Matchstick Poetics and Black
Militant Love: John Murillo’s
‘Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry’
A review by Eric Morales-Franceschini
John Murillo, “Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry”
Four Way Books, 2020
88 pages, softcover, $16.95
For fans of his first collection, “Up Jump the Boogie” (2010), John Murillo’s “Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry” (2020) is a much-anticipated “sequel” that doesn’t disappoint. Written in conversational and testimonial style and with all the candor and subdued fury that makes us trust his voice, Murillo’s collection is intimate and cadenced storytelling with debts and odes to Black poets—not least the musical ones (i.e. Gil Scot-Heron, Notorious B.I.G., Marvin Gaye, etc.)—and to Black revolutionaries, from Nat Turner and Malcolm and Huey to all those anonymous Black rebels who have, as it were, set shit on fire—be it literally, lyrically, or both.
It would be too generic, thus, to say that this collection is about “race.” Nor would be quite right to say it’s about “Blackness,” as if such a name (or category) had any significance outside of its geopolitical and historical situatedness. Hence, it is situated within urban America, the “ruckus” and “rapture” of it. “On Prosody” conveys precisely the intonations beyond the concrete apparatus that is the tenements and pavement of the city: the “fisticuffs and hollers,” the “droning” and “caresses,” the sex and fights, the reminiscences and the new days, all within a neighbor’s earshot. And so the physicality of walls becomes a metaphor for the “hushed half light” in which life is lived in the city—or to be exact: the impossible circumstances in which black lives try to thrive.
“Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry” is not as such a series of melancholic or parodical riffs on capitalist or suburban America—as much I love, and we need, that kind of poetry. Nor is it an ethnographic poetics, with Murillo as “native informant” and us, the voyeurs before the spectacle of indigent blackness. Rather, it is an inquiry on justice: when will it come? In what modes, other than merely poetic or fictive? And to what lasting effect? Needless to say, it is not as such a philosophically abstract inquiry, as if history were irrelevant or too unruly. Here there is history, history that reads like a genealogy of violence. And while its rhizomes run deep, Murillo’s collection is situated in the history of our present: from the Panthers to the Rodney King “riots” of 1992 to the Movement for Black Lives. And so: state violence, yes, but also the rebellious outcries and the emancipatory desires they bespeak.
There are other modalities of violence, too, not least those amongst kin: father to son, father to daughter, husband to wife, and brother to brother. In the opening piece, “On Confessionalism,” the narrator holds his hand to a gun, “the gun/in the mouth, a man, who was really/a boy, on his knees.” And that narrator pulls the trigger, except that, inexplicably, the Beretta jams and the narrator flees, asking of himself (and us) “who did I almost become?” Indeed, so many of the poems reckon with “the animals we make of ourselves/and one another,” and in their homages to Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy, Mercy Me,” ask, “what’s goin’ on?”
The answer: murder. Let’s be more exact: police brutality and its outrageous impunity. Such is the locus around which Murillo organizes his poetic tributes and diagnoses. The lengthiest of poems, “A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn,” is exemplary to this end. Centrally placed and set off as its own section, the poem is itself a series of confessional vignettes that testify to the (im)possibility of turning the other cheek. “What/I want, I’m not supposed to Payback. Woe/and plenty trouble for the gunman’s clan./I’m not supposed to. But I want a brick,/a window. One good match, to watch it bloom.” As the poem’s title avows, these verses are not (or not yet) acts of mourning: they are psalms to a justice as old and as righteous as an eye for an eye—indeed, as old and as righteous as fire. And so the riotous rebellions of ’92 and those that came before and those that have come since: “We watched, in shock./The fury, sure. But more so that it took/this long to set it. All these matchstick years […]”
That fire becomes one of the text’s key motifs is no accident. Sure, it’s a literal referent. But Murillo’s poetry is interested, dare I say, in its theological connotations—not unlike James Baldwin in his indispensable “The Fire Next Time.” For fire is a sacral referent, too: that which purifies. And in this regard, that which is burnt becomes the sacrificial offering. To what god(s)? We don’t know. But we do know that it’s not an irrational, let alone inconsequential, act. It has a logic and an efficacy: “A lit/match put to gas-soaked rag, the bottle flung,/may die, but dying, leaves a burning house.” Indeed, as the anthropologists Marcel Maus and Henri Hubert insisted, every sacrifice comes down to the same thing, namely (a longing for) redemption.
The Etheridge Knight epigraph is, thereby, as revelatory as it is raw: “Fuck the whole muthafucking thing.” Why wouldn’t we put our faith in fire, so to speak? In this respect, Murillo’s collection cumulatively—and paradoxically—says, if I may paraphrase: “I could be … indeed, I want to be … violent … and this precisely because of, not despite, love.” A love of his kin, a love of Black dignity, and so the outrage every time a (filial) brother or sister is taken. Poetically, that love is expressed in Murillo’s homages to black music and to the black revolutionary tradition. We see it in the collection’s very title, reminiscent of the Panthers’ neologism “Amerikkka.” And while he doesn’t write with the same revolutionary enthusiasm of the Panthers, Murillo does honor and embody their critique of white supremacy and their refusal to partake in bourgeois liberal and black respectability politics—much less poetics. You’ll find no academic “civility” or trademarked “hope” here, just love—dangerous and dignified love: black militant love.
Martín Espada, that people’s poet, once said of Murillo that he was a “dangerous” poet. This is no less true today, if not more so. The back cover photograph of brother John says it all: here is the “professor on the block,” a poet wiser for the wear after all these “matchstick years.” Be it via confessionalism, metaphor, magical realism, negative capability, epiphany, lyric narrative, or prosody, we hear him crying out with explanatory rigor: “Blame/the times, and what they’ve made of us.” But, as the Panthers were fond of saying, there comes a time when one has to “seize the time.” And, for this, poetry (or the mere Word) will never suffice:
It ain’t enough to rabble-rouse. To run
off at the mouth. To speechify and sing.
Just ain’t enough to preach it. Poet, kin
to kin, pulpit to choir, as if song
were anything like Panther work. It ain’t.
Murillo’s poetics are not, thereby, invested in testimonial inasmuch as emancipatory politics; they’re not about speaking truth to inasmuch as the coming of power. Rarely do you read a book with so much love and fury all at once, and rarely does poetry leave you with a simultaneous sense of urgency and forbearance. Murillo leaves us poised to “let it bloom,” but weary about whether this will set the world right. Whatever its ecstasy and righteousness, and whether literal or lyrical, fire is but one modality of justice, and Murillo seems to be saying it alone won’t do. In an echo of Che Guevara, he seems to be saying there must be love, too. Not sentimental or erotic, but love with disciplinary swagger and a people’s profile. A love that says, to quote (as Murillo does) Gil Scott-Heron: “We beg your pardon, America. We beg your pardon, once again.”
The wait (10 years) for Murillo’s newest collection has been worth it, and its timing couldn’t be more apropos. Matchstick years call for matchstick poetics.
Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Tampa, Florida, e. m. franceschini is a former day laborer, US Army veteran, and community college grad who now holds a PhD from UC, Berkeley, and is Assistant Professor of English and Latin American Studies at the University of Georgia. His scholarly works have appeared in Global South Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Centro, and others, and his poetry in Moko, Somos en escrito, Chiricú, and others.