Malik Wilson

Composed between 2018 and 2024, The Tribute Years, 2018-2024 is Malik Wilson's 6th book of poetry. Party is Sunday, September 20th, 6-8pm at Takoma House.

Written in 2015, published in 2018

Written between 2013-2014, published in 2018.

Written between 2013-2014, published in 2018.

Malik Wilson's 2nd book. Party was Monday, January 20th, 2014 at P.J. Clarke's / Sidecar in Washington, DC.

Malik Wilson's 1st book. Party was Sunday, June 9th, 2009 in Adam's Morgan, Washington, DC.

In The First Books, Malik Wilson describes how the emergence of a readerly consolation became synonymous with his own hidden success, his quiet development. In a world of constantly appended information, books stand as something finally finished, a statement in the world, a statement of the world - congruent, finished, settled. Their world, the worlds of books, becomes a trade and practice, connecting, in the old ways, impossible things. As such, as articles of travel and pleasure, deliverance and joy, books function as a wayfair for the needy and desperate. Petite elegies of our own little worlds, their speech has gone out into the world, and returns to us, at such lovely, productive times.

In this brief monograph, Malik Wilson runs down the line to describe how the years of reading and learning about war and statesmen, calamity and folly, destruction and possibility, established a kind of lament of the possible, and probable. In reading seriously and tenderly about tragedy and courage, weakness and strength, a sense of oneself – in private, sequestered, away from trouble – can be tested out, drawn together. The author intrigues how the stories of war and peace we read also read us, establishing our own small heroisms, our need for collaborate change, and the universal search to find a grand cause worth fighting for.

In The Font of Memory Malik Wilson remembers the last tickling days of Black Washington, of the Chocolate City, and its understated, unstated values, practices, beliefs. He unearths a universe-in-motion, and in miniature, through the houses of his grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, all just blocks away, in a time when we were all still together. 

In an age where 'knowledge' is more readily available than ever before, what it means to be taught, to learn, to be educated. As ideology, professed-commitment, and a kind of casual, disputatious assumption of inerrancy are assumed, how does one truly live a curious, thoughtful life in bond with the greatest older traditions in link with new insight. In a project in cooperation with the African American Institute, Malik Wilson helms a series of discussions of this important topic and shares in this short monograph how every man, every woman can best suit up for the most potentially intellectually profitable time in human history. "I don't want to be taught, I only want to learn," he has written, and in that captures something of the restless, itinerant, don't-tread-on-me sensibility so native to our people. 

In Moral Ecologies, Malik Wilson captures an interesting salable moment in African American culture, and American and world culture writ large. He notes that a tidy refusal - to be bought or sold - tells down from a kind of omni-American refusal to play along, or even play nice. He notes that this twin-headed, Scylla-Charybdis inheritance produces both austerity and lush possibility, and that, when properly rendered and in collaboration, it produces the cosmology of remarkable creations that have defined this country and shaped the world. 

The grand plan of the Mall, a set-aside space for memory, memorial, reminder, return, meets it's high point, its pensive and ongoing Main Street, at the Museum-bridge mall expanse. Helmed and hedged at either side by the Capitol building and the Washington Monument, it is one of the most compelling, situating vistas on earth. In The Beauty of the Washington Mall, Malik Wilson explains how the grand principles of Greek and Roman architecture, especially in the original National Gallery of Art building, bleed into a kind of quiet, civil, harmonious ideal - a dignified privacy of the inner world, that an outward civility, and unity with others, and one's community, might be reached.

Malik Wilson’s The Spirit of the Law explores the difference between a ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ law – that is to say, one seemingly penned from time immemorial and one subject to nuanced change. He describes how a hard law comes with an acceptance of human weakness, and need, and lack, and requires humility and moral architecture to determine locales of enjoining. Success in this area is not to the swift, bright, or wealthy, but to the honest and lowly. A soft law on the other hand, grants creative powers, and strength, even where it might be lacking. A hard law says ‘I know what I am’, a soft law says, ‘I believe in what I might be’. What we use to construct our own moral and civic possibilities will eventually tell the tale, and the house we build will be proven in time.  

