Sacriligion by L. Lamar Wilson, and: The Big Smoke by Adrian Matejka, and: Catastrophic Bliss by Myronn Hardy (review)

“African American poetry” is a term traditionally tethered to “racial” identity, like its ancestral brethren “Negro poetry” and “Black poetry”; that has been true since the eighteenth century. There’s a prevailing attitude that black or African American poets must deal with the elusive, metaphysical nature of blackness along with the more easily identifiable events of, say, American slavery; official and extra-legal discrimination; and white-on-black physical terrorism and emotional ridicule. This issue of the individual, artistic self versus the citizen of Negro/black/African American community(ies) arose in 1926, when Langston Hughes wrote his germinal essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”:

After every reading I answer questions like these from my own people: Do you think Negroes should always write about Negroes? I wish you wouldn’t read some of your poems to white folks. How do you find anything interesting in a place like a cabaret? Why do you write about black people? You aren’t black.

Certainly, many dearly long for that elusive post-”racial” moment in American society, but given the present resurgence of conflict in American society—a much larger entity than the territory of Contemporary American Poetry—the notion of what constitutes the artistic representation of “race” remains unclear. And Hughes’s words, those of a culturally mixed man who nevertheless identified as black (or rather, Negro), prove that one man’s African American poem is another man’s “raceless” poem that just happens to be about black/African American folk.

This year, three black, male poets presented books that seem to stand on either side of Hughes’s mountain.

Sacriligion, the first collection of poetry by L. Lamar Wilson, meditates on family, spirituality, sexuality, and belonging. In some of the longer poems like “Substantia Nigra,” one can see the hybridity of a nontraditional prose work taking shape, as in John Keene’s Annotations and with strong influences from Ego-Tripping, an early book by the Black Arts Movement poet Nikki Giovanni. Wilson shows his knowledge of his contemporary forebears; in this way, he works within already-existing African American literary traditions, those that insist on acknowledgment for the genre’s earlier practitioners.

Many of Wilson’s poems rest on the reconstructed foundation of black masculinity, if not necessarily a new black poetics, and those are the most satisfying, such as “In the Lion’s Den”:

bathe in rupaul’s orders ape beyoncé’s buck pimp tupac’s swagger

you better work, bitch faggot, punk, bulldagger, dyke

Taken within the context of still-lingering black/American homophobia, the last three lines of this poem are incredibly courageous and, again, allude to the later writing of James Baldwin, who, like Audre Lorde and other African American lgbt writers, complicated the matters of “race.”

In any first collection, some poems might have been set aside to present a more pared-down vision. Yet the joy in reading a first book lies in encountering the passion of the poet and the clues to the artist who will evolve. The urgency in many of Wilson’s poems offsets any missteps, and his exhilarating vulnerability leaves readers curious about future books from this promising poet.

Adrian Matejka’s The Big Smoke takes on the weighty subject of Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight world champion, in all his glorious frailty. The past decade has seen several poetry collections on black historical figures; however, Matejka’s third offering contains several essential vectors, in addition to his representation of history. His best poems are those with crafted attention to detail, especially the boxing poems like “Fisticuffs” and “Mouth Fighting.” The “Shadow” poems provide echoes of John Berryman’s complicated Mr. Bones figure, whom some continue to question as a troubling minstrel figure.

The sly wit in a poem like “Cannibalism” builds Johnson’s appeal, despite himself. Those familiar with nineteenth-century American history will...