By Jon Jeter
Had Amiri Baraka been born 50 years later to a Chicano family in Southern California rather than a black family in Newark, he would’ve been Matt Sedillo.
Present in the work of both poets –the late icon and the relative ingenue respectively –is the rhythmic mixture, una mezcla, of the street, and minds sharpened, like swords, by struggle, and self-enlightenment.
This is not to suggest that Sedillo’s poetry is all fire and brimstone. Like Baraka before him, Sedillo infuses his poetry with a certain knowing, or playfulness, befitting an outsider who is in on the joke, and has seen through the illogic of a handful of Europeans “discovering” 90 million indigenous people. The white settler’s arrogance produces both amusement and blinding, righteous, anger.
And so it is that Sedillo’s second book of poetry, Mowing Leaves of Grass, reads like a criminal indictment handed up by, well, a poet. In the book’s first poem, entitled Pilgrim, he writes:
See, I come from struggle
And if my story offends you
That is only ‘cause you made the mistake of seeking your
reflection
In my self-portrai
In one of the book’s shorter poems, Pedagogy of the Oppressor, it is made abundantly clear that Sedillo’s poetry is, at its core, an attempt to decolonize the American mind:
And when they read
They read in conquest
And when they thought
They thought of process
And when they wrote
Again and again
It was the word progress
And when they spoke
A festival of bayonets
Impaled the audience
Line the children
It’s getting late November
Teach them Pilgrim
Teach them Indian
Speak of gratitude
Speak of friendship
Of all the usual suspects perp-walked by Mowing Leaves of Grass, however, the kingpin is Walt Whitman, whose storied 1855 book of poems, Leaves of Grass, is the inspiration of Sedillo’s book title. Widely regarded by ivory-towered elites as the greatest book of poetry in the history of the Republic –or the genre’s Huck Finn – Leaves of Grass is considered a siren song, calling for a young and yearning nation of castoffs and cut-ups to unite in the democratic experiment that is America.
Sedillo, however, makes no claim to the mantle of poet-laureate but rather dissident laureate, and he finds Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, like the nation itself, wanting, and in need of a reappraisal. Why, he seems to ask in Mowing Leaves of Grass, is Whitman so fawned over and feted when he fails to account for the suffering, the despair, or the rivers of blood spilled by Native Americans, and blacks, in the making of the nation?
In his poem titled “Oh Say,” Sedillo remixes stanzas from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, lyrics to the anthems Star-Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful, and the dirge popularized by Billie Holliday, Strange Fruit.
So we were bound
To keep singing
Oh captain
My captain
Drunk on blood anthems Blind patriots
Raised flags
And fallen veterans
The myths
The hymns
The bitterness
Of fairy tales
Best woven into song
From the dawn’s
Early light
To twilight’s last gleaming From Plymouth Rock
To Dred Scott
From smallpox
To church bomb
From black bodies
Swinging in the summer breeze To the endless blood
Of countless wounded knees Old glory
We are born
Witness
To the sins of your soil
Oh pioneer
I’ve never heard Sedillo recite his poetry live but I am told by those who have that he is electric, inhabiting the words, owning the room, spitting fire and truth much as Baraka did in his day, but to a rapid-fire, staccato, hip-hop beat rather than Baraka’s jazzy cadence. The writer Greg Palast calls him the best political poet in America, and while I’m not in any position to agree or disagree, I can say that his poems leave me feeling ennobled, and less alone in the world.
Sedillo’s voice is defiant, irreverent, even wrathful, but his metier is championing the cause of the unwashed, and the unloved, be they Chicanos, African Americans, Indonesian sweatshop workers, or Palestinians. And the irony is that what shines through in Mowing the Leaves, more than anything is not of a poet seething at the injustice of it all, but besotted with the people. From his poem, Once:
I have this dream
Every so often
Of people
Beyond borders and prisons
Gathered in the distance
Telling tales of a time
When women feared the evening
When communities were punished by color
And grown men hunted children
Hardly able to believe
People once lived this way
Jon Jeter is a former Washington Post correspondent and the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Bright Nights and Dark Days in Obama’s Postracial America.
