John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections, Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry and Up Jump the Boogie, both available from Four Way Books. His honors include a Pushcart Prize, two Larry Neal writers awards, the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Cave Canem Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. His poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies including American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Best American Poetry 2017, 2019 and 2020. He is an assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University and also teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada University.

Cate Lycurgus, Interviews Editor: I first came across your work as a new grad student in Indiana—I hardly knew what poems were, but was chasing that burst-chest feeling of a good one. As your lines ricocheted in the room, beating out the rhythm of a speaker and his world, they startled with not only their music but also their unflinching vulnerability and hard-won perspective. Like the title of one I first fell in love with, they were so much “Song.”

I’m embarrassed now to admit my astonishment when I opened Up Jump the Boogie and found it full of sestinas and ghazals and bops and crowns of sonnets—songs so totally thrumming I hadn’t picked up on their basslines. At the risk of simplicity, I’d love to know how you think about inherited forms and what they allow (or maybe prevent) especially since so much of your work upends the given, expected, accepted? Has your relationship with form changed as you’ve continued to write?

John Murillo: When I first began writing in form, I did so as a way to practice. Thirty-nine lines with six repeated teleutons… go! Fourteen lines of five strict iambs… go! Go again. And each form trained me in ways I could not have been trained otherwise. As an autodidact, working in form was a crucial part of my education. So, there is that side of it. Of late though, form has also come to represent something more to me, and I think the way you phrased this question, of form as something inherited, has everything to do with it. Over the past few years, I’ve been thinking about this notion of inheritance not only in regard to form, but to the western literary tradition in general. What’s passed on, what’s denied, and what I, as a Black poet, as a Mexican poet, lay claim to regardless. I think of language and culture and colonialism and imperialism and slavery and whiteness. How enslaved Africans were robbed of birthright languages, for instance, while also being forbidden to read and write in languages newly imposed upon them. What does it mean to inherit a language? A literature? What does it mean, what is required of one, to participate in what’s been inherited? I think of how the word “stanza” derives from the Italian “room,” say, and imagine those old Italian and English inventors of the sonnet watching me roam now through these rooms, these houses they’ve built, touching things. What I’ve inherited is not the tradition, but a way of engaging the tradition. Not the forms themselves, but a way of treating the forms. Whether we’re talking about closed forms such as the sestina and sonnet I alluded to earlier, or open forms such as the ghazal and pantoum, what we’re talking about is constraint. Boxes and bars. Borders. Walls. A cage is a kind of room. America is a kind of cage. An inherited constraint. But what to do with it? Donny said “Someday we’ll all be free,” Marvin said “Since we got to be here, let’s live.” But live how? To my mind, the answer is found underground. On any given subway, you’ll find a group of black and brown children claiming space on a moving train. Each car, of course, a room. And in that room, they’ll crank up the volume on whatever device they have—boombox, bluetooth—and commence to dancing, spinning, flying all through that enclosure. Inspiring some, maybe. Antagonizing others, perhaps. But most definitely seen and heard by all. Showtime. Laying claim to, and even if only briefly, transforming that space into something, somewhere, else.

CL: I think about the cage of inheritance a lot—how much I don’t like the history I’ve come into. In discussing this a mentor of mine said, “if you don’t like it, you have to transform it”—usually easier said than done.

In terms of transformation, another poem of yours, “Upon Reading that Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds,” starts with a bird vying for the speaker’s attention since another has its leg caught in a car door. The piece shifts through questions of responsibility and self-preservation at the intersection of love and violence, moving quickly via memory and jazz composition, and ornithology, and etymology—I really can’t do the piece justice and so have included a link here—but we end up where we started—that is, with the speaker walking away. Which is not to say a transformation hasn’t occurred—it has—so I’m wondering if you could address what transformations your poems move toward?

JM: I don’t know that I can answer that in a way that is both meaningful and honest. Truth is, I’m not thinking about any of this when I write. If transformations have occurred, chances are I’ve lucked into them.

