Book Review: The Big Smoke

If you just take
a prose and break
it up into pieces I
don't think that you
can really call that poetry.

I am getting sick of the abuse of free verse I have observed explosively trending in contemporary poetry. Frankly, I have read many wonderful uses of free verse, and these uses were great partly because they were actually poetry. Poetry has more to it than looking like poetry. If you take a normal sentence and break it up to appear a free-verse poem, that is in no way worthy of the name "poetry," but rather "poorly formatted prose."

The Big Smoke by Adrian Matejka is yet another addition to the Jack Johnson collection, which by now could be placed in the mythology section of a bookstore. It is a collection of Johnson-inspired poems that hardly vary in style, tone, or themes. Almost every poem states something about black rights, perseverance, or Johnson's hardships with women, and yet Matejka somehow, in 100 full pages of poems, managed to never deepen the dimensions of these themes.

Now, to the deeper and more controversial issues, for those are truly the reasons I excite about literary criticism. What is the purpose of a poem? It has become commonly agreed that poems share an experience. However, I hardly believe it stops there, and this is where I often ram heads with other theorists. An experience is not worth sharing in a poem unless it unveils an idea worthwhile. Unless a poem adds something important to my life or has the potential to add something important to the life of another, I find it pointless and a waste of good time.

A few poems in this collection handed some interesting ideas for me to sort out, primarily Cannibalism and Battle Royal - the book's first two poems. I spent two hours breaking down the possible implications of these poems and their intricate symbols and challenging ideas. Quickly I swept the book back up, thrilled to rip another bite of its meat. But I found myself highly disappointed starting at poem three and ending at the last. All of the symbols and layers had been dumped out, and Matejka resorted to rapid-firing events, all of them failing with a capital F as stand-alone poems. None carry any meaning other than their face-value, and nary actually gave the world insightful ideas when removed from the collection.

"Belle & I returned after a fine supper
of roasted quail in the Crystal Dining
Room. Hattie was waiting in the mauve
hallway right outside our rooms.
She was angry & rigid like one
of those Buckingham guards when
it's raining. I don't know why she came
to San Francisco, but she wore the black
lace dress I bought for her in London."

¿.....profound stuff.....?

And let's not forget the protagonist of our story, Jack Johnson. Every poem is dedicated to him, and we learn many facts about his life. Matejka clearly did his research on Johnson's life, but he completely forgot to write him as an interesting character. Instead, he leaves the protagonist flat. Apparently when you devote an entire book to one single person, fleshing out his depth is hardly necessary.

The Big Smoke is doubtlessly a bunch of broken up prose made to appear like free verse, as well as random events; yet it is hardly poetry.

1 out of 5 stars