By Jon Jeter
Reading Matt Sedillo’s second book of poetry, City on the Second Floor, reminded me of the late, hip hop icon, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, who chose that colorful pseudonym, according to his bandmates in the Wu Tang Clan, “because there was no father to his style.”
That is not entirely true of Sedillo. As I myself wrote in my review of his first book, Mowing Leaves of Grass –a postcolonial takedown of Walt Whitman’s fabled 1855 book of poetry, Leaves of Grass – Sedillo’s verses shares much in common with the late, African American griot, Amiri Baraka. I wrote at the time:
"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.”
Hints of Baraka are also present in City on the Second Floor, but reflecting a relatively-young poet who continues to find his voice, Sedillo’s verses are evolving, making it difficult to pinpoint one single, or dominant, influence. Or, to return to the example of Ol’ Dirty Bastard, it is not that his style is fatherless, but rather it seems the product of many fathers.
Aside from Baraka’s work, City on the Second Floor’s most glaring resemblance is perhaps to the work of another son of Los Angeles, Charles Bukowski, although the similarities between the two poets are superficial, and I suspect, purely coincidental. Like Sedillo, Bukowski’s poetry was often a paean to his hometown, the City of Angels, and its seedy underbelly but Bukowski ‘s gritty portraiture veers towards cynicism, and even solipsism, mindful, perhaps,`` of film noir. Sedillo uses Los Angeles’ grit much differently, casting the city’s Chicano community and dispossessed populations in sharp relief, and his poetry is reminiscent not of any sterile Hollywood oeuvre, but of Mexico’s iconic Marxist muralist, Diego Rivera, and his classic fresco depicting the Ford River Rouge plant in interwar Detroit.
In a poem entitled The Pope of Broadway, Sedillo writes:
Heard a story that
When Anthony Quinn married in to the DeMille family
It was on the condition that his very Mexican family would not be attending the wedding
And that's the ticket, the price of admission, what they are buying and you had best be selling
And let me tell you one thing
When Dallas, Minneapolis, Ann Arbor, Orlando, Toledo, Scranton Ohio sends their people
They don’t send their best
They're vain
They're shallow
They're narcissists
And some of them I imagine are good waiters
Flight of the sociopaths
Transplants turned cynics chasing down plans, hopes and ambitions
On roads paved in ways I would never even begin to dream to imagine
Talking only to themselves, defining a place by all they claim it is not but it’s them
Fake, fakes, fake as fuck, fuck them
They don’t know this town, this region the history
Hell they don’t even know the valley
A certain class consciousness imbues the work of both Bukowski and Sedillo, but while Bukowski maintains a comfortable distance from the unwashed, bearing witness to the struggle but not really getting his hands dirty, Sedillo picks a side, and dives in head first, grounding — to borrow a term introduced by the late Marxist, Jamaican economist Walter Rodney — with the masses. His poetry is equal parts art, advocacy, and anthropology. Consider his poem from which the book draws its title:
There is a city on the second floor
An international destination
Whose entrance is prohibited
To all those appearing
Too poor for travel
Where commerce crosses
Bridges of wire and concrete
Just above the street light
Rises an economy of scale
Where buildings and offices
Connect to disconnect from the world below
Here
In the space between
Worker and destination
Conversation spins profit
And no one moves without reason
And no one speaks without purpose
Here
The word is stillborn
A commodity
And the world dies anew
While working stiff spend wages
In cheap imitation
Of their exploitation
Arrogant
Delusional
Walking dead
Laughingly dreaming
Of a penthouse suite
They will never reach
While staring down from terraces
Towards the street below
In this and other poems, I detect echoes of two, towering Midwestern poets whose work is often associated with proletarian themes: Detroit’s Philip Levine, and Chicago’s socialist scribe, Carl Sandburg, whose poem, Chicago, remains one of my all-time favorites. City on the Second Floor is indescribably good, as rich and textured as the best bottle of wine you’ve ever consumed, , in part because of this almost sociological lens that Sedillo applies to his verses. But reading it for me was a bit of a chore, akin to a high-stakes wine-tasting contest, as I struggled mightily to identify the differing bouquets: was that vanilla or almond, nutmeg or currants?
After identifying hints of Baraka and Bukowski, Sandburg and Levine and even a subtle aroma of Rivera, I still felt I was missing someone. Finally, after my second reading of Sedillo’s poem entitled simply, The Rich, it hit me: the Spanish poet, , Federico Garcia Lorca, who was assassinated by Spanish fascists in 1936. It reads:
You see the rich
And the poor
Well, they're just like you and me
Two hands
Two feet
The sky
The sea
And everything between
One heart that beats
And the time
To make the most of it
So, you'll find no sympathy
Reaching into these deep pockets
All we ever asked was our fair share
And God damn it, that's all of it
So, while you're out in the streets screaming for peace and justice
We’re sleeping in satin sheets dreaming free and guiltless over oceans and tariffs liquidating pensions then off to bid on porcelain and portraits at billion dollar auctions
You know you need us
You know we're selling your secrets
It is not that Sedillo is a surrealist as Garcia Lorca was but his poetry represents Chicanos in the same unapologetic way that Garcia Lorca represented his tribe of Andalusian Roma people, who suffered under the thumb of Franco’s regime just as Sedillo’s tribe suffers under the white settler regime in LA. Reading Sedillo’s use of the words “us” and “we” is subversive, particularly in such dire times, and emotionally triggering, but in a good way, harkening back to a day when the best artists were not feted with awards and university chairs, but were instead held in contempt by the pharaohs, for helping the people fight their oppressors.
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.