CL: That’s the sign of a true transformation, right? The ones that we didn’t even know we were capable of. And yet to have those moments on the page, there has to be some guiding structure or something to transform from. I’m reminded of your ghazal “Hustle,” which begins with a Rakim quote “Thinkin of a master plan / ‘Cuz ain’t nothin but sweat inside my hand” and progresses with couplets of building a living, sustaining a life through hard work, doing all that hands can or must do. Yet nothing prepares us for the final lines: “No way to know, but maybe Daddy sang blues / Blood explains the itch of his tune in these hands.” And the piece reverberates newly. If transformation is not on your mind when you write, what is, when you turn to the page? What first compels your pen?

JM: It changes from poem to poem. Also, from draft to draft. For me, the thing is to stay for as long as I can in that space where I’ve not yet figured everything out, and am still open to surprises, turns, and discoveries. To be capable of being, as one youngster put it a few years back, in uncertainties, mystery, doubt, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. So maybe it’s disingenuous of me to say that transformation is not on my mind. It is, but only as a possibility, not as an objective, if that makes any sense.

CL: Of course, yes. Some of your poems like “On Epiphany,” for example, end back in a place of unknowing, or a place of resignation. And yet the best feeling is feeling possible, no? A possibility of literature that I love is the chance to create a world other than the one we’ve been given. I rarely hear poets talk about world-building, but in both Up Jump the Boogie and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry you incorporate distinct cadences and city-scapes while explicitly mapping Poetry with a capital P as a different place. How would you describe the world you’re trying to build in this new book, either at the time or now, in retrospect?

JM: I don’t know that I set out to build a world so much as I meant to make sense of the one given. But in doing so, I realized that not only is this world of mine an invention—comprised, as it is, of my own interpretation of events, of my own relationships with people and places (the cityscapes you mentioned)—so, too, is the self who experiences it. I don’t mean this in any deep, ontological, sense wherein we start breaking down what it means to exist, to have, or be, a “Self.” Nor do I mean, simply, that in writing poems I believed to be grounded in memory that I made up a few details along the way, filled in gaps. One does that, of necessity I think, when trying to reconstruct the past. What I mean to say is that over the course of forty-something odd years, I’ve managed to conflate personal history with the lies I’ve told myself in order to face that history. Realizing this opens up a line of inquiry that I, for one, hadn’t anticipated, and two, find immensely interesting to think about. Not just the world, but the Self the self finds necessary to navigate that world. This brings to mind Borges’ Dreamtigers and his wonderful prose poem, “Borges and I.” But whereas Borges’ speaker was negotiating the tensions between his public and private selves, what I’m discussing here is a self so private, indeed so deeply imbedded, that its owner can go a lifetime without ever having been made aware of its existence.

CL: It makes perfect sense that we build (write) the world we need to survive. In “Borges and I,” I’m intrigued by the speaker’s assertion that Borges’ literature ‘justifies’ but will not ‘save’ him. Even as he (they) write this, I’m not sure I believe it; the act of writing seems an argument to the contrary. Or it is a negotiation he’s having, and in your pieces I see speakers constantly negotiating with themselves—the triple O.G. lifter breaking weight amidst young bucks, the lover in “On Confessionalism” who almost kills a man out of jealousy, or he of “On Metaphor” who sees not his father but himself in a gun’s reflection—and with a mode of language. One of the great consolations, to me at least, is that we are not who we were not so very long ago. From the collection’s Levis epigraph, this is the premise: I know this isn’t much. But I wanted to explain this life to you even if / I had to become, over the years, someone else to do it.”

And yet. Some things we can never outrun. In thinking of a self so embedded we’re unaware, I keep zooming in and out—from the micro of not knowing my own heart, to the macro of a nation—what lies we have told ourselves that then become embedded in a national history that in turn defines us? That, if uncovered, would completely overthrow how we function? Given the way Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry claims our moment and our nation, this zooming feels crucial to your collection too.

Whitman has a similarly slippery sense of self, and I think of the preface to Leaves of Grass where he writes: “The greatest poet … is the free channel of himself. He swears to his art, I will not be meddlesome, I will not have in my writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains. I will have nothing hang in the way, not the richest curtains. What I tell I tell for precisely what it is.”

I would argue that your poems are so elegant it seems as if there is no artifice. And that this, combined with the speaker’s transparency, is what makes for such limpid and chilling poems. How do you conceive of your poems as changing (or do you?!) the perceptions of our national self? What curtains have you lifted? Has the writing lifted for you?

