A Reckoning

Transcript of episode

Episode transcripts are provided to make this podcast accessible to a wider audience. Please note that interviews featured in this episode have been edited for concision and clarity.

SPEAKERS
John Murillo, Camille Rankine

John Murillo
I love that word, “reckoning.” I think it's so appropriate. I kind of shy away from big words like justice and things like that. But I think, you know, reckoning, there is a lot of that happening.

(Music starts)

Camille Rankine (Host)
Welcome to The Glimpse. I'm your host Camille Rankine. John Murillo doesn't shy away from reckoning. John is a poet and a teacher and has received fellowships from the NEA, Cave Canem, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, among many others. His debut collection, Up Jump the Boogie, was a finalist for several awards, and his highly anticipated follow-up collection was released in 2020. John Murillo is our guest today, on The Glimpse.

(music trails out)

Camille
Reading John Murillo’s most recent book, Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, I found myself suspended, or maybe entangled, in this complex emotional web. The work is threaded through with considerations of rage, violence, and anguish and the forces that create them. But at the same time, there's a delicacy to the poems and a tight control. I felt as if the poems took this question, “What are men capable of?”, and held it up to light, examined it under glass, through a skillful, musical lyricism. Welcome, John. Thanks for talking with us today.

John
Thanks for having me.

Camille
So I wanted to ask you about that title, Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry. Is this book a sort of statement on poetics for you?

John
In a way it is. There were ten years between books and I had a chance to sit off to the side and watch people writing their books and promoting their books and all this and that. And I think one of the things I was trying to do with the book is to just bring something honest back that I thought was lacking. I thought a lot of what I was seeing and reading seemed performative in many ways, so it is kind of a critique of [that], and me just kind of trolling in some ways. (Camille laughs) But also, if that makes any sense, trying to be as authentic as possible at the same time.

Camille
Yeah, that's funny. I love that you use the word trolling. I did feel, reading the book so many times…what are you up to? It was a little bit of a wink, I thought.

John
Exactly. Well, I am trolling myself too, you know? I think that's really, more than anything in those poems, what I'm trying to get at, it's this kind of a self-check. Right?

Camille
Yeah, definitely, that self-check, I think is so present throughout the book and one of the things that I feel was just continually complicating the poems I was reading. And I just really loved that element of it so much. So speaking of, I would love for you to read one of the poems from the book, if you would oblige us.

John Murillo
Absolutely. I think I'm reading “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 never got around
to wiping away the prints.

"On Confessionalism" by John Murillo, from Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books, 2020)



Camille
Thank you so much for that.

John
Thank you.

Camille
I love that poem and it's a long one. It really sustains your interest and pulls you along.

John
When I'm giving readings, that’s the thing, I feel bad for the listeners often, because I write really long poems. And I'm just hoping that they're paying attention and staying with me the whole time, because you never know.

Camille
I want to ask you about the title, “On Confessionalism.” Why did you choose that title? And are you making an argument about confessionalism here?

John
I don't know that I'm consciously making an argument. So one of the things I was trying to do in the book, at least for myself, really, was to think about this space between our lived lives and the lives that we show others, or, rather, our true selves and our performed selves. And also the way we perform self to self, right, and the way memory changes over time. So I'm confessing something in that poem. But also what I'm doing is just playing with memory and fiction and the way we fictionalize memory.

Camille
I think there are some things that you don't want to admit to yourself, even when you're confessing. That's something that is maybe one of the biggest challenges. There are things that you don't want to open that door, even to yourself. So to do it in a confession feels impossible. I feel like that is something that must be occurring for people as well.

John
Yeah, all the time, all the time.

Camille
This is the first poem in the book, can you talk about why you made the choice to start here?

John
I didn't want the poems about violence or, let's say, police or state-sanctioned violence to take up too much psychic territory. I wanted it to still be in conversation with, or…about the violences we cause one another and self. So, the first poem, that one that I just read, it has to do with violence, but it's more of an interpersonal violence. And I think it helps to set up a voice that is really speaking throughout the rest of the poems and serves as a touchstone. If I would have started with another poem, it would have framed the book differently.

Camille
I thought the ending was really interesting too, the way that we have this ending where the prints are still on the gun. That’s the image and where we exit the poem. And it feels like sort of this acknowledgment that there's a chance for this to reverberate still. That this event is not closed, it's not over, there's still this sort of dangling end.

John
It's the prints that are left on the gun, but also the prints in terms of the impression that is left on the speaker. Right? So the speaker is always looking over their shoulder, throughout the rest of their life.

