Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry is a volume that oscillates seamlessly between past and present, the same way rack focusing works in filmmaking. Highlighting one image with razor sharp focus, while allowing the other to appear blurred in the background (and vice versa) is Murillo’s specialty. This cinematic trick allows him to exert complete control over what the audience takes away from his urgent, deftly-crafted poems. He wields that control in Kontemporary as he explores themes such as violence, racial injustice, revenge, and domestic abuse with anger, love, grace, and vulnerability. He also salutes poetic traditions like magical realism and negative capability alongside musical and literary forebears — Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Yusef Komunyakaa and Gil Scott Heron — just to name a few. This is a heavy weight to lift, but Murillo snatches it with ease.
Kontemporary, Murillo’s sophomore volume, examines some of the same haunts as his first volume, Up Jump the Boogie. This impressive debut was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery and the PEN Open Book awards. However, in Kontemporary we find the poet examining a whole life with maturity. The opening poem, entitled “On Confessionalism,” begins the book with a pending violence, while simultaneously referencing a poetic style of writing. It tells the fractured story of a young man who loses a girl, and ends up confronting the plausible cause of this loss with a pistol.
Blacked out
and woke, my hand on a gun, the gun
in a mouth, a man, who was really
a boy, on his knees.
The tragedy of two young black boys engaged here is accentuated by the alliterative music in these lines. In the end, the gun jams and no one gets shot. While the audience is shocked and relieved, the narrator’s view of what has transpired in this scene haunts the whole volume.
Cold enough day to make a young man
weep, afternoon when everything,
or nothing, changed forever.
Readers may wonder, how often does this happen to a young man of color? Although no actual crime is committed, how does this shadow the rest of the man’s life? Will it be “live by the sword, die by the sword”? Perhaps the music referenced in the poem’s background is telling — the “dead rapper nudging” could be Notorious B.I.G. Even more clever is that Murillo gives B.I.G. his very own stellar tribute in the last poem of the book.
In Up Jump, Murillo has a signature mini-epic poem called “Flowers for Etheridge.” It is an ode to the influential Black Arts Movement poet Etheridge Knight. And Kontemporary includes a similar quasi-epic poem entitled “A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn.” The epicenter of this gem peers at the 2014 Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley shooting of two police officers. The officers died, and afterwards, Brinsley killed himself. However, this poem is more than a free verse repeat from Murillo’s first volume; isn is a sophisticated examination of racial in/justice through a crown of sonnets. Going even more meta, Murillo places epigraphs from various African American male poets at the top of each sonnet, sometimes even mimicking the style of the quoted poet quoted. As readers can see, both the content and the form are intense, but purification by fire as a metaphor is crucial.
It’s natural, no, to put your faith in fire?
The way it makes new all it touches. How
a city, let’s say, might become, by way
of time and riot, pure.
Unlike “Flowers for Etheridge” this poem is more than a lament, it’s a meditation, an invitation to think about justice and who gets it — if, when, and how.
Despite these heavy themes of violence and racial injustice, Murillo’s new volume does not drag with heaviness. The love of music, and Murillo’s deceased father, are also themes that unite Kontemporary. Music is embodied both in mentions of famous artists and in Murillo’s lyrics. In Up Jump, music is also a huge character. Musical artists such as Chaka Khan and Marvin Gaye (who gets a special poem entitled after one of his songs — “Trouble Man”) appear. However, in Kontemporary, music reappears but in a much more complex way. For example, take Murillo’s “Upon Reading that Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds,” Murillo’s opening line “I think of the first two sparrows I met when walking home …” invites readers to listen to birds, too. Later, birds invite the narrator, “They called to me —something between squawk and chirp, something between song and prayer — to do something.” But as readers descend into the poem, the focus blurs the birds’ melodies, and brings the sounds of domestic abuse to the forefront. Just that quickly, Murillo shifts readers from ornithology to anthropology.
Two of my favorite poems are “On Metaphor” and “Poem Ending and Beginning on Lines by Larry Levis.” “On Metaphor” is a small and impactful poem about finding photographs, and a pistol, in the back of the narrator’s father’s closet. The poem ends with
… I think I see my father
Reflected in the steel. Wait, no —
Not my father. It’s me.
This gorgeous line conjures the last line of Komunyakaa’s “Facing It.” Another fave of mine, “Poem Beginning …” is really a meditation on getting older while youngins watch the narrator lifting weights. I’m heartened to see an Afro-Chicano poet engaged in critical self-reflection and rejecting reductive notions of masculinity. Actually, this may be a trend, considering last year’s Scorsese and Tarantino films are arguably doing similar work. This gives me great comfort because grey hairs and crow’s feet have been “women’s worries” for far too long.
Rarely do I find a volume as honest and close to the bone as Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry. Murillo can hold both a .45 and a sunflower in the same hand without flinching. And these dichotomies do represent life in its truest form. Kontemporary is a sincere look at a fully-lived life, and all the things in it.
[Published by Four Way Books on March 2, 2020, 104 pages, $16.95 paperback]