JM: It’s hard to say, really. Particularly as it relates to perception because, in the end, people will see what they wish to see. Especially if we’re talking about something as complex as a national sense of self. One hopes, on the one hand, that a poem—or a song, or a film, let’s say—has the power to lift a veil of some sort, to show America to America. But at this late stage, one has to wonder whether there exists, in fact, anyone who does not yet know what those stars and stripes stand for. At this point, I would argue that all ignorance is willful. As of this conversation, for example, cities are burning all over the country. People are demonstrating in Berlin and Paris and London in outrage over the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in solidarity with victims of white supremacy here in the U.S. The fires now burning in Minneapolis and Atlanta are the same fires that burned in LA in 1992, Detroit in 1967, and will, in all likelihood, burn again in another few years. And yet, you can see everywhere people asking the same tired question: “Why?” Why are these people (which is only a stone’s throw from “you people”) destroying their own neighborhoods? Why can’t they just take out their aggressions at the ballot box? Why do they think this is the best way? They’re not asking in order to learn, but as a way of performing concern. Because to really get to the bottom of their questions, to know why, is to either be called to action or to be forced to divest oneself of the illusion of being on the right side of this moment. So, no. I don’t imagine my poems lift any veils for anyone else. As for what the writing has brought to light for me, personally, I would have to say that any revelations have been more personal than social. And they’re still under way, so I might be too close to the poems to have learned yet what they still have to teach me.

CL: I find it baffling, the why? question. Exhaustion, despair, rage?! Yet the root of ‘rage,’ its etymology, carries the taint of madness. Which persists—when we see folks enraged we can either dismiss them as insane or take them very seriously because the rage is…‘justified.’ Nothing is as dangerous as controlled and directed rage, which leads me to your crown of sonnets “A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn.” The poem nods to a Dylan Thomas poem and responds to police-community relations since the Rodney King uprisings; more explicitly it is set after a young man’s rage at violence against black folks leads him to lash out, kill two officers, and ultimately take his own life. The poem grapples with both injustice and rage—with each masterful sonnet in perfect rhyme, meter, etc. The music haunts me with its pulse of anger, of frustration, of beauty in the midst—maybe also because these operate within the confines of those formal cages you mentioned earlier in our conversation. But not underground at all; it’s as though you’re using the bars to break them. And so, how do you see art and rage intersecting? What gets forged in its crucible? How (does) poetry lend itself to rage, perhaps differently than other art forms?

JM: Well, I don’t really know that they can intersect. True rage is uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Ineloquent. I think, if anything, art may grow out of, or exist as a response to, rage. Maybe even stand in for it. But rage—true and earnest—doesn’t happen between the pages of a book. I imagine that if those in power had a choice between someone shooting up a precinct or spending months contemplating iambs, they’d choose the latter. Contrary to the cliché, writing is not fighting. Singing is not swinging. To pretend otherwise, I think, is dishonest and serves only to placate the artists who like to imagine themselves as more vanguard than they actually are. This reminds me of the Etheridge Knight poem, “On the Yard,” where a white supremacist knocks into a black man on the prison yard then challenges him to do something about it. The black man, the poem’s speaker, then tells the reader:

“All night
I sat up
All night
wrote 5,000 words
explaining that
I
was doing something

but the slim cat—
beautiful fascist
didn’t buy
it—nor
did I
completely.”

Knight’s speaker knows rage and art are distinct and chides himself for choosing the latter. This is the same feeling that led me to begin drafting “A Refusal to Mourn…” upon returning from a poets’ rally a few years back—a rally to protest police shootings of unarmed black and brown people—and learning of the officers’ murder. In that moment I felt rage, joy, sorrow, gratitude, guilt. Simultaneously. The poem was my way of processing all this. Then, to present it. I think, maybe, the most an artist can hope is to present, to allude to, or insinuate, rage.

