, pluralizes the phrase, adding melisma to its meaning. Instead of a single, structured outline, Kinard makes room outside the lines—for new poetic forms and new stories.
Where a reader may expect to find a table of contents, Kinard titles the section "Epyllia" (plural of "epyllion," meaning short epic poem). Where a reader may expect discrete epigraphs, Kinard quilts a cento-like poem from incomplete lines:
I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also:
—I CORINTHIANS 14:15 KJV
It matters what you call a thing:
—SOLMAZ SHARIF
For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.
—MATTHEW 12:34 NIV
By breaking the first two quotes at a colon, Kinard gifts their readers with a patchwork poem through epigraphs. The beauty of the cento—from the Greek meaning "to plant slips of trees"—is that even as Kinard uproots lines from their base text, they create meaning anew from the intertextual tension between the new poem and its source materials. In subsequent poems, Kinard similarly reimagines figures from the Western canon. In my personal favorite, "A Tangle of Gorgons." Kinard's speaker is a descendant of Medusa. Instead of a murderous evil, Kinard's Medusa-brood is a jaded seductress. Next, in "The Vision," Kinard casts Icarus as "a new Nike" along the lines of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, an early 2nd century sculpture that Kinard cites in the epigraph to the poem. Rather than an Icarus consumed by his own hubris and doomed to fall from the sky and drown, Kinard reimagines Icarus as victorious, "bound[ing] two octaves" towards the sun and stealing it.
Subtitled a fugue, Orders of Service holds its own poems in relationship to each other. Rather than each poem existing as a solitary episode, Kinard connects them into a larger score. Just as, in a musical sense, a traditional fugue begins with a single melody and is then joined by answering and transposed voices, Kinard orchestrates their poems in conversation with one another, or themselves. Kinard describes some of their world-building in the Notes section, tracing how characters across poems ("actors," Kinard calls them in their final Note) reappear in subsequent poems. For instance, in the Notes, Kinard tells us that the speaker of the first poem, "Self-Portrait as the Cricket," "can largely be 'followed' throughout the course of the manuscript." The second and third poems establish, respectively, a Choir and a collective speaker "functioning essentially as an onlooking Greek Chorus" which resurface in later poems. The speaker of a poem titled "Catfish" is "one of the 'cricket-fed & fried light' fish" mentioned offhandedly in an earlier poem, "What We Wayward Do."
Kinard even imbues one poem with consciousness: the abecedarian prose poem "Catalog of My Obsessions or Things I Answer to" is "cognizant of its own list contents & thus, has alphabetized them." Kinard implies that the speaker possesses an awareness of Kinard's pages beyond the confines of the speaker's own poem. Beginning with "alphabetization," the abecedarian goes on to list recurring motifs or themes from throughout Orders of Service, such as:
choirs & choir culture; choral responses; church; church services; cicadas; [...] orders of contents;
orthodoxy; patterns & processes; performance; [...] sugar; superstition; surrealism; sweetness;
things I answer to; titles & naming
Kinard's Notes section also shines light on how themes recur and evolve across the book. In overlapping series — the "Boomerang" sestet, the "Hymn" suite, and the "Automation" poems — Kinard arranges poems whose connective threads echo one another while also building upon themselves. The first of these, the "Boomerang" sestet, builds its echoing lines cumulatively across six poems, all sharing the title "Boomerang, or a Chorus of Onlooking Fireflies Captions the Previous Poem." The first "Boomerang" poem begins with a line flush left, then repeats the line, partially erased with an underscore, flush right:
They smelled humid & lightning followed.
____ smelled _____ & lightning followed.
The second "Boomerang" repeats the lines from its predecessor in palindrome form, enfolding and echoing a second line:
They smelled humid & lightning followed.
They hooded clouds & lightning followed.
____ hooded _____ & lightning followed.
____ smelled _____ & lightning followed.
By the sixth poem, Kinard has built a butterflied sestet:
They smelled humid & lightning followed.
They hooded clouds & lightning followed.
They rained fire & lightning followed.
They bulleted mercy & lightning followed.
Inverting, they wailed thunder; lightning followed.
