John Murillo’s monumental debut collection of poetry Up Jumps the Boogie is one of the most important, influential books of poetry in my personal canon. While Murillo certainly was not the first poet to imbue his poems with a hip-hop aesthetic, Up Jumps the Boogie definitely marks a turning point. I am not sure if anyone managed to crystallize a hip-hop aesthetic, put it in conversation with the American and English poetic tradition, marry it to some of the most challenging contemporary forms, and then do all that for an entire book before Murillo. I don’t mean to overstate ya boy’s accomplishments. I know that folks like Adrian Matejka, Terrance Hayes, and many more deserve their head nods in this conversation. For me at least, Up Jumps the Boogie provided me with the most detailed blueprint about how to do this poetry shit while staying true to your roots in hip-hop.
Murillo’s sophomore collection Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry had a lot to live up to. It delivers. The collection largely features poems that comment on the buzz words of contemporary poetic discourse from the perspective of a sharp-eyed, East Coast outsider. Poems with titles such as “On Confessionalism,” “On Metaphor,” “On Negative Capability,” “On Lyric Narrative,” “On Epiphany,” and “On Prosody” abound. These are all terms the talking heads of poetry discuss ad infinitum. Murillo manages to punch new life into them by approaching the terms sideways with the raw material of life, rather than an explicit head-on conversation with poets and their thoughts. (The exception to this is “On Prosody,” which is probably my favorite poem in the collection.) “On Confessionalism,” then becomes a poem that talks about a time the speaker almost murdered someone. “On Negative Capability” becomes a poem about the recklessness of a group of young teens smoking blunts, pumping the gas pedal to thumping speakers. “On Prosody” becomes a poem about the rhythm of the voices fighting and howling in the neighboring apartment. My biggest beef with the collection is that Murillo cut what may have been one of the strongest poems from the manuscript, this jawbreaker of a poem published in Kweli Journal, entitled “Ars Poetica.” The poem clearly fits the themes of the manuscript, commenting on a traditional form from an outsider perspective. Featuring seventy pages of poetry, however, Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry is respectably slim, especially during these times when poetry collections seem to be getting longer and longer, unnecessarily so.
At the heart of collection lies a fierce series of sonnets, entitled “A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, By Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn,” meditating on police violence against communities of color and, importantly, the dilemma of resistance and retaliation. Murillo wrestles against the romanticization of violent resistance. “You dream of pistol smoke / and bacon, folded flags—and why feel shame? / Is it the dream? Or that it’s only dream?” Murillo pens. The title poem in the collection, likewise, critiques the vapidness of contemporary poets, pedantically discussing whatever is buzzing poetically while on the television “the muted news of another boy / shot dead and black in some city / now burning…” What these poets demonstrate is a divorce from the reality and conditions many communities in contemporary Amerikkka shoulder. The collection revolves out from this point, critiquing by means of brutal and vital truth-telling.
In this collection—which literally centers a conversation about police violence against communities of color—Murillo places an equally incisive eye inward. The first poem in the collection, “On Confessionalism,” most notably, includes a speaker confessing to pulling a trigger in the mouth of a rival three times only to have the gun jam: “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…” This confession is so deeply troubling, so painfully human, and literally opens the collection. Much in the way that Kendrick Lamar calls himself a hypocrite on “The Blacker the Berry” “when gang banging make me kill a n**** blacker than me?”, Murillo frames his meditation on police violence within a larger conversation about the the petty and monumental ways violence plays out in our communities.
I can’t end this review without mentioning this collection also features a poem dedicated to Yusef Komunyakaa—”Dear Yusef,” which is a darkly playful elaboration of the Nas line “I drank Moet with Medusa, give her shotguns in hell / From the spliff that I lift and inhale, it ain't hard to tell.” The collection ends with “Variation on a Theme by the Notorious B.I.G.”. Playing off of “Juicy,” Murillo details his come-up in the poetry game and hang-ups, a pointed, poignant (if ludicrous) way to tend the collection.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in hip-hop, contemporary poetics, police violence, Nuyorican poetics.