Getting in the ring with Jack Johnson
The Big Smoke
Adrian Matejka
Penguin: 128 pp., $18 paper
Boxing may be a brutal blood sport, but its devotees range from ringside brawlers to ringside literary gentility like Joyce Carol Oates. Boxing’s history offers not only opportunities for poetry (Muhammad Ali’s “Float like a butterf ly/ sting like a bee”) but also for a shocking chronicle of America’s racism — in and out of the ring.
Adrian Matejka’s new collection, “The Big Smoke,” is a series of dramatis personae poems: swift uppercuts, fast hard-hitting insights. The chief “speaking voice” in this chorus is that of the legendary prizefighter Jack Johnson (1878-1946), the first African American heavyweight world champion.
The child of slaves who refused to bow to rules that initially barred him from an all-white boxing ring, Johnson challenged the gatekeepers, the reigning champions, the boxing profession itself, then went on to defy society’s extreme prejudice, concurrent with that of the Feds, who monitored his personal life, including his relationships with white women, searching for grounds for prosecution.
Through it all, Matejka goes round after round on the steely music of Johnson’s authentic-poetic voice. If the reader is confused in identifying the other voices (a contextualizing introduction would help, the end notes are not so clear), Johnson’s basso profundo is unmistakable: … I’m going to make a whole lot of money
betting on myself. I’m so fast I only got
my shadow to spar with & most times, it
don’t keep up either.