In lieu of daybreak, lightning followed.
In lieu of ________, lightning followed.
Inverting, ____ wailed ______; lightning followed.
____ bulleted _____ & lightning followed.
____ rained ____ & lightning followed.
____ hooded _____ & lightning followed.
____ smelled _____ & lightning followed.
Each sentence is a "six-word story," its twin further down the page creating an effect of "rewinding & erasing as if in the six-second Instagram Boomerang flash video format," as Kinard explains in their Notes. Similarly, in the four-part "Automation" series, the later three poems are partial-erasures of the first "Automation" poem. Though the base text remains the same across all four poems, Kinard renders most of the poem into light-gray text, darkening into black only selected phrases, words, and letters. As a result, Kinard remixes each poem, fading out or dialing louder certain parts of the base text in order to draw out different melodies and messages from each variant poem. Thus, like a fugue's polyphony, Kinard's pieces at first "imitat[e] each other, but gradually diverge and become unique" (Alina Stefanescu).
In piece after piece, poetry and music sibling alongside one another. In various poems, half in the penultimate section, Kinard includes a song title and artist as an epigraph, citing that the poem was "occasioned by" or "yokes the lyrics of" singers from Mariah Carey to "gospel deep cuts,"
Drawing allusions to the world beyond their pages, Kinard's poems soar alongside Biblical passages, ancient Greek mythology, and contemporary figures alike. Kinard's brilliance resounds in the symphony they compose, where themes and characters resurface across pages like intertwining melodies, lingering in the mind long after the final verse.
My own name is a church of fields.
I listen for it when I put a man on his back.
A man on his back is a call & response.
My own name is a choir of churches.
My own name is a chorus of strumming.
Some nights, the only refrain I care sung.
Through repetition and variation, Kinard's couplets create a cadence similar to the call and response rhythms of many a Black church. The speaker's name is at once "a church," "a choir," and "a chorus"—both preacher and singer, in the same way gospel can mean music or the Word. Yet, at the same time, Kinard's speaker couples "a man on his back" with the spiritual metaphors, queering the lot. Even as their poems draw from classical and Biblical antecedents, Kinard sidesteps expected patterns of poetry and storytelling. Typically, an order of service is a prescribed process in pamphletized form for how to perform a rite or ceremony (such as a funeral, worship service, wedding, etc.). But Kinard's title, Orders of Service, pluralizes the phrase, adding melisma to its meaning. Instead of a single, structured outline, Kinard makes room outside the lines—for new poetic forms and new stories.
Where a reader may expect to find a table of contents, Kinard titles the section "Epyllia" (plural of "epyllion," meaning short epic poem). Where a reader may expect discrete epigraphs, Kinard quilts a cento-like poem from incomplete lines:
I will pray with the spirit, and I will pray with the understanding also:
—I CORINTHIANS 14:15 KJV
It matters what you call a thing:
—SOLMAZ SHARIF
For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.
—MATTHEW 12:34 NIV
By breaking the first two quotes at a colon, Kinard gifts their readers with a patchwork poem through epigraphs. The beauty of the cento—from the Greek meaning "to plant slips of trees"—is that even as Kinard uproots lines from their base text, they create meaning anew from the intertextual tension between the new poem and its source materials. In subsequent poems, Kinard similarly reimagines figures from the Western canon. In my personal favorite, "A Tangle of Gorgons." Kinard's speaker is a descendant of Medusa. Instead of a murderous evil, Kinard's Medusa-brood is a jaded seductress. Next, in "The Vision," Kinard casts Icarus as "a new Nike" along the lines of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, an early 2nd century sculpture that Kinard cites in the epigraph to the poem. Rather than an Icarus consumed by his own hubris and doomed to fall from the sky and drown, Kinard reimagines Icarus as victorious, "bound[ing] two octaves" towards the sun and stealing it.
