So, we’ve seen that today’s poem is highly compressed into its box-like shape and in that small space develops a rich concentration of images and repeated sounds. Another technique that knits and drives things forward is modulation in diction. In the first few lines, diction is formal, featuring technical terms from the field of astronomy like “Sirius” (the name of the Dog Star), “ephemerides” (tables giving coordinates of celestial bodies at different points in their orbits), “lunations” (lunar cycles), “Hubble” (a space telescope), and “ascending nodes” (elements that define the orientation of an elliptical orbit). Is it necessary to know the precise meanings of these terms in order to appreciate the poem? Of course not. The point is to notice that the diction is, in fact, unusually technical, and also to notice when it changes. From high, scientific language, the poem dives twice into vernacular, first in “Imitate them remarkable days” in lines 6-7 and again in line 11’s “One monkey don’t stop no show.” In general, diction evolves from technical and Latinate to simpler and more informal, a trend that culminates in the devastatingly forthright personal utterance of the poem’s last line: “I have spoken the best I know how.”
In the great tradition of poets like James Wright, the title, “Instruction, Final: To Brown Poets from Black Girl with Silver Leica,” is a poem unto itself. Of the title’s four adjectives, three of them are “brown,” “black,” and “silver,” an early signal that color is going to be important to this poem. “Instruction” is self-explanatory because the entire poem reads like a set of somewhat metaphorical directives for how to live as an artist. But why is the instruction “final?” That word by itself creates suspense and tension, as if the poet were saying, “This is the last chance you’ll have for instruction, and so it really matters that you listen.” An effective way to command reader attention, it ups the stakes from the outset.
Why are the instructions directed specifically at “Brown Poets,” and what is meant by that term? “Brown” can mean many things but here seems to designate nonwhite, historically oppressed peoples, a group of which the speaker, a “black girl,” is part. Why is it only “poets” who are being addressed? It seems to me that the speaker is addressing artists, people who want to transform experience into and by means of art, and the instructions are for the best way to practice that art. Finally, why is the title’s speaker carrying a camera, specifically a “silver Leica?” A camera is often used as a symbol of what the artist does—seeing, recording, and transforming experience. Leicas were made in Germany before WWI and dominated the market for high-end niche cameras until reflex camera technology made them obsolete. In the context of this decidedly edgy, contemporary poem (see, for example, the allusion to “James Brown” and current cultural icons), the speaker carries an artifact, a vintage but in its time highly effective technical device for seeing and recording experience, a thing that poetry aspires to do. I see the camera as both a nod to the traditional (white male European) canon and a statement of that canon’s outmoded limitations. Those traditional (often formal) poems are beautiful and elegant, the speaker seems to suggest. But they are of another less and less relevant time, and we should not mistake their beauty of form for the substance or beauty of the things they were trying to express.