Calling this poem a griot's roll call is accurate, but it undersells the machinery. A griot recites a lineage the audience already half-knows, and the achievement is memory and delivery. Wone's poem does that and runs a second operation underneath it constantly: nearly every proper name is being decomposed, re-spelled, or split into a hidden English word, so the tribute and the wordplay are never separable events. This is closer to what a serious reading of the text has to reckon with — not one technique repeated, but a working kit of at least fifteen distinct devices, several of them stacked three deep inside a single line. What follows names them precisely, then slows down on the passages where the machinery is most visible.
Isolating each device by name is what makes the poem teachable rather than simply admirable. Below, each device, defined precisely, with its clearest instance in the text.
One shared surname lets two or three distinct women occupy a single grammatical slot.
A surname is respelled or run together with adjacent words so it reads as an ordinary verb. This is the poem's single most repeated trick, appearing at least four times with four different mechanisms.
A dead, familiar idiom is reactivated because a real surname happens to match one of its words.
An expected identity is set up on a shared name, then swerved away from at the last possible moment. Appears at least three times, forming a recognizable signature move rather than a one-off joke.
A fictional group name spells a real name using the first letters of its unrelated members — a puzzle hidden entirely inside a casual aside.
Each line's closing name becomes the next line's subject, so the sentence hands itself forward without stopping — the oral genealogy technique in modern dress.
An artist's own body of work is paraphrased back at them as tribute, so the citation and the praise are the same gesture.
Two surnames are paired not because they sound alike, but because they mean the same thing.
A name's own etymology is excavated and literalized in the scene around it.
An entire section runs on one field of vocabulary, mapping the poem's own syntax onto its subject.
Two relevant concepts are fused into a single coined word that exists nowhere outside the poem.
A first name doubles as a place, so the biography and the geography confirm each other.
A name is split at a seasonal word and handed forward to the next name in literal seasonal sequence.
The naming stops entirely and the poem speaks in a subject's actual recorded voice — rare enough to land hard when it happens.
All wordplay stops. A name and a fact are stated with no ornament at all — a rest, in the musical sense, that lets historical weight land unaided.
I saw Ananda talking talk shows with Iyanla who was preaching the gospel to Yolanda who was singing the gospel to Ms. Smith not Emma Azalia but the bass player Rhonda the First Ladies on stage couldn't be M.Obama Issa group called DuVernay R.A.A.E. featuring Rihanna Ava Andra and Esperanza all Rhimes ghostwritten by Shonda Taylor'd for Teyana and Zoe Saldana
Fourteen lines, and at minimum six distinct devices are running at once. The spine of the passage is anadiplosis — each line's final name becomes the next line's subject, a relay that never lets the sentence stop moving. But the verb choice across the handoff is doing exact, quiet work: Iyanla preaches the gospel — figuratively, a life coach's register — and hands it to Yolanda, who sings the gospel — literally, a performer's register. The chain moves from metaphor to fact in a single line, which is the passage enacting its own theme: testimony becomes more embodied the further it travels down the line.
Then the decoy fires twice in four lines — a name almost surfaces (Emma Azalia Hackley, then Michelle Obama), gets raised only to be corrected, and the correction requires a reader specific enough to have already guessed wrong. That's a punchline built entirely from the reader's own cultural fluency, used as the setup and then subverted.
And buried inside the fictional group name is the passage's most virtuosic move: DuVernay R.A.A.E. is a cryptogram. Take the first letters of the four unrelated women listed under it — Rihanna, Ava (DuVernay), Andra (Day), Esperanza (Spalding) — and they spell Issa Rae's own first name, cued a line earlier by "Issa," which is simultaneously the colloquial contraction "it's a" and Issa Rae's given name. The construction runs in two directions simultaneously: on the surface, a fictional supergroup; underneath, a solved puzzle. The trick is built so it never announces itself — a reader can miss the acrostic completely and the line still scans as a joke. That optionality, virtuosity available only to the reader who goes looking for it, is the mark of the passage's real craft.
