This week’s ‘Poem of the Week’ comes courtesy of one of my new favorite poets, John Murillo.
Murillo’s work, similar to many other poets that I’ve stumbled onto this past year, came to my attention purely by chance—his newest collection, Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, was on the ‘New Releases’ shelf at the local library, and I took one look at the cover and walked over to the checkout area with it in my hand. The blurb on the back also sounded like the kind of poetry that I’m interested in—it said the book ‘is a reflective look at the legacy of institutional, accepted violence against Blacks and Latinos and the personal and societal wreckage wrought by long histories of subjugation.’ Now, while that may sound a bit heavy, I think it sounds fascinating. And that’s just a personal choice—I’ve grown to discover, over the past year since I started devouring poetry collections during quarantine and the ‘stay at home’ situation society is still going through, that I like to read poetry collections that try to not only tell a story, but are personal and have messages about the kind of change that American society must go through today. Give me poetry that forces me to be uncomfortable, and to question where we are as a society and our agreed-upon American history. Give me poetry that shows that America hasn’t always been the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave, but a nation full of contradictions and horrors wreaked upon those who are people of color and the enduring struggles and overcoming of those obstacles by the same people. Admittedly, that isn’t everyone’s cup of tea right now, or ever, but that’s what’s going through my mind as I read poetry collections in the current moment.
And John Murillo more than delivers.
Murillo, a poet and a playwright, was born the son of an African-American father and a Mexican mother, and spent his formative years growing up in Los Angeles. After graduating from high school, he attended Howard University and New York University, where he earned an MFA. He published his first collection of poems, Up Jump the Boogie, in 2010, and it was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Open Book Award, along with being named one of Huffington Post’s ‘Ten Recent Books of Poetry You Should Read Right Now.’ Soon after, his choreo-play, Trigger, premiered with the Edgeworks Dance Theater in 2011.
Currently, Murillo lives in Brooklyn and is an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University, while also teaching in the low residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada College. He has won a Pushcart Prize, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Besides his two collections of poetry, his work has been published in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Poetry 2017, 2019, & 2020, amongst many other publications.
Much of Murillo’s work is done in both formal and free verse, sometimes both within one poem, as he ‘engages themes of family history and personal identity,’ according to the Poetry Foundation. When speaking with the Poetry Society of America, he said: ‘I write, first of all, in the tradition of the witness.’ His poems deal with the streets of Los Angeles, confliction and guilt related to personal identity, loss and grief and their effects on the human psyche, familial relations and history, historical scars, marginalized populations, and gang warfare in Los Angeles. His poems cut deep, their themes dark and heavy and razor-sharp, but most of them have hope shining through in-between the cracks.
In many of the poems in Kontemporary American Poetry, Murillo is exploring his memories by putting them down on the page, plumbing his earlier life and his family history for life lessons and ways to cope with the overwhelming sadness of seeing so much systematic violence against black and brown people and what to do about it. His poems can be bleak, admittedly, but the language he uses, and the poetic devices he is able to hide in a seemingly otherwise normal free verse poem, is what makes his poetry that of a genius.
The poem I chose this week from Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry is called ‘Variation on a Theme by Elizabeth Bishop.’ Bishop, one of the giants of poetry in the 20th century, wrote a poem called ‘One Art,’ which deals mainly with the theme of loss and how to move on from it, saying that one must ‘exercise the art of losing to catch up with a healthy pace of life.’ In other words, if a person never deals with loss and the accompanying emotions, he or she can never live a full, well-rounded life.
