Circus

by Dante Micheaux

Circus by Dante Micheaux
Dante Micheaux’s superb poetic aptitude is wedded to an equally superb poetic amplitude. Intimate soliloquy, lyric address, and linguistic allegory merge with resonating voices and personae. is poem is masterful, paradoxical and spiritual. The “holiness in all its unholy rejoicing” is variously scored in Dante Micheaux’s commanding Circus.

—TERRANCE HAYES

I still stand by words I wrote almost twenty years ago, when I read Dante Micheaux’s poems for the first time: “I am impressed by the serious depth and masterful technique of Micheaux’s poems. He is a true man of the world, mature beyond his years, one whose voracious intelligence and richly diverse background uniquely equip him for the literary vocation. Circus promises to be received as a masterpiece reminiscent of the best of Melvin Tolson’s work, and some of Micheaux’s poems bear an a affinity to the delicate music and wisdom of Robert Hayden. But Micheaux’s influences are not limited to the stars of African American poetry; his experience and reading ranges wide. Dante Micheaux is a code-switcher fluent in many languages. Some of his lines bring this reader close to heartbreak.”

—MARILYN NELSON

Dante Micheaux’s Circus commands the reader’s attention. In this long poem, each line is tuned by breath and image, serious play and heartfelt critique, but also by the modern urban motifs of grief and love. At times, signifying can get us to a desperate truth. The reader or listener has to possess a sense of history in order to be transported to the here and now. In Circus, the borders between the imaginary and the real dissolve as the poem delivers us into verisimilitude.

—YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA

Genres: Poetry

35 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2018

Reviews

[Jenna]

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.

[Jee Koh · Rating 1 out of 5]

The kind of black poetry that plays, knowingly, on white sympathies. Not a single original or memorable image or line, but plenty of name-checking: T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Charles Baudelaire, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston etc. From II: Funhouse, the section that is least indebted to other writers, two boys pay a prostitute an ice-cream cone:

and follow her double-fisted, backward lure
into the condemned house of tricks and trade,
into a moribund world of creaky stairs,
sparse slivers of light,
bedless bedrooms and lecherous walls,
Here the cat is always away.

Creaky stairs? Slivers of light? All cliches further burdened by silly pathetic fallacy ("lecherous walls") and weak attempts at wordplay: bedless bedrooms, always away. The lines give no sense that any specific house or room is being imagined or remembered.

And when the boys go to it:

Numb and spread-eagle on the floor, she invites
the boys with a sticky finger, one at a time,
later together,
into to an unkempt and musky void.
They sink into her clutches, tighter than vise-grips,
with a clumsy start, all nerves and erection.

"An unkempt and musky void" is not how young boys will describe a vagina. More cliches: sink into clutches, tighter than vise, clumsy start. And the boys react, apparently, in an identical manner: "with a clumsy start, all nerves and erection." This is a failure of the imagination.