Camille
I think that's the impression it leaves you with, that sense that this can still come back to you. It's not a closed door. I think in part because there's a sense of the reckoning with the event as it's continuous in the poem, the way we see that revision and reframing and re-understanding. That reckoning continues kind of throughout.

John
I love that word, “reckoning.” I think it's so appropriate.
(John takes a deep breath and exhales)
I kind of shy away from big words like justice and things like that. But I think, you know, “reckoning,” there is a lot of that happening and has been happening for the last several years. And maybe this is why so many of us are inauthentic with the selves that we create, is that we're kind of flinching at the idea of that reckoning.

Camille
One of the things I was thinking about, with this poem and the book as a whole, was there's a lot of exploration of violence and anger, and their entanglement with masculinity as well, which I think is a really fraught thing for black and brown people and black and brown men. I wondered, is that something that you were consciously navigating as you made these poems?

John
So one of the things that is important to me—and I wasn't writing towards this consciously—are the ways that we've inherited, as black and brown men, this idea that masculinity is dependent upon how effective we can enact violence, on others, on ourselves, right?

I think about my generation growing up in the 70s and 80s and the effect the Vietnam War had on us, in that a lot of our fathers were sent out to combat and either did not come back or came back damaged and left a whole generation of us boys teaching each other how to be men. And a boy’s idea of a man is this kind of cartoonish, hyper-violent, masculine brute, right.

And I think a lot of the issues that I had coming up was, what I felt was, a shortcoming, my inability to live up to a lot of that and trying to do my best to. So a lot of the things that I've done in my own life, that have brought me the most shame, have really been me, acting out of that sense of wanting to prove myself to some abstract judge of what is masculine, that I too am a man.

Camille
I really liked hearing your thinking through that. I think growing up in this country, it's impossible for violence not to be kind of touching you and forming you in some way.

John
I think you're absolutely right. And it informs so much by how we interact with one another. And I think one possible response to that is tenderness and care. When I think about my students, just what so many of them are going through and the world that they're inheriting, it just makes me adore them that much more, and the same with friends and family members. You know, the world is such a rough place, that I think it really calls for more of that care, more of that tenderness.

Camille
So thinking about this poem, I want to ask one more thing about the way you utilize music and repetition. I wonder if you could talk about how sound plays into the way you make a poem.

John
I think my first encounter with poetry was with my ears, not my eyes. I came to poetry not as a reader, at first; I came as a listener, and the poets I listened to were rappers, were MCs, and I came to writing as a rapper. So for me sound, music, has always been really important.

I think Lawrence Ferlinghetti once said that the printing press ruined poetry. And one of the things I think he meant by that was when we started writing for the page, a lot of us lost that sense of the oral and aural pleasures that poetry can give. And I think that when the poems are really working, when they are firing on all cylinders, it's part song, part cinema. So your images are working, but also, you have something that's keeping the reader or the listener engaged. (break music starts)
And so I think that when the poems are really working well, there's no separation, right?

Camille
I think this is a good time for a little break.

(break music ends)

BREAK
A message from co founders Cathy and Peter Halstead:

We hope you're enjoying The Glimpse. It's just one small part of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. We are the founders, Cathy and Peter Halstead. Our goal is to make great poetry more accessible to everyone. And we do that in a variety of ways. Through partnerships, our film series, this podcast, and our website, brinkerhoffpoetry.org. We hope these works will lure you into a parallel universe, the way a Möbius strip brings you into another dimension without leaving the page you're on. Thank you so much for listening.


BACK FROM BREAK

Camille
Okay, we're back. So we're gonna talk about a poem that inspires you. Can you tell us which poem you've chosen?

John Murillo
So I've chosen this poem by one of my favorite poets, Etheridge Knight. Etheridge Knight is one of my favorite poets; this is not one of my favorite Etheridge Knight poems. But there's something compelling about this. I'll read it and then I’ll talk about it.

So the poem is called “Cop-Out Session.”


I done shot dope, been to jail, swilled
wine, ripped off sisters, passed bad checks,
changed my name, howled at the moon,
wrote poems, turned
backover flips, flipped over backwards
(in other words)
I been confused, fucked up, scared, phony
and jive
to a whole / lot of people.

Haven't you?

In one way or another?

Enybody else wanna cop-out?



"Cop-Out Session" by Etheridge Knight is from the book The Essential Etheridge Knight, by Etheridge Knight, © 1986. Aired by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.

John
So this is a short poem of his, but what I find most compelling—he's an uneven poet, so some poems are way better than others. At his best, he's really singing. But one of the things that I love about him, in addition to his range, is how honest he is, right?

