#JACK JOHNSON FRAGMENTS MEANING FREE#

So, it took me eight years total to write.Īdrian Matejka: I was researching the whole time. So, I spent about two years researching Jack Johnson, his biography, the time he lived in, boxing at that time, all of that before I even wrote a poem and I continued to research the entire time I was writing the book. I needed to be able to do all of that, but because he actually did these things, I felt like it would have been disrespectful to not really focus on the events as they happened. Poets do it all the time and they’re able to kind of weave a narrative and create a world that’s believable and valuable. They take little bits and pieces of their lives. It seemed to me that in order to be respectful of the life that this man lived, I needed to know as much about him and as much about the time as I could. One thing that they all had in common was kind of authenticity and honesty about the experiences of the protagonists and so, when I started thinking about writing about Jack Johnson, I didn’t want to walk into his story without fully understanding as much as I could about where the story took place. I’m a great admirer of historically based fiction and poetry and one of the things that those wonderful books, like Natasha Tretheway’s “Native Guard” or Tyehimba Jess’ “Leadbelly” or Michael Ondaatje, “Coming Through Slaughter,” those kinds of books where they’re grounded in a time in place. Jo Reed: Tell me about the research you did because you really take in the scope of his life.Īdrian Matejka: Yeah. I thought I’d write a few poems, but it didn’t seem like I was doing the work his story deserved and so, through that, it became a book. But the more I researched Jack Johnson for that essay, the more I realized that his story was really valuable and much more important than the essay that I was working on. Then, I don't know, maybe 2005, I saw a picture of him and all of this came back, like “Wait a minute, that’s the guy, the guy that my mother used to reference,” and so, I thought I was going to write an essay about learning to love boxing through my mom. She said something a little bit more pointed and so, she’d bring up this guy Jack Johnson all the time in that context and I just never knew who he was.

So, we would sit there on a Saturday afternoon and watch Ken Norton or watch Muhammad Ali or George Foreman, the era of great heavyweights and my mother was a very animated fan and if the person she was cheering for didn’t win, she would say “Forget that guy, he’s no Jack Johnson,” but she didn’t say forget. This was in the 70s when boxing was still on TV. My mother was a big boxing fan and we used to watch the fights when I was a kid. I had first heard about him through my mother. He’s published three other collections, including “The Devil’s Garden,” which won the New York/New England Award, “Mixology,” winner of the National Poetry Series, and most recently “Map to the Stars.” I spoke to Adrian Matejka about “The Big Smoke” when we were in pandemic shutdown and I wanted to know where did he get the idea to write a book of poetry about Jack Johnson.Īdrian Matejka: I didn’t really know much about Jack Johnson at all when I started the project. Adrian Matejka teaches in the MFA program at Indiana University in Bloomington. Adrian Matejka book won the Anisfield-Wolf Prize, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and it’s an NEA Big Read title. “The Big Smoke” explores Johnson’s journey from the son of former slaves to the champion of the fight of the century against Jeffries. The boxer Jim Jeffries came out of retirement to fight Johnson. His lifestyle infuriated white America, but his winning the title enraged them. Johnson was a bon vivant who lived large, a flashy dresser who drove flashier cars, hung out in nightclubs, and took up with many different women, marrying three times, all white women. He had the title from 1908 to 1915 when Jim Crow ruled and blacks were killed throughout the country with impunity. Jack Johnson is an unlikely subject for a book of poetry, but that’s exactly what Adrian Matejka did with “The Big Smoke,” a collection of 52 poems about Johnson, the first African American Heavyweight World Champion. Jo Reed: That’s poet and NEA Big Read author Adrian Matejka and this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced by the National Endowment for the Arts. So, they would take it out on other black people. There was such an inattention to the lives of black people and such a disregard for their value that having somebody like Jack Johnson in a lot of ways, especially later, became dangerous for other black people because they couldn’t get to him.

#JACK JOHNSON FRAGMENTS MEANING FREE#

Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.Īdrian Matejka: The man could have left his house, gotten murdered, and nobody would have said a word. Music Credit: “NY” written and performed by Kosta, from the album Soul Sand.

Jack johnson fragments meaning