Ever since Plato kicked us poets out of his ideal Republic, it seems we’ve been banging at the gates, manuscripts in hand, proclaiming, and indeed pleading for, our necessity.
Such proclamation, when it comes to the poem of political engagement, has unfortunately taken root in codified modes of expression: the reductively rhetorical call-to-arms on the one hand and the syntactically disjunctive rejection of imperialist language on the other. It is a wonder, then, that the world doesn’t clap for poetry’s sad insistence on comfortably reclining into irrelevance.
The tangled complexities of our political lives deserve a poetry equally complex, as prone to refusing simple paraphrase as it is unwilling to rest on elaborate, though flimsy, theoretical structures. This is what I admire about Farid Matuk’s work. Within his poems, one is experientially situated though ethically adrift, unsure of what stance, exactly, the author is espousing. And yet, like a person groping for a light switch while knowing full well that the electricity’s long been shut off, his is a poetry unafraid to look for illumination, even as he supposes that we are in the dark. In this way, his poems are built upon the terra firma of attention. Would that we all had the courage to articulate a position that so embodies the bewilderment inherent in issues of race, class, immigration, and sexuality.
Matuk doesn’t make the world easier to understand. What he does is ease our fears of having to have it all figured out. This might be what Keats called “negative capability,” but I think it’s also unconditional love.
—Noah Eli Gordon
Carols
I only care that you love my country—
coffee in the street, invitations into unknown homes
kisses on the copper penny bridge, the bridge—
take them. I only care that you love,
she says to her American—
hammocks, hillocks, porcelain ducks floating down the
river,
testicles like oyster onions floating down the river.
There were no torturers, we sang carols, of comfort and joy,
andirons
polished for the winter’s wood, godevils we would ride back
home
I told her, breakneck, breakneck.
These explanations in Yugoslavia, Podgorica,
over the river Ribnica, most fair.
Long Before and Shortly After
The alley runs long
men keep cave or ship in their garages
pass a trumpet
trees stand outside
and grow a sticky purple
flower over pack mules herding
into the alley, the mules sniff
provenance papers off each other
bills of lading. It is 1981
I am seven, a bullet
waits for Ronald Reagan
I am starting to understand
there are things called
Velcro others moon
in Anaheim my thighs burn
on the vinyl bench
of the Impala it sluices
onto the freeway
Harbor Blvd., Anaheim Blvd.
Lincoln Ave., St. Boniface doors
tarred, I’m told, to keep the spic
Catholics in at least
today I am among my whites
whom I love very much
San Martincito
Before Plato told the great lie of ideals
men slimly went like fishes, and didn’t care.
—D.H. Lawrence
You’re in Greenpoint
this week in summer
The sheets line a thin, easy silence around me
Moon’s heavy sleep breath
The chairs out back too wet
tonight, bugs and such
call up a small swamp
If there aren’t scenes all down our street
at a simple throb in someone’s
car music
I’ll give you the republic
a story of land treaties
and the shapes they made
San Martin
brings little spaces in
a home for the hen, the dog made mild
in the skirts of the black saint
This morning—so hot—I saw
the grackle turn its beak, make
a thing to follow
into the dark column of cypress in our sidewalk
I’ll tell you love
when I was a kid and we first got to this country
the taste of a Famous Star burger
was worth the week
Of Mule and Deer
Out of a tin-cold, murmuring black wood
Lightly you lope, pale deer, lifting
A story from pages of snow
Nothing turns in your eye they say
Toward the tin-cold and murmuring black wood
I bear a display case of blue light
Say it was the sky
Say all you want it was the sky
Anamorphosis
Two shepherd collies lie in the grass
of the children’s outfield
A woman stands between them so tall
their mistress, mistress smokes
She keeps sunset
A slow cloud bank rises over the park
to refract the light through particulate
garbage air,
light honeyed
in the methane
Islanded in the long grass I am drinking a bottle of water
keeping sunset
Warm air trades places with cold air
knocking a plastic bag around
the new leaves of a park tree
I’m a shitty listener—
too many things sound like paper
or a phone ringing
Usually there is plane
traffic above me
but I am allowed to see it
intermittently
by steam trails
My mother has been allowed to grow old—
I visit
drive her
away from her TV
so she can say things before she dies
Today she talked about her rape
he took pictures of her at gunpoint
A long time ago painters
laid out
shadows such that if
you stand in the right place
they coalesce for your eyes
into a skull
So we
learn to look
at anything and recognize death
That’s alright I’ll
do that
but right now I want a bigger
compass to draw the register of planes above me
the woman and her dogs
gone home
the Marlboro in the grass
the plastic bottle in my hand
I want to hear the plastic bag
in the tree
I want to look up
and see that it’s death
and a plastic bag
and a city tree