In Murillo’s poem, he dwells on the same kind of sentiment, but his poem is much different from Bishop’s. It’s darker, sadder, and more personal, all of it written as an account of Murillo’s life. But, at the same time, I would argue that it’s also more hopeful. The main body of the poem deals with events that have happened to Murillo over the years (presumably, that is; I don’t know this detail for sure, and I’m making this assumption based on how personal all his other poetry is and what he’s said in interviews), and some of them are more than heavy—the poem begins with losing a girlfriend and then five friends before quickly moving on to saying that Murillo has gone crazy: ‘Lose money, lose time, lose your natural mind.’ He then becomes pessimistic, saying to ‘learn to leave others’ while ‘losing and losing again.’ He talks about the imagery of his father’s coffin before moving on to describing seeing his sister through the prism of prison glass, and the accompanying picture he paints of the two moments in time is haunting, juxtaposing a funeral home in a way with a prison visiting room. He mentions an uncle who struggled with diabetes, and then riffs on going to bed alone at night, staring up at the ceiling and having nothing else left in the world to care about.
Sounds dark, right? I’d argue the opposite. By relentlessly telling readers what he has lost, Murillo is seemingly getting these depressing memories off of his chest, and we as readers get to follow the journey that he’s been on as he writes. He starts at the beginning, when he was a young boy chasing after a girl with puppy love, and ends in the current moment, when Murillo is an older man in his middle decades and has been around the block more than a few times, moving from the largest city on the West Coast to the largest city on the East Coast. By listing off what he has lost, he’s opening a floodgate in his mind and in his heart, allowing his memories to become public to those who will journey with him through his work, and he’s exorcising his personal demons created by bad memories by getting it all off his chest. His relentless dark and seemingly pessimistic listing of everything that he’s ever lost is more like an inventory of the challenges that he’s had to face and overcome, the challenges that didn’t end up holding him back in the end and instead allowed him to become the man he is today, one who is alive and breathing and with both legs still intact.
I will admit that the ending of the poem can be interpreted in two different ways. The way I initially read it was with a sense of optimism—he hears a drunk man laughing late at night out his window and mistakes it for that of a child. A child laughing is an innocent and happy image, one that is universal I would argue, and by mistaking the old drunk man laughing at the moon for that of a young child, it shows that there are two ways to look at everything. Murillo can become an old, bitter man, mad at the world for making him lose so much and not paying attention to what he has, or he can look back on all the loss, remark at how resilient it’s made him, and go to bed with a smile on his face, the innocence of childhood laugher softly putting him at ease.
After reading the ending a few more times, I saw another interpretation—that life can mask its inadequacies, that what might seem good and pure at first can really be nothing more than the Devil hiding in plain clothes, and that humans can still be naïve and optimistic after so many years of loss. I choose to think that Murillo wasn’t trying to express this sentiment with the ending of the poem, but it’s still something that makes me reread the poem in a different light, one darker than the other, and it adds a new dimension to the poem, forcing me to look at it in a different way than just a straightforward poem with a straightforward message.
To place a copy of Murillo’s brilliant second collection Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry on hold, head over to our catalog here, or purchase a copy through Amazon here or through a local bookstore here.
'Variation on a Theme by Elizabeth Bishop'
Start with loss. Lose everything. Then lose it all again.
Lose a good woman on a bad day. Find a better woman,
then lose five friends chasing her. Learn to lose as if
your life depended on it. Learn that your life depends on it.
Learn it like karate, like riding a bike. Learn it, master it.
Lose money, lose time, lose your natural mind.
Get left behind, then learn to leave others. Lose and
lose again. Measure a father’s coffin against a cousin’s
crashing T-cells. Kiss your sister through prison glass.
Know why your woman’s not answering her phone.
Lose sleep. Lose religion. Lose your wallet in El Segundo.
Open your window. Listen: the last slow notes
of a Donny Hathaway song. A child crying. Listen:
a drunk man is cussing out the moon. He sounds like
your dead uncle, who, before he left, lost a leg
to sugar. Shame. Learn what’s given can be taken;
what can be taken, will. This you can bet on without
losing. Sure as nightfall and an empty bed. Lose
and lose again. Lose until it’s second nature. Losing
farther, losing faster. Lean out your open window, listen:
the child is laughing now. No, it’s the drunk man again
in the street, losing his voice, suffering each invisible star.
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