Subtitled a fugue, Orders of Service holds its own poems in relationship to each other. Rather than each poem existing as a solitary episode, Kinard connects them into a larger score. Just as, in a musical sense, a traditional fugue begins with a single melody and is then joined by answering and transposed voices, Kinard orchestrates their poems in conversation with one another, or themselves. Kinard describes some of their world-building in the Notes section, tracing how characters across poems ("actors," Kinard calls them in their final Note) reappear in subsequent poems. For instance, in the Notes, Kinard tells us that the speaker of the first poem, "Self-Portrait as the Cricket," "can largely be 'followed' throughout the course of the manuscript." The second and third poems establish, respectively, a Choir and a collective speaker "functioning essentially as an onlooking Greek Chorus" which resurface in later poems. The speaker of a poem titled "Catfish" is "one of the 'cricket-fed & fried light' fish" mentioned offhandedly in an earlier poem, "What We Wayward Do."
Kinard even imbues one poem with consciousness: the abecedarian prose poem "Catalog of My Obsessions or Things I Answer to" is "cognizant of its own list contents & thus, has alphabetized them." Kinard implies that the speaker possesses an awareness of Kinard's pages beyond the confines of the speaker's own poem. Beginning with "alphabetization," the abecedarian goes on to list recurring motifs or themes from throughout Orders of Service, such as:
choirs & choir culture; choral responses; church; church services; cicadas; [...] orders of contents;
orthodoxy; patterns & processes; performance; [...] sugar; superstition; surrealism; sweetness;
things I answer to; titles & naming
Kinard's Notes section also shines light on how themes recur and evolve across the book. In overlapping series — the "Boomerang" sestet, the "Hymn" suite, and the "Automation" poems — Kinard arranges poems whose connective threads echo one another while also building upon themselves. The first of these, the "Boomerang" sestet, builds its echoing lines cumulatively across six poems, all sharing the title "Boomerang, or a Chorus of Onlooking Fireflies Captions the Previous Poem." The first "Boomerang" poem begins with a line flush left, then repeats the line, partially erased with an underscore, flush right:
They smelled humid & lightning followed.
____ smelled _____ & lightning followed.
The second "Boomerang" repeats the lines from its predecessor in palindrome form, enfolding and echoing a second line:
They smelled humid & lightning followed.
They hooded clouds & lightning followed.
____ hooded _____ & lightning followed.
____ smelled _____ & lightning followed.
By the sixth poem, Kinard has built a butterflied sestet:
They smelled humid & lightning followed.
They hooded clouds & lightning followed.
They rained fire & lightning followed.
They bulleted mercy & lightning followed.
Inverting, they wailed thunder; lightning followed.
In lieu of daybreak, lightning followed.
In lieu of ________, lightning followed.
Inverting, ____ wailed ______; lightning followed.
____ bulleted _____ & lightning followed.
____ rained ____ & lightning followed.
____ hooded _____ & lightning followed.
____ smelled _____ & lightning followed.
Each sentence is a "six-word story," its twin further down the page creating an effect of "rewinding & erasing as if in the six-second Instagram Boomerang flash video format," as Kinard explains in their Notes. Similarly, in the four-part "Automation" series, the later three poems are partial-erasures of the first "Automation" poem. Though the base text remains the same across all four poems, Kinard renders most of the poem into light-gray text, darkening into black only selected phrases, words, and letters. As a result, Kinard remixes each poem, fading out or dialing louder certain parts of the base text in order to draw out different melodies and messages from each variant poem. Thus, like a fugue's polyphony, Kinard's pieces at first "imitat[e] each other, but gradually diverge and become unique" (Alina Stefanescu).
In piece after piece, poetry and music sibling alongside one another. In various poems, half in the penultimate section, Kinard includes a song title and artist as an epigraph, citing that the poem was "occasioned by" or "yokes the lyrics of" singers from Mariah Carey to "gospel deep cuts,"
Drawing allusions to the world beyond their pages, Kinard's poems soar alongside Biblical passages, ancient Greek mythology, and contemporary figures alike. Kinard's brilliance resounds in the symphony they compose, where themes and characters resurface across pages like intertwining melodies, lingering in the mind long after the final verse.
Frances Nan (francxs gufan nan) is almost 33. They have received fellowships from the Open Mouth Poetry Retreat, Brooklyn Poets, and The Watering Hole.