The first edition of a three year triad, The Portrait Gallery muses on the import, value, and beauty of the Smithsonian's great gem. Hidden within Chinatown's hustle and bustle, the Portrait Gallery is a staid sanctuary of ongoing rest, muted civic history, and restrained portraiture. In this monoscript, Malik reflects on the aesthetic poetics of the Portrait Gallery, and makes a case that in the coming and going of museums lies a modern form of the ancient and sacred - offering an opportunity of sanctuary, passage, and reform. His argument is that such realities emerge whole cloth as it were, as a kind of ascendant moral and even spiritual conscience greater than the sum of its parts. The great gift of the Smithsonian, and of the Portrait Gallery in particular, stands unique among human accomplishment - rendering the beauty of the age, and of the ages before, to anyone, and everyone. 

Malik Wilson's first monoscript of art criticism puzzles through the work of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, its quiet and bold humility, its lush and restrained painterliness. Portraiture as a kind of subdued rhythmic and aesthetic assertion collapses the length between imagery, imagination, and ideas of the soul, and the puzzling nature of LYB's accomplishment in blurred and delayed envelopes of color and form remain mysterious. A thought-piece about the nature of "effective" art itself, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye presents a kind of phenomenological artistic induction, treating art, and its journey to the soul, as a kind of Large Hadron Collider of moral and physical beauty, aesthetic and artistic pleasure.

Beauty, Clothes, Consolation explains how physical beauty, and not just physical beauty seen, but the thoughtful presentation of such beauty represents a kind of forded consolation in the world. What is beautiful, even who or how they are beautiful presents ideas of structure and need, consolation and grace. ‘Fashion’ represents something more than style, it is the frame by which we view each other, define each other, determine each other. And determine ourselves. Malik Wilson puts forth that in the fuzzy world of what we desire, about what moves us, lies the detritus of who we are at our spiritual core. In uniting ourselves in that, in pressing forward with lanky courage, we wade into mysteries, and make them our own.

A sense of belonging, paired with a sense of exile, is the sine qua non of the artistic spirit, and Malik Wilson argues, a true spiritualism. In The Metaphor of the Ambassador, he argues that this image, especially how it is encountered through years of living in Washington, DC, enriches notions of adventure, community, continuity, and consolation. A true ambassador - one who is sent by another - should love some of the things of his called-to land, but in his should will be unconvertible, distant, in ways hard to tell. Yet even when home, his adventurous spirit, his sense of duty should call it for his beloved assignment. His ability to see both places, refracted upon each other, allows him to be both critic and participant, lover and nudger, as he partakes in the beauty of both places. Malik Wilson sits with such ideas, and considers the bearing they can have over our own lives, our own living.

Art's most ethereal, loose, evanescent and evasive form, dance celebrates, mourns, forms indissoluble patterns, lists along in multiple ways, signifies. In established cultures, it can also serve as a wayfarer, weather vane, canary in the coal mine, symptom. In our modern, disaffected age, dance spreads 'virally' but seems to have little rooted basis, just as we are. In The Beauty of Dance, Malik Wilson takes a pastiche-assemblage approach, recording instances of departure and consolation, and in haunting, ghostlike forms, imagines a new requiem for the body in motion.

The material world, as described by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, is fragrant, pregnant, full of secret meanings. Things that are made speak to us, inform us,  describe us, creating an inescapable odor of ideas. In A Symposium of the Natural World, Malik Wilson wades back into the earlier years, telling a dreamlike, childlike fable of natural enchantment, youthful wonder, and the fierce, constructed beauty that surrounds us. 

No one should go their whole lives without applying themselves to either retail or front-facing restaurant industry service. One really doesn't know about humanity, or oneself, or the strange inward optics binding coworkers, the voluptuous differences and attractions of the trade, or, most importantly, how one is changed oneself, through the process. 

As a medium of exchange, of disbursement, of process, and processing, 'service' goes beyond what it should be able to do and renders long possibilities of the heart and soul, of the mind and desire, of the need for work and the purposes to exclaim  something irreducibly human. 

Malik Wilson's music series takes a consequential, intimate look at music needed and music desired - its consoling effects and affects. He shows how music's subjects, and cultural subdivisions actually eke out a unique poetics of development, possibility, beauty. He goes on to show how certain music which may appear farther from us - culturally, nationally, notionally - can reveal itself at great, grand, deep structural levels. He shows that in these cases, such music wields a totemic, presumptive, explicative power, revealing and concealing, opening new lines of understanding, about the world, about ourselves.

