Mowing Leaves of Grass by Matt Sedillo
FlowerSong Press, 2019
I teach English at a college outside of Los Angeles, and every semester I am faced with questions about teaching canonical literature. If the canon often supports the idea, either directly or casually, that some people lack personhood, shouldn’t I be fighting against that tradition? Of course many pieces in that body of literature do. Matt Sedillo’s Mowing Leaves of Grass takes on that subject directly and suggests that much of the inequity that exists today can be to some degree traced back to texts that see the dehumanization of minority groups as incidental to plot and theme or even as a moral good, although this is not all that this book discusses. Sedillo is a writer of broad passions, and he takes on immorality wherever he sees it, but it is the part of his discussion that hits closest to me and my life.
In his poem “Pedagogy of the Oppressor” for example, he goes back to the overtly racist literature and history taught to children:
And when they read
They read in conquest
And when they thought
They thought of process.
Here he illustrates how focusing only on how the process of manifest destiny removes the humanity from pedagogy. So many of the narratives of my childhood books see history in just that way, and the cinema of my childhood focused only on the truths of those who were moving into the land of other people. Later, he focuses directly on how arts and craft merge with history for the same effect:
It’s getting late November
Teach them Pilgrim
Teach the Indian
Speak of gratitude
Speak of friendship.
In the titular poem, and my favorite poem, “Mowing Leaves of Grass,” he states this idea directly and clearly:
The classics
Who will shelve
The wit and wisdom
Of Ben Franklin
Shelley
Shakespeare
Chaucer
Walt Whitman.
These are, of course, the classics that I read as a child and an undergrad and struggle with still. Because, after all, they are representative of only one culture. There is wisdom contained within the works of these authors, but there is racism and misogyny as well. Later, Sedillo takes on the voice of the oppressor:
What has
Miserable
Ineffecient Mexico
To do with the great mission
The new world
The noble race
You fought
You lost
You don’t get to define this.
“This” being any number of things, but certainly the canon of American literature and eventually the American experience. The act of choosing the literature being taught, he is saying, helps to define who we see ourselves as, and if those books and poems define one group as a noble race and another as defeated, then that point of view is going to lead directly to the problems seen in other poems in the collection, poems that discuss income inequality and police brutality. It is unavoidable to lose humanity when the diet of literature a person is fed lacks compassion in one specific way. Or as Sedillo writes later,
I will show you
Who you are
In a book
And you will believe it.
Another way to put this, and probably the most beautiful way that he puts it, is in the ending lines of “El Sereno”:
I like you
Am made of stars
You like me
So full of pain
Are brimming with genius
Listen to no one
Who would make you feel different.
It is too often that we ask our students to read work that does indeed make them feel different. This then, along with the other poems of the collection, is a call to readers that they do not participate in their own abuse by listening to those who might make them feel weak. It’s not a bad message, and because I love much of what I read in the canon, I know that I must read it with intensity and nuance and often anger because none of these writers were as perfect as we often suggest to our students that they were.
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John Brantingham was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been featured in hundreds of magazines, The Writer’s Almanac, and The Best Small Fictions 2016. He has ten books of poetry and fiction, including The L.A. Fiction Anthology (Red Hen Press), Crossing the High Sierra (Cholla Needles Press), and California Continuum: Migrations and Amalgamations (Pelekinesis Press) co-written with Grant Hier. He teaches at Mt. San Antonio College.