The stanza closes on a self-reflexive wink — "all Rhimes ghostwritten by Shonda" uses Shonda Rhimes's own surname as a homophone for the poem's own material (rhymes), a rare moment where the text steps outside itself and comments on its own method using a name that already contains the word for it — and then resolves into an actual clean end-rhyme, Saldana against Teyana, after a long run of near-rhymes. The ear tightens right before the stanza lets go, the way a verse resolves into its hook.
Leontyne's Price was so nice it cooled a heated Alice Parker becoming a Walker in Rosa's purple colored Parks
Three lines, and the compression here is arguably tighter than the R.A.A.E. passage, because it layers biography, invention, literature, and civil rights history without a single wasted word. Alice Parker was the inventor who patented an early design for the central heating furnace — so "it cooled a heated Alice Parker" is not decorative wordplay draped over her name, it is a precise historical fact about her actual invention, expressed as a temperature pun. The line requires knowing what she built before the joke even registers as a joke.
"Becoming a Walker" then bridges to Alice Walker on the strength of a shared first name, and "purple colored Parks" does three things simultaneously: it evokes The Color Purple — Walker's own novel — through the adjective "purple"; it carries "colored," the era-specific racial term, forward into the same phrase; and it lands on Rosa Parks's surname as a literal place, a bench, a seat on a bus. Three historical registers — invention, literature, civil disobedience — are folded into six words, with the connective tissue never made explicit. The reader is trusted to supply the entire argument themselves.
from this political paper that Fannie Lou Hamer gave me it read that Mariah could Kerry Washington if the pac was backed by Stacy Ms. Abrams
This is the single densest homophonic pun in the entire poem. "Kerry Washington" is doing three jobs in one phrase: it names the actress; it functions as the verb "carry Washington," meaning to win the state or the capital, which is exact campaign-trail language for a candidate who takes a contested region; and it sits inside a stanza explicitly about a PAC and Stacey Abrams, so the electoral meaning is not incidental, it is the sentence's actual subject. Fannie Lou Hamer's presence as the one who "gave" the paper roots the whole passage in the literal history of Black political organizing, which means the pun is not just clever, it is thematically load-bearing — the wordplay is the argument that entertainment and electoral power are the same terrain.
Beneath the naming, several long rhyme structures run for stretches well beyond a single couplet — structures that function the way a griot's mono-rhyme run functions, as a mnemonic thread a listener can predict, confirm, and remember without a page in front of them.
What keeps a poem this dense from exhausting its reader is that it knows when to stop performing. Passages like "Claudette Colvin 15 years golden already down for the cause" or "I met three inventors / Sarah Goode Patricia Bath and Mary Kenner" carry no pun at all — the wordplay simply stops, and a fact is stated plainly. In a text built almost entirely from misdirection and layered reference, these unadorned lines function as a rest in the musical sense: a moment where the historical weight of a name is allowed to land without competition from the surrounding acrobatics. The alternation between virtuosity and stillness is itself a structural decision, not an absence of one — the poem is pacing its own breath.
"And you're from? Who invited you?" "Alice Dunbar, Frances Harper and Ms. Pleasant's daughter Henrietta suggested I come through….. my friends" "Ok, Wone, well come on in!!"
This exchange is worth isolating because it is the one moment the poem stops alluding to the griot tradition and simply performs it. In West African oral practice, a speaker earns the right to recite a lineage by first establishing their own — naming the ancestors and elders who authorize their presence before the recitation itself begins. Here, Wone is asked for exactly this credential at the door of the revue, and answers with a list of literary foremothers rather than a ticket. The scene is not a metaphor for the tradition. It is the tradition, staged as dialogue, with the author himself standing inside the roll call he is building — which is the clearest evidence in the entire poem that the naming is not observation from outside the lineage, but membership claimed and granted in real time.
Fifteen devices, several stacked three deep inside single lines, sustained across several hundred names without the machinery ever repeating itself in exactly the same form twice — that is the real technical claim this poem can make, and it is a rare one. Most catalog poems find one trick and lean on it. This one keeps inventing new ones the moment a reader might start to predict the last, then rests entirely in a plain unadorned line before starting again. The griot frame explains why the poem gathers names. It does not, by itself, explain how it keeps astonishing across the distance it travels. That is authorial control, sustained over thirty years, and it is the part of this work most worth preserving in exact detail — because it is the part a future reader could otherwise mistake for accident.