Malik Wilson's music series takes a consequential, intimate look at music needed and music desired - its consoling effects and affects. He shows how music's subjects, and cultural subdivisions actually eke out a unique poetics of development, possibility, beauty. He goes on to show how certain music which may appear farther from us - culturally, nationally, notionally - can reveal itself at great, grand, deep structural levels. He shows that in these cases, such music wields a totemic, presumptive, explicative power, revealing and concealing, opening new lines of understanding, about the world, about ourselves.

In a moment where "movies" - organized images and sounds and visual and oral stories - are everywhere, the story of the movies, their ontological poetics and consoling and inspiring properties need more attention than ever. What movies were and are - in theaters, on discs, and now on screens everywhere we go - needs definitions and discussion both loose and fulsome, rich and spindly. The most visually astute generation that has ever lived - or at least the generation who has seen more stories than any other - can benefit from a thoughtful retreat, and retelling of the first things. What should happen soon, if this and other efforts can successfully occur, can be the greatest revival in film history, and perhaps its last, as the cosmological scale of what we mean when we talk about movies grows by the day. Malik Wilson's stubborn + humane telling preaches to us that a resolution to reside, to stay centered, to continue to believe in movies' compelling power is now more important than ever. 

In this short monoscript, Malik Wilson tells a telling tale. Were you there? Do you remember? Just how it was? Just how overwhelmed we were, impressed, forsaken? Excellence, and with a rhythmic attachment. Commitment, in a loose-masculine glow. Our great American Baryshnikov, sauntered down, having always won, and always winning. In The Beauty of Michael Jordan, Malik Wilson reminds us that the Greeks had it right - the centrality and beauty of competition, a woesome desire to stay as we are, can sometimes be interrupted - spiritually even - by a kind of irredentist glory, reminding us of things beyond words, things before words. 

No philosopher has had as much impact on Takoma as Gaston Bachelard, the white-bearded, passionate French genius. Boyish and bumptious, he combines a sensuous, urbane wonder with a rural, earth-bound pragmatism. For Malik Wilson and others, Bachelard is French accomplishment at its finest - insatiably curious, unrestrained by Anglo-Saxon nominalism, but able to let mysteries bubble in increasingly beautiful and seductive ways. 

Nowhere does his genius better show than in his considerations of things. Objets which not only take on meaning, but suggest truths and shape the handler, holder, dweller of said items. In Gaston Bachelard and Jim Rutherford: The Beauty of Things, Malik Wilson testifies to such truths through a kind of impression-catalogue of the lovingly and humbly restored workshop items of Jim Rutherford. In these small items of previous purpose, now rendered into decorative beauty, Malik Wilson tells a tale of purposes lost and found, intentions beyond intentions, and the consolation of ruins. In a young culture, and in a young country like America, Jim Rutherford's astute eye, hands, and heart are a tether to older ways, more established practices. 

African Americans Abroad is Malik Wilson's attempt to distill universal principles from three remarkable African Americans who worked in the Foreign Service or participated in foreign diplomacy abroad. Wilbur Wright, Ernest Wilson, and Wendy Wilson-Fall were all 'noticed', called upon, by people in the furthest places, people who knew little (or nothing) about the particularities of the African American experience. It begs the question, what did they see, and how do the crafted braids of sameness and difference, discipline and freedom, newness and tradition, show up when we are worlds away? Their experiences provide a kind of moral bas-relief of efficacious self-development, restless curiosity, and the doused scent - that all three carry - of other places, other ways. 

Men and women from the world over have been seduced by Paris' quiet, sensuous call. Whether rich or poor, king or pauper, so many have felt the stir, have been assuaged, consoled, brought to bear. In The Call of Paris, Malik tells his own story - 5 week-long trips alone as a young man, and how the city's speech, its very grammar, unfolded and changed him. Ernest Hemingway noted that to be "in Paris as a young man, it stays with you, because Paris is a movable feast." How it moves, and how the feast beguiles, is the subject of this short memoir. 

Beloved by poets and philosophers, lovers and warriors, only wine has the power to "gladden the hearts of man", as King David wrote. Used to perform miracles, as a recipe and antidote for consolation, like anything else, it is what you make of it, but precisely and humbly and confidently entered into, nothing can beguile, assuage, or settle like wine. 

In The Beauty of Wine, Malik Wilson shares his own origin and ongoing story of wine - one of a daily kind of attention, intention, and pre-arranged mourning - a way to mark the time, and, if only instantaneously, pause it, in search of the things that matter most. 

