He's African American and identifiably in that great tradition of American poetry, but his roots are really broader than that, such as in Neruda, and maybe especially Whitman, and so many contemporary poets I don't know that he references and dialogues within and through the images and ideas. But I feel I know him and his sensibilities very well in this first book of poems that loves poetry so much, and draws on his love of poetry and his learning and imitating and drawing from the ideas and tricks and sensibilities of so many poets. I don't really know Roger personally, no social connection, though we do nod in the hallway and have that first name basis. That was just astonishing." And I meant by that, the poems of course, but also the performance of them, and I have heard dozens of the greats reading: Robert Bly, James Wright, Ginsberg, Oliver, Creeley, Ferlinghetti, so many others, and this was the level of ecstatic with the best of them. When I finished his poetry reading "job talk" for the tough, really often unfriendly audience of our department, there were often nods, little hums-'mmm!"-of appreciation, some cries of affirmation, I walked out of the room and said to a colleague, "I think I am going to remember this reading for the rest of my life. Full disclosure: I work with him in the English department at UIC in Chicago. This is an amazing collection of poetry, Reeves's first. (Happy New Year fellow GoodReads friends. Lawrence, like I normally do, but I enjoyed the time spent with Roger Reeves. And I didn't have my end-of-year-reading with D.H. I couldn't spend the holidays with family this year, so I chose to spend it with art. What I enjoyed most was the soft and supple feel of these words that made me carry them around, from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the Philadelphia Academy of Music. The lines are adroitly served so that you sense you are reading poetry from one who is a teacher and student of the craft. Point is, there are so many enjoyable themes in this collection. I'm also uncovering an ode to family (and the displacement of), a visceral response to the calamity of mental health. This is a chapbook that refuses to be defined although, alas, it must be placed in some four or five sentence paragraphic definition after publication, right? I've seen descriptions that state this is poetry that examines "appalling acts of humanity." I've seen "poverty" and "race." Meanwhile, I'm reading between lines of deep self-examination and melancholy. I couldn't find van Gogh because I was wooed by Monet, he who never ceases to make me smile even when I feel sad his short, calming brushstrokes: pale hues of green and blue scenery, a non-visible sun somewhere, sketches of freedom in land and air and water. Today I went to find van Gogh after reading Roger Reeves' poem, "Self-Portrait as Vincent van Gogh in the Asylum at Arles:"įor the moths shrieking in the orchard of my mouth And Dorothy's alone in the corn with Jack, his black fingers, the brass of his lips, the half-moons of his fingernails clickingalong her legs until she howls-Charlie Parker. The hummingbirds inside my chest,with their needle-nosed pliers for tonguesand hammer-heavy wings, have left a messof ticks in my lungs and a punctured lullabyin my throat. These are the young kings whom we love to kill-over and over again." For me, the myth manifests in the killing of young black men, Emmett Till, and in the ways America deems young, black male bodies as expendable-Jean Michel Basquiat, Mike Tyson, Jack Johnson. As Roger Reeves said in an interview, "While writing King Me, I became very interested in the mythology of king, the one who is sacrificed at the end of the harvest season. From a horse witnessing the lynching of Emmett Till to Mikhail Bulgakov chronicling the forced famines in Poland in the 1930s, King Me examines the erotics of care and the place of song, elegy, and praise as testaments to those moments.
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