For your listeners who may not know, Etheridge Knight was a poet who served in the Korean War. In the war, he got a shrapnel wound, and, because of the shrapnel wound, developed an addiction to, I think, opioids, painkillers. Once he was discharged, he committed a robbery or burglary, trying to feed his addiction, and went to prison. And it was in prison where he started writing and reading poems. While he was in prison, he began corresponding with other poets, Gwendolyn Brooks among them.

He got out and is one of the—I think—most important poets in the tradition. He's known primarily for his prison poems. But he also has some really beautiful love poems. And in that poem, in particular, I just love the honesty. He's just putting it all out there. I've done this, I've done that, I'm a piece of shit, blah blah blah, aren't you?

Camille
Yeah, yeah. It definitely has that… self-critical gaze. Like we were talking about the idea of reckoning and how that has to be inward, as well as outward, and how people have such a hard time with that, understandably. And I love what you're saying about that notion of being a good person and how it's like a posture people want to adopt but don't want to perform.

John
And even that idea, right, Camille, that idea of a good person, like what does that even mean? We're very complex, right? And the thing that I noticed just in the course of us living our lives, becoming who we are going to be, you will hurt people. But I think this idea, when we reduce it to such a binary, good and bad or good and evil—which is a really juvenile way of looking at things, I think,—we do ourselves a disservice as humans, and also, especially, as writers.

Camille
As a writer, I think it's really important to never exempt yourself from seeing critically and analytically. And I like that this poem, it's both doing that work, but it also was a confrontation at the end, like—and you? Your turn.

John
Yeah. And so you read a poem like that and you either take up the challenge or you don't, right? But if you're taking it up honestly, you know, there is some risk involved. You might reveal a self to yourself that is hard to live with, you may lose friends, you may lose institutional support…that's a real thing.

Camille
I'm thinking about the way this poem moves, too. You know, there's a moment halfway through, where he kind of distills and kind of reframes what everything above means. In other words, I've been confused, fucked up, scared, phony, and jive. It's like another confession, another layer of confession that happens there.

John
Absolutely. I think there's something in this moment, it’s so vulnerable, so raw, there's nothing, there's no dressing it up. It's just like, look, this is what it is. And each of those things, when you think about, again, this self that we present, how many of us are willing to say that we've been scared? And phony? Right?

Camille
You said this was not your favorite Etheridge Knight poem. Do you have a favorite?

John
Wow. You know? Yeah, I do actually. I don’t even know why I am acting like that is a hard question. “Feeling Fucked Up” is my favorite Etheridge Knight poem.

Camille
Mine too! I'm obsessed with that poem. It's so good.

John
I mean, it's so good. And I mean, and to me, it's like when you talk about love poems. That's it right there.

Camille
Yeah, so before we wrap up, I want to ask you what, what are you working on right now? Do you have anything in the works?

John
I've been scribbling badly for the past couple of years. But I did finish a collection of translations. Rafael Alberti, his book Concerning the Angels, I translated that this past year and that's coming out in 2025. Nicole and I, we wrapped up the Dear Yusef anthology, editing that, and it's coming out in 2024. [We recorded with John in December 2023.]

But as far as the poems, I'm kind of trying to vary my influences, listening to different music, watching different films, reading different poets, and just seeing what I can glean from them. And just waiting and seeing how it affects the writing and just giving myself time. I hope there's not ten years between books two and three.

(music starts)

Camille Rankine
Yeah, well, I'll give you all the grace, you take your time. You take your time, John.

John
(John laughs) Thank you.


PERMISSIONS + CREDITS



Camille Rankine
Thanks for joining us today. I'm your host, Camille Rankine.

John's poem “On Confessionalism” from his book Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry was aired with permission from Four Way Books.

The Etheridge Knight poem “Cop Out Session” comes from the book The Essential Etheridge Knight, copyright 1986. Thanks to the University of Pittsburgh Press for permission to air it.

Coming up next week, Ama Codjoe digs into The Bluest Nude and talks about why Gwendolyn Brooks shows up in some unlikely places in her poetry.

Make sure to like and subscribe to The Glimpse wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find episodes on our website, brinkerhoff poetry.org. If you have any questions or comments, please drop us an email at TheGlimpsePoetryPodcast@gmail.com. The Glimpse is a production of the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation. I'm your host, Camille Rankine.

Our senior producer is Jennifer Wolfe. Kat Yore is our technical director and mixing engineer. Editorial Director Amanda Glassman is our curator and production coordinator. Amy Holmes is the foundation's Executive Director and our co-founders are Cathy and Peter Halstead. Thanks for listening.