Poetry isn't a popular art form these days.
When it is, it comes in two forms: the teenager, full of questions and feelings and words that seem to make sense to only them, needing distance and affirmation all in one. And the academic, full of terms and ideas and connections as thin and tenuous as threads, perhaps teaching to sustain a writing habit or perhaps writing to sustain a teaching habit. Perhaps both.
When we read poetry in school, it's often old and dusty; filled with terms like iambic pentameter and stilted similes that became cliche a hundred years ago. There's nothing wrong with this type of poetry, but it's not the kind of poetry that breathes new enthusiasm into readers.
Most of what we Westerners know as literature was written by white males-- mostly because the gatekeepers of literary canon, for centuries, were white males as well. And so there is the tradition that poets are well-to-do white men, living in cottages in the country and writing about birds and trees and daffodils. And they grow old and die, and their poetry grows old and goes in anthologies.
Not so with Jamaal May.
May's poetry stems from his experiences in Detroit, and a recurring texture in his poetry is a "hum" - in fact, his best-known poetry book is titled "Hum." Hum, published in 2013, won several awards including 2014 Notable Book Award from the American Library Association and 2014 NAACP Image Award Nomination. May's poetry vibrates with intensity and feeling, from his amazing titles to his attention-grabbing imagery to his beautiful, lyrical turns of phrase and impassioned sentences.
May's poetry also engages with social issues, such as "Pomegranate Means Grenade," where May implores a young man not to fall victim to the violence that seems inevitable in his life: "You stand nameless in front of a tank against / those who would rather see you pull a pin / from a grenade than pull a pen / from your backpack." This near-rhyme of "pin" and "pen" pulls the two words together, comparing and contrasting them while providing a sharp image.
My favorite poem in Hum is "The God Engine," where the speaker reflects on his decision to lie to his niece: "When I find a dead frog in the freezer, / I have to question the wisdom / of telling my niece GE stands for God Engine: / a mystical device, a suspended animator / that keeps strawberries plump." May's speaker realizes that the niece, wanting to keep the frog alive forever, placed it in the freezer to try to preserve it. This leads to a rumination on the inevitable rotting of the earth: "decay is a constant ferryman, and if forgotten, / everything in this freezer will burn."
For anyone who wants to experience modern poetry, Jamaal May is a must. He straddles a line between lyric confessional and sparse imagery that is truly mesmerizing to behold.
Also, he's not an old white dude.
(Jamaal May's website)
