Today we turn to John Murillo’s Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry as we continue looking at several books that came out early in the pandemic:
“Well, there is the pandemic, certainly. But I believe this current moment to be equally defined by the worldwide protests against anti-Black violence. One thing that’s occurred to me—and, to be frank, saddened me to no end—is that there has never been, and may never be, a moment in which it is passé to write about black suffering. There is a poem in my first book that I would dedicate, when I read it to an audience, to Sean Bell. A couple years later, I added Oscar Grant to the dedication. Now, I can dedicate that same poem to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and it will read as if I wrote it specifically for this moment. Next year, the poem will be relevant because of another Black body dropped. And it’s not because I was at all prescient when I wrote that poem, or any of the poems in my new collection. It’s because the conditions that give rise to these poems have not changed, and—all recent public proclamations of organizational solidarity notwithstanding—show no signs of truly changing any time soon. All to say, the current moment is not just the current moment, it’s tradition.”
--John Murillo, in an interview with Dora Malech, July 2020
Born in Los Angeles, John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie, finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (2020), winner of the 2021 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His many honors include the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Times, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. He teaches at Wesleyan University and in the low residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada College.
Murillo’s poems appear in multiple issues of Best American Poetry and in the anthology Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African-American Poetry. Here’s “On Confessionalism,” from Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, first published in The Common and reprinted in Best American Poetry 2019.
On Confessionalism
Not sleepwalking, but waking still,
with my hand on a gun, and the gun
in a mouth, and the mouth
on the face of a man on his knees.
Autumn of ’89, and I’m standing
in a section 8 apartment parking lot,
pistol cocked, and staring down
at this man, then up into the mug
of an old woman staring, watering
the single sad flower to the left
of her stoop, the flower also staring,
my engine idling behind me, a slow
moaning bassline and the bark
of a dead rapper nudging me on.
All to say, someone’s brokenhearted.
And this man with the gun in his mouth—
this man who, like me, is really little
more than a boy—may or may not
have something to do with it.
May or may not have said a thing
or two, betrayed a secret, say,
that walked my love away. And why
not say it: She adored me. And I,
her. More than anyone, anything
in life, up to then, and then still,
for two decades after. And, therefore,
went for broke. Blacked out and woke
having gutted my piggy and pawned
all my gold to buy what a homeboy
said was a Beretta. Blacked out
and woke, my hand on a gun, the gun
in a mouth, a man, who was really
a boy, on his knees. And because
I loved the girl, I actually paused
before I pulled the trigger—once,
twice, three times—then panicked
not just because the gun jammed,
but because what if it hadn’t,
because who did I almost become,
there, that afternoon, in a section 8
apartment parking lot, pistol cocked,
with the sad flower staring, because
I knew the girl I loved—no matter
how this all played out—would never
have me back. Day of damaged ammo,
or grime that clogged the chamber.
Day of faulty rods, or springs come
loose in my fist. Day nobody died,
so why not hallelujah? Say amen or
Thank you? My mother sang for years
of God, babes and fools. My father,
lymph node masses fading from
his x-rays, said surviving one thing
means another comes and kills you.
He’s dead, and so, I trust him. Dead,
and so I’d wonder, years, about the work
I left undone—boy on his knees
a man now, risen, and likely plotting
his long way back to me. Fuck it.
I tucked my tool like the movie gangsters
do, and jumped back in my bucket.
Cold enough day to make a young man
weep, afternoon when everything,
or nothing, changed forever. The dead
rapper grunted, the bassline faded,
my spirits whispered something
from the trees. I left then lost the pistol
in a storm drain, somewhere between
that life and this. Left the pistol
in a storm drain, but can’t remember
ever wiping away my prints.
In an interview, when asked about the collective purpose writers have, Murillo answered:
“I believe literature has the potential to make us more human. Poetry, drama, literary fiction, creative nonfiction—when done right—can show us exactly who we are and who we still might become. For better or worse. So, yes, I do believe we have a collective purpose. Not necessarily as individuals, or in our individual works, but as a whole, I think we’re here to help us—humanity—do and be better.”
This humanitarian center to his project, his poems, his person, is immediately apparent when you read Murillo, and it’s clearly in evidence in “On Confessionalism.”
In the same interview he was asked: What’s the most daring thing you’ve ever put into words?
The answer: “A seventh grade love letter.”
So he’s funny, too, and that humor that also occasionally appears in his poems highlights their deep seriousness. This is especially in evidence in his linked sonnet sequence, “Renegades of Funk,” from Up Jump the Boogie. Murillo is a virtuoso when it comes to the sonnet, and at the heart of Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry is the magnificent “broken” crown, “A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn,” some of the most challenging work to appear in this reader’s lifetime.
These poems illustrate what Murillo has said in another Q and A: “I write, first of all, in the tradition of the witness.” His work as a witness is concentrated, full of clarity, invention, and a humanity made stronger by its vulnerability.
On Negative Capability
Whitewalls Mudflaps
Late night howling down
a dark dirt road Headlights
killed and so the world gone
black but for the two blunts
lit illuminating Jojo’s fake gold
grin One girl each screaming
from the backseat we raced
the red moon rawdogged
the stars His mama’s car
my daddy’s gun Public Enemy
Number One Seventeen and
simple we wannabe hard-
rocks threw rudeboy fingers
and gang signs at the sky
Blinded by the hot smoke
rising like the sirens
in the subwoofers blinded
by the crotchfunk rising
from all our eager selves We
mashed in perfect murk a city
block’s length at least
toward God toward God
knows what when or why
neither Jojo nor I not our
two dates screaming had a clue
or even care what the dark
ahead held Come road
come night come blackness
and the cold Come havoc
come mayhem Come down
God and see us Come
bloodshot moon running
alongside the ride as if
to warn us away from as if
to run us straight into some
jagged tooth and jackal throated
roadside ditch When Jojo
gunned the gas we pushed into
that night like a nest of sleeping
jaybirds shaken loose and
plunging Between our screams
a hush so heavy we could
almost hear what was waiting
in the dark
(from Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, first published in The Common)
