Poetry Readers Challenge discussion

I was quite impressed by this. It's a long poem in five parts that can be read as largely a response to The Waste Land, although it also takes cues from influences as wide-ranging as Walt Whitman, Amiri Baraka, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, and musical artists like Trina and Ciara. The language is colloquial, clear, and compelling, while the scenarios it depicts play out as vividly as one's own lived experiences, in addition to which, like religious parables, they are imbued with a symbolism, moral weight, and relevance by which they etch themselves into the memory indelibly. The scenes painted in Circus -- the interaction between two young boys and a drug-addicted prostitute; the death of a drug dealer; a religious revival -- are engrossing even as they induce queasiness. And yet the poem indicts the reader's voyeuristic gaze at the very same time that it deliberately reels it in, thus enacting the central ethical problem with which Micheaux concerns himself here: the way he perceives our society to contain two distinct classes -- African-Americans who are pressured to perform their lives for the white gaze vs. power-holders who gorge on this "entertainment." Like Eliot in The Waste Land, the poet here also takes a prophetic tone, warning of a continued descent into moral and spiritual bankruptcy for all if the rings of this vampiric circus are not broken. The poem is unsettling on a profound level, in the best way that poetry can be.

Prior to reading this chapbook, I had not heard of Micheaux, and it appears that I have been woefully out of the loop: he has had work published in Poetry and the American Poetry Review, and Circus is blurbed by Yusef Komunyakaa, Marilyn Nelson, and Terrance Hayes. I will definitely be keeping an eye out for more of Micheaux's work in the future.

another great review, Jenna.

Thanks, Nina. Hayes's blurb for this chapbook begins, "Dante Micheaux's superb poetic aptitude is wedded to an equally superb poetic amplitude...." I'm really intrigued by that distinction he makes -- aptitude/amplitude. On the one hand, if you think about it too much, you have deja vu about that page-ripping scene in Dead Poets Society :-D On the other hand, it does pithily encapsulate one of the standout features about this work -- its impressive scale, its ambitious scope.

I was happy to learn Micheaux's book just won the Four Quartets Poetry Prize from the Poetry Society of America: https://lithub.com/dante-micheaux-win... It's good to see recognition going to a book that much deserves it.