"Style", properly described, is hosts values, considerations, ontologies, theories of beauty + design, ideal, principles, even truths. The Beauty of the Takoma Style is an  elegy to a faded aristocracy, dappled things, a full, considered table. It argues that the 'elite feast' table, many bowls and petite plates spread out, food deeply flavorful, even painfully, limitingly so, teaches a kind of faith-in-practice for the best things life has to offer - a kind of ongoing study and wading into freedom. This formulation makes the most American sense, an omni-style that demands a certain honesty, a certain music, a muted, robust consolation, and a wine big enough, adept enough, quick-on-its-feet and achy enough to wrap it all up in a bow. Both a theory of fellowship and an ongoing image of the table, The Beauty of the Takoma Style is our first statement of purpose, first argument for beauty. 

This series of images displays the frayed, joyous formalism and lapsed presentation that characterizes the end of the meal, the silence after fellowship. Smudged glasses and collapsed plates, a lovingly ordered, disputed mess. The images point to a sacred kind of sexiness, muteness, tales of other rooms, other times, other people. 

"Such a place of crisscrossing ideals, motives, living. Such a saggy, snagglepuss joy. Such a locale of easy gestation, easy living. We put the L in local, whatever that means, but we also found a way to live here. Also, found a way to live, here."

In Malik Wilson's rambling, true fable, he speaks to the central material metaphor of his life - Lovely Takoma - and all that it has meant, means, will mean. 'A little town on the edge of the city', perfectly caught and sandwiched between two ideals, living simultaneously, the perfectly settled, finished, unsettled, unfinished nature of it all brought the first grand ideal of a lived settlement, and settled living. 

Museums are the canary in the coal mine of our late civilization, the "the bouquet of our keeping,", defining what we love, what we value, what we deem worthy to preserve. And nowhere, at any time, is there a richer providence, a more fulsome endowment, then our own Smithsonian institutions, where trillions of dollars in value has been carefully and painstakingly offered in kind, to the lonely soul, to the needy man. The architecture of appreciation, as it were, needed to keep up with such a gift is staggering, and impinges upon all various aspects of daily life. focusing in on the broadest questions that assail modern life. How must/should one live in the shadow of such great gifts? What do mercy, profiteering, easement really look like? How can I be ok, in the aftermath of such a bestowal? Museums answer this call in one sense, by directing the leitmotifs of the heart at our ongoing sagas and sieges, with their ordered, architectures offering of beauty.  

Men and women from the world over have been seduced by Paris' quiet, sensuous call. Whether rich or poor, king or pauper, so many have felt the stir, have been assuaged, consoled, brought to bear. In The Call of Paris, Malik tells his own story - 5 week-long trips alone as a young man, and how the city's speech, its very grammar, unfolded and changed him. Ernest Hemingway noted that to be "in Paris as a young man, it stays with you, because Paris is a movable feast." How it moves, and how the feast beguiles, is the subject of this short memoir. 

Beloved by poets and philosophers, lovers and warriors, only wine has the power to "gladden the hearts of man", as King David wrote. Used to perform miracles, as a recipe and antidote for consolation, like anything else, it is what you make of it, but precisely and humbly and confidently entered into, nothing can beguile, assuage, or settle like wine. 

In The Beauty of Wine, Malik Wilson shares his own origin and ongoing story of wine - one of a daily kind of attention, intention, and pre-arranged mourning - a way to mark the time, and, if only instantaneously, pause it, in search of the things that matter most. 

"Style", properly described, is hosts values, considerations, ontologies, theories of beauty + design, ideal, principles, even truths. The Beauty of the Takoma Style is an  elegy to a faded aristocracy, dappled things, a full, considered table. It argues that the 'elite feast' table, many bowls and petite plates spread out, food deeply flavorful, even painfully, limitingly so, teaches a kind of faith-in-practice for the best things life has to offer - a kind of ongoing study and wading into freedom. This formulation makes the most American sense, an omni-style that demands a certain honesty, a certain music, a muted, robust consolation, and a wine big enough, adept enough, quick-on-its-feet and achy enough to wrap it all up in a bow. Both a theory of fellowship and an ongoing image of the table, The Beauty of the Takoma Style is our first statement of purpose, first argument for beauty. 

This series of images displays the frayed, joyous formalism and lapsed presentation that characterizes the end of the meal, the silence after fellowship. Smudged glasses and collapsed plates, a lovingly ordered, disputed mess. The images point to a sacred kind of sexiness, muteness, tales of other rooms, other times, other people.