Proletarian Poetry Returns: A Review of Matt Sedillo's 'City On The Second Floor'

By Jon Jeter

Reading Matt Sedillo’s second book of poetry, City on the Second Floor, reminded me of the late, hip hop icon, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, who chose that colorful pseudonym, according to his bandmates in the Wu Tang Clan, “because there was no father to his style.”

That is not entirely true of Sedillo. As I myself wrote in my review of his first book, Mowing Leaves of Grass –a postcolonial takedown of Walt Whitman’s fabled 1855 book of poetry, Leaves of Grass – Sedillo’s verses shares much in common with the late, African American griot, Amiri Baraka. I wrote at the time:

"Present in the work of both poets –the late icon and the relative ingenue respectively –is the rhythmic mixture, una mezcla, of the street, and minds sharpened, like swords, by struggle, and self-enlightenment.

This is not to suggest that Sedillo’s poetry is all fire and brimstone. Like Baraka before him, Sedillo infuses his poetry with a certain knowing, or playfulness, befitting an outsider who is in on the joke, and has seen through the illogic of a handful of Europeans “discovering” 90 million indigenous people. The white settler’s arrogance produces both amusement and blinding, righteous, anger.”

Hints of Baraka are also present in City on the Second Floor, but reflecting a relatively-young poet who continues to find his voice, Sedillo’s verses are evolving, making it difficult to pinpoint one single, or dominant, influence. Or, to return to the example of Ol’ Dirty Bastard, it is not that his style is fatherless, but rather it seems the product of many fathers.

Aside from Baraka’s work, City on the Second Floor’s most glaring resemblance is perhaps to the work of another son of Los Angeles, Charles Bukowski, although the similarities between the two poets are superficial, and I suspect, purely coincidental. Like Sedillo, Bukowski’s poetry was often a paean to his hometown, the City of Angels, and its seedy underbelly but Bukowski ‘s gritty portraiture veers towards cynicism, and even solipsism, mindful, perhaps,`` of film noir. Sedillo uses Los Angeles’ grit much differently, casting the city’s Chicano community and dispossessed populations in sharp relief, and his poetry is reminiscent not of any sterile Hollywood oeuvre, but of Mexico’s iconic Marxist muralist, Diego Rivera, and his classic fresco depicting the Ford River Rouge plant in interwar Detroit.

In a poem entitled The Pope of Broadway, Sedillo writes:

Heard a story that

When Anthony Quinn married in to the DeMille family

It was on the condition that his very Mexican family would not be attending the wedding

And that's the ticket, the price of admission, what they are buying and you had best be selling

And let me tell you one thing

When Dallas, Minneapolis, Ann Arbor, Orlando, Toledo, Scranton Ohio sends their people

They don’t send their best

They're vain

They're shallow

They're narcissists

And some of them I imagine are good waiters

Flight of the sociopaths

Transplants turned cynics chasing down plans, hopes and ambitions

On roads paved in ways I would never even begin to dream to imagine

Talking only to themselves, defining a place by all they claim it is not but it’s them

Fake, fakes, fake as fuck, fuck them

They don’t know this town, this region the history

Hell they don’t even know the valley

A certain class consciousness imbues the work of both Bukowski and Sedillo, but while Bukowski maintains a comfortable distance from the unwashed, bearing witness to the struggle but not really getting his hands dirty, Sedillo picks a side, and dives in head first, grounding — to borrow a term introduced by the late Marxist, Jamaican economist Walter Rodney — with the masses. His poetry is equal parts art, advocacy, and anthropology. Consider his poem from which the book draws its title:

There is a city on the second floor

An international destination

Whose entrance is prohibited

To all those appearing

Too poor for travel

Where commerce crosses

Bridges of wire and concrete

Just above the street light

Rises an economy of scale

Where buildings and offices

Connect to disconnect from the world below

Here

In the space between

Worker and destination

Conversation spins profit

And no one moves without reason

And no one speaks without purpose

Here

The word is stillborn

A commodity

And the world dies anew

While working stiff spend wages

In cheap imitation

Of their exploitation

Arrogant

Delusional

Walking dead

Laughingly dreaming

Of a penthouse suite

They will never reach

While staring down from terraces

Towards the street below

In this and other poems, I detect echoes of two, towering Midwestern poets whose work is often associated with proletarian themes: Detroit’s Philip Levine, and Chicago’s socialist scribe, Carl Sandburg, whose poem, Chicago, remains one of my all-time favorites. City on the Second Floor is indescribably good, as rich and textured as the best bottle of wine you’ve ever consumed, , in part because of this almost sociological lens that Sedillo applies to his verses. But reading it for me was a bit of a chore, akin to a high-stakes wine-tasting contest, as I struggled mightily to identify the differing bouquets: was that vanilla or almond, nutmeg or currants?

After identifying hints of Baraka and Bukowski, Sandburg and Levine and even a subtle aroma of Rivera, I still felt I was missing someone. Finally, after my second reading of Sedillo’s poem entitled simply, The Rich, it hit me: the Spanish poet, , Federico Garcia Lorca, who was assassinated by Spanish fascists in 1936. It reads:

You see the rich

And the poor

Well, they're just like you and me

Two hands

Two feet

The sky

The sea

And everything between

One heart that beats

And the time

To make the most of it

So, you'll find no sympathy

Reaching into these deep pockets

All we ever asked was our fair share

And God damn it, that's all of it

So, while you're out in the streets screaming for peace and justice

We’re sleeping in satin sheets dreaming free and guiltless over oceans and tariffs liquidating pensions then off to bid on porcelain and portraits at billion dollar auctions

You know you need us

You know we're selling your secrets

It is not that Sedillo is a surrealist as Garcia Lorca was but his poetry represents Chicanos in the same unapologetic way that Garcia Lorca represented his tribe of Andalusian Roma people, who suffered under the thumb of Franco’s regime just as Sedillo’s tribe suffers under the white settler regime in LA. Reading Sedillo’s use of the words “us” and “we” is subversive, particularly in such dire times, and emotionally triggering, but in a good way, harkening back to a day when the best artists were not feted with awards and university chairs, but were instead held in contempt by the pharaohs, for helping the people fight their oppressors.



Jon Jeter is a former Washington Post correspondent and the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Bright Nights and Dark Days in Obama’s Postracial America.