The Big Smoke by Adrian Matejka is a collection of poems about the late heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson. I have meant to watch the Ken Burns documentary for some time now, so when I happened to see this book in the public library I decided to grab it. I read most of it in coffee shop over a couple of mornings; lately I seem to be more successful reading there than at home.

Anyway… I liked a lot of things about this collection. Writing a poem about a historical figure reminded me of a couple of other books I enjoyed:

1) Frank X. Walker’s two books about York, the African-American slave brought along on the Lewis and Clark expedition and

2) Campbell McGrath’s Shannon, another book about another member of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Shannon was lost from the group for a number of days before re-uniting with them.

As for Matejka’s collection, The Big Smoke, here are some excerpts that I enjoyed enough to jot them down in my notebook and type up here later.

from the poem “Chicken & Other Stereotypes”:

The officer said, Nigger where’s the chicken & started inspecting / the seats of my automobile.  before / I could say anything … he still kept searching. ? I finally told him, “Mr. Officer, please understand: no stolen chicken ever passed the portals of my face. The chickens see the gleam / in my eye & keep out of my way.

from the poem “Gold Smile”:

Before we got into the ring, I told Tommy / the only reason I got gold uppers was to make/ every bit of my food twice as expensive.

Finally, this excerpt from the poem “Cooking Lessons” brings today’s NFL and its issues with players and domestic violence to mind:

Belle, I wouldn’t put / my hand on you if you’d do / what I say. If you’d just do what you’re told, I wouldn’t / shake you that way. / I wouldn’t raise a hand. / I wouldn’t have cut my knuckle on your eyetooth. I wouldn’t/ have sparred with a grease fire / in my fist until the cut healed. …Belle, as long / as you do what I tell you, / you get to cut a swath/ with the Heavyweight chamption of the World. / You get to travel / first-class, on steamers/ with Kings & Queens.

After I read that poem I wrote in my notebook that the poem made me think about mainstream America’s response to violence. On the one hand,

1) people are/were surprised and shocked by Johnson’s womanizing, involvement with prostitution and his beating of women. And yet,

2) people are/were awed and amazed and impressed by the violent athleticism Johnson showed in the ring as he violently beat his opponents.

I believe the world of American professional sports in the early twenty-first century is not so different than it was in the days of Jack Johnson approximately one hundred years earlier.

I think if I was more familiar with the biographical details of the life of Jack Johnson, then I would have enjoyed Matejka’s book a bit more. The book has inspired me to take a look at the Ken Burns documentary about the boxer. I do think I most enjoyed the poem “The Battle of the Century” the most; it was the longest poem in the collection. My only real criticism of the collection is, at least in my opinion, the overuse of the ampersand. I sometimes felt the author was a little too enamored of the late LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s fondness for this typographical symbol.