Poetry with the kind of intellect that Roger Reeves displays in his debut, King Me, often runs the risk of insularity and in-speak to the point of exclusion: through literary or cultural allusions, technical jargon or prohibitively challenging diction, big-brained poetry often leaves full-hearted readers with too little blood to keep upright. Reeves’ poetry, though, is as emotionally riveting as it is intelligent: an incredibly rare feature in the landscape of contemporary poetics. And it’s this stunning emotional force that keeps Reeves’ poems thoroughly accessible.
Like Whitman’s, Reeves’ project is the very opposite of exclusion, and the means by which he keeps his brain from blocking the reader’s view is by moving his feet expertly among a vast crowd of recognizable witnesses. This is fundamentally a peopled poetry, and the range of people to whom it speaks is rivaled in scope only by the range of people of whom it speaks: Mike Tyson, Vincent Van Gogh, the Wu Tang Clan, Anne Frank, Duchenne de Boulogne, Yosemite Sam, Ernestine “Tiny” Davis, Jack Johnson, Mikhail Bulgakov, Emmett Till, Cher, Charlie Parker, and Mussolini, to name a few.
And yet, this is not poetry rooted in pop-culture—this is poetry as culture, and it refuses to ignore the moral imperative of witness. And not merely the passive “witness” of one who has been present at the scene of a crime (though this poetry is present at the scene of many crimes)—but more importantly the active “witness” of the fire-breathing Pentecostal shrieking life into bones.
“I, Roger Reeves, hereby pledge that I will not come back
to this city, if this city will not come back to me.
I leave the children waving their flags and wrists
at a dark sky, without worrying about the coconut tree
dropping its wintered fruit upon their heads.
I leave the man with his one leg turned backward
to walk this street twice as pure contradiction.
I leave the heron on the roof, the dachshunds
scrambling over the cobblestone in their black
patent-leather shoes, and the flies to open wide
and swallow as much melon as they can before evening comes
and that same melon is between my lips.”
(from “Pledge”)
These poems are charged with swagger and force. The book’s cover, a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, is an appropriate harbinger for the explosiveness of Reeves’ lines, which demonstrate both technical virtuosity and urgent bursts of lyric intensity. Like the iconoclastic painter, Reeves oscillates between the figural and the emotive in such rapid succession as to render the two nearly indistinguishable. Moments of vivid imagery are blurred down the page by a cadence not unlike the dripping of paint from a spray can: evocative of the necessarily primal.
“Father, forgive me
for the moths shrieking in the orchard
of my mouth. Forgive the rattle and clatter
of wings inside the blue of my brain.
Even if these iron bars queer a field,
queer a woman standing too close to a reaper’s blade,
a half-moon hung and wholly harsh,
even if this woman, burdened like a spine
carrying a head and a basket of rocks,
forgets the flaw of a well-sharpened tool,
let her not mistake my whimper and warning
for the honk of a goose in heat.”
(from “Self-Portrait as Vincent Van Gogh in the Asylum at Arles”)
Reeves often deploys dislocation as a means toward location, as though the only way to see a broken world is through vision fractured by the brutalities of history and mended, momentarily, by lyric clarity.
An early poem in the collection, “The Mare of Money,” tells the story of the lynching of Emmett Till, and while the story itself packs all the punch worthy of weeping, Reeves complicates the burden of the narrative by juxtaposing Till’s brutalized body with that of a nearby dead horse:
“She listens to the men’s boots break
the water when they drop a black boy’s body
near her head, then pick him up,
only to let him fall—again,
there: bent and eye-to-eye with her
as though decaying is something
that requires a witness”
A brave poet rooted in the history of his people would tell the story of Till’s lynching; a truly original poet would do it from the perspective of a dead horse. But Reeves does not merely tell the story from the horse’s perspective. He goes further:
“but not this mare;
she does not get the luxury
of a lyric—a song that makes
our own undoing or killing sweet”
In a fractured genius all his own, Reeves removes the speaker into a liminal space both lashed to and by history, powerless against atrocity save the admittedly modest consolation of disembodied witness and the haunted quiver in the speaker’s own testimony.
“They part
here: the boy’s body
carried back to town by another,
as the horse stays, says nothing
because horses don’t speak, besides
this one’s dead.”
The poem itself, then, becomes the only living body through which we can access a reality so grotesque and inescapably true. And while there is no beauty in the historical fact of a black boy’s murder, the poem in this context offers a kind of grace and ghosted beauty pushing out toward resurrection. Here and throughout King Me, in poems such as “Some Young Kings” and “Self-Portrait as Ernestine ‘Tiny’ Davis,” not only are the subjects of the poem re-granted the humanity that had once been stripped of them, but poetry itself is affirmed as a capable and necessary medium for this bestowal.
To hear Reeves read these poems live is as visceral an experience as you will find at any poetry reading in the country, and the poems on the page sing themselves into the corners of whatever room they happen upon. It’s difficult not to feel the pulse of gospel truth beating through the lines that trace history and race and gender identity—and it’s with absolute authority that these poems testify to that of which they speak. But if we’re sticking with ecclesial metaphors, it’s important to note that the poems here are less sermons than prayers: never didactic, but rooted in blooded conviction and full-throated oblation, offerings to, yes, God, but more importantly: to God-as-God’s-People, which is to say All People. Which is to say: You, Reader.
A collection as dynamic as King Me poses countless challenges for a reviewer with an eye toward a word count, but none of these challenges proves as daunting as the danger of hyperbolic praise. I want to be frank: this is the most powerful debut I’ve encountered since Shane McCrae’s Mule, which was the most powerful I’d encountered since Richard Siken’s Crush, which was the most powerful since Ilya Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa. And the lineage here is not simply a matter of taste: like each of these collections, King Me is endowed with undeniable lyric force, formal vision, unrelenting self-implication and, most astoundingly, redemptive grace. And, like these poets, Roger Reeves has, after just one collection, established himself as an indispensible voice in American poetry.
Notable Poems: Cross Country; The Mare of Money; Shadowboxing Herons; Some Young Kings; Self Portrait as Ernestine “Tiny” Davis; Brief Angel; Someday I’ll Love Roger Reeves
Copper Canyon, 2013
Page Length: 74
Retail: $15
Bradley Harrison is a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers and a PhD student at the University of Missouri. His work can be found in New American Writing, Fugue, New Orleans Review, Forklift Ohio, Best New Poets 2012 and elsewhere. His chapbook, Diorama of a People, Burning is available from Ricochet Editions (2012).
