Hello.
Hi.
[LAUGHTER]
Welcome to the Poetry Center.
I'm Hannah Ensor.
I coordinate the reading and lecture series here.
Tonight, we're lucky to be joined by Adrian Matejka, who
will explore intersections of poetry and spectacle
in our contemporary US-American moment.
Matejka's most recent book, The Big Smoke-- do we have it?
[LAUGHTER]
Thank you.
Eh eh.
I feel a little bit like Pat Sajak and Vanna White.
It's like--
So The Big Smoke was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
and was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award
and the 2014 Pulitzer Prize.
The book takes as its subject and its predominant speaker
the boxer Jack Johnson, once the most famous athlete
in the country whose remarkable and complicated life
spanned from 1878 to 1946.
Reviewer Gabrielle Calvocoressi writes about The Big Smoke,
quote, "Through the virtuosic interplay of voices,
Matejka forces us to interrogate our own complicity
in making histories that focus on the prize
fights and the flashy cars while ignoring and perhaps abetting
the intimate struggles and losses, the cruelties occurring
in the places we call home that make
the rifts in our lives and our country deepen," end quote.
So I was thinking about this.
What do these complicities look like?
What does it mean when we're complicit in, say, violence?
In rape culture?
In ethical, religious, moral, or legal transgressions
against other humans or against ourselves?
Why do we avert our eyes or look and not care?
Is it in the name sometimes of industry?
Of entertainment, leisure, and pleasure?
Of fatigue or exhaustion?
For contemporary case studies in complicity,
in case you're having a hard time
placing this abstract notion, we could turn, say,
to Ray Rice, Adrian Peterson, Ben Roethlisberger,
Jameis Winston, Peyton Manning.
We could turn to ongoing concussions
in professional, in "amateur," and in youth athletics.
To Chris Brown, to Kesha's current legal battles,
to the Sony hack, to leaked nudes
and tapes of various kinds.
As Matejka points out in a recent interview about The Big
Smoke, quote, "There's a discussion
that needs to be had about domestic violence.
This isn't something that just happened
with Ray Rice or Greg Hardy.
It's not a contemporary athlete problem.
It's not even an athlete problem.
It's a systemic and societal problem
that's been going on since well before Jack Johnson,"
end quote.
History is reclaimed and aired out in The Big Smoke
almost as an injunction against cultural amnesia.
Part of this airing out, though, involves a refusal
to throw Johnson under an ahistorical, self-righteously
fueled bus.
Pushing on the Jack Johnson myth, it turns out,
opens up and out to a world beyond one man with echoes
into the deep past, the recent past, and the present.
Writing a book like this and writing it for eight years
isn't the kind of work I imagine you
can be inside of without first being attracted, being a fan.
And perhaps what The Big Smoke suggests
to us is a new kind of fandom, one in which affection
and criticism are not mutually exclusive, one in which
a moment in history, including the one
we're occupying right now, February 25, 2016,
contains complex networks of contexts, questions,
and pressures.
The anti-amnesia impulse in The Big Smoke
involves holding it all at once.
This might be how we can correct the record.
In addition to the honors that The Big Smoke earned,
Adrian Matejka has also received fellowships and awards
from the Illinois Arts Council, the Guggenheim Foundation,
and the Lannan Foundation.
He was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award for his book
Mixology, which was a National Poetry Series
winner selected by Kevin Young.
They're doing it again.
[LAUGHTER]
And published by Penguin Books in 2009.
Two graphic novels are in the works, one
continuing Jack Johnson's stories and one
on 1980s hip hop.
His next book Collectible Blacks,
which Matejka describes as being about astronomy and being poor,
will be out in April of next year from Penguin Random House.
Please help us welcome Adrian Matejka.
[APPLAUSE]