CL: I love that last line break though—it seems to hold out a sort of qualification—while the speaker didn’t buy ‘completely,’ he does in part; that last word, to me at least, less discounts the writing than calls for writing and since writing is incomplete response. But as far as “A Refusal to Mourn…,” something about the imagined revenge reminds me of Stevens’ ideas of imagination pushing back against the pressures of the real. Not to shy from reality, but rather to be so of it that something new emerges. At one point in The Noble Rider and the Sounds of Words, Stevens writes “no politician can command the imagination….[the poet’s] function is to make his imagination theirs and that he fulfills himself only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others…to help people live their lives.” Which is all to say—to insinuate rage would have it flame in the minds of others, right? Or help them process, too? Before we can even get there though, it seems that spark has to transfer, that it often requires the tinder of vulnerability, of confession. How (do) you balance presenting such complex emotional states with overexposing yourself? Can a poem be too vulnerable, too confessional?

JM: Absolutely. But I think that has more to do with the poem’s shortcoming as a poem than with the confession being too confessional. In other words, when confession, or vulnerability, becomes the point of the poem, then the poem is doomed. Let’s not forget that those poets we most closely associate with the so-called confessional lyric—your Plath, your Sexton, your Lowell—were all first-rate poets. Sharon Olds is a first-rate poet. But not all confessors are. And because we lack the requisite chops to write as well as our idols—and, on some level, must intuit this—we depend on subject matter to carry the day. The personal made spectacle. Add to this the advent of social media and the popularity of reality shows and it’s no wonder that oversharing has become as commonplace as it has. In poetry, as in life.

For my own part, I don’t worry about exposing too much. First, as I mentioned earlier, my speakers are, for the most part, merely self-adjacent. Even if drawing from personal experience, the making of the poem—or, rather, the prioritization of the poem as a made thing (made of music, of images, of language)—always requires that certain licenses be taken: Say I get chased by a three-legged Rottweiler through Rancho Cucamonga, but “Santa Ana” has a better ring to it… I move the poem forty miles west. Or, say I’m robbed at gunpoint in real life, but the poem is more compelling in the first-person point of view of the assailant… I become, in, and for the sake of, the poem, that assailant. Whatever is necessary in order to write the best possible poem, I’ll do. And often, such infidelity to fact allows me to get closer to an emotional truth. And this, in the end, is infinitely more important to me than “what really happened.” Secondly, to the degree that I do expose anything personal, I learned long ago to chalk that up as part of the price of doing business. You have to be willing to give up some of yourself. The upside, though, is that if you’re writing honestly—even if not always factually—you can reveal yourself to yourself, and maybe learn a thing or two.

CL: Now I want to figure out a way to work Rancho Cucamonga seamlessly into a poem! But to your point, that’s one of the greatest powers of art, right? For artifice or infidelity, as you put it, to lead us closer to truth. A certain type of truth, of course—but an even more potent one, one that could put us at risk, one that places demands on us, maybe—that we have to change our lives. At the risk of sentimentality, I have to ask—is there a poem that changed your life, or led to a key juncture? And if you met someone who had never encountered a poem before, what piece would you give them first?

JM: It depends on the person, what they were going through, the context of our meeting, etc. I don’t think there exists a single poem that would appeal to everyone. I do, however, believe there is a poem, and a poet, for each of us. When people say they don’t like poetry, what I hear is that they have yet to come across the right poet for them. (And yet, some people will write off an entire medium—not just a genre—and go without it their whole lives. That would be like hearing some Cardi B, or some Kool and the Gang, not liking it, then concluding that music was not for you. Not just Cardi B or Kool and the Gang… but music. That’s crazy.) So yes, I would have to take into consideration a number of factors before prescribing a poem, but I have no doubt that I could find something the person would love and want to carry with them. As for myself, I can’t really pinpoint a single poem that did it for me. But I can definitely think of some poets who were vital for me, especially early on. Etheridge Knight, who I mentioned earlier has been really important to me. Sharon Olds, who I also mentioned. Lucille Clifton, Martin Espada, Yusef Komunyakaa, Phil Levine, Larry Levis, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Li-Young Lee, Cornelius Eady, have all walked with me at various points. And before them, my first poets: Melle Mel, Big Daddy Kane, Ice Cube, Slick Rick. Bill Withers, Smokey Robinson. The list goes on forever. And keeps growing. Yeats, Auden, Prado, Vallejo. Black Thought, Noname, MF Doom, Rapsody. I’ve borrowed plenty over the years, and keep borrowing. And, now, I’ve got a whole lot of debt to work off.

CL: Ah, thank you so much, John—your words are working hand over fist.