Joseph G. Ramsey reviews two of Chicano poet Matt Sedillo’s recent works, Mowing Leaves of Grass (2019) and City on the Second Floor (2022).
Matt Sedillo’s poetry performances are intense, almost like he’s trying to shred the ruling fabric of the world with his words. Winner of the Grand Slam Championship for Los Angeles in 2011, the Joe Hill Labor Poetry Award in 2017, and most recently the prestigious Dante’s Laurels in 2022, Sedillo has now performed at over one hundred college campuses across this continent and has recently been appointed Literary Director of the Mexican Cultural Institute of L.A. His frenetic pace and vocal force communicate a passionate poetic protest, and his audience is growing.
But Sedillo doesn’t just demand to be heard. His poems need to be read, with particular attention to how they forcefully communicate radical ideas, recount suppressed histories, map the terrain of contemporary capitalism, and confront profound challenges facing the cause of radical change within the U.S. empire.
Sedillo’s two recent books, Mowing Leaves of Grass (2019) and City on the Second Floor (2022), both from Flower Song Press, are riveting and provocative, brash, and openly revolutionary, indicting the current world order and carving imagined paths towards a new one. Sedillo himself refers to his first book as a call for “Pitchforks-style” revolt, his second as a kind of poetic Marxist urban sociology, informed by Marx’s Capital and the work of David Harvey.1 Both deserve to be discussed by those who are serious about creating a radically different kind of society.
Mowing Leaves of Grass refers to Walt Whitman’s 19th century opus, one of the most famous works in American poetry. Scholars often paint Whitman’s legendary Grass as wild and free, democratically available to all—and in ways, ol’ Walt was certainly ahead of his time. But Sedillo reminds us that what appears as one person’s site of free wandering inspiration may be another person’s site of exploitation and exclusion. “Look for me under your boot-soles,” Whitman famously concludes his sprawling classic. Sedillo’s Mowing Leaves begins with the labor and the land theft that prepared the ground beneath Whitman’s own boots.
Sedillo has real beef here with Whitman, zooming in on the bard’s racist apologetics for brutalities perpetrated against Mexican and indigenous peoples of the Southwest during the mid-19th century. His title poem quotes Whitman at his worst, reminding us that the widely loved bard, like so many other national heroes, was once a voice for a racist ‘manifest destiny.’ (“What has / Miserable / Inefficient Mexico/ To do with the great mission / [of peopling] The new world /[with a] The noble race”? as Whitman once asked (119).)
It’s just one way that Mowing Leaves of Grass challenges commonplace American myths of democratic inclusion, foregrounding the foundational exclusion of exploited—and often racialized—labor. As the book’s opening poem, “Pilgrim,” puts it:
The Melting Pot
Was never meant for the hands
That clean it
The American dream
Has always come at the expense
Of those who tucked it in
The same poem takes aim at contemporary Arizona lawmakers seeking to ban Ethnic Studies: “these racists / That try to erase us / As we raise their kids / In cities that bear our names” (14). As the opener concludes, “We didn’t cross the borders / The borders crossed us / Who you calling immigrant / Pilgrim?” Sedillo reminds us of who the new arrivals are here.
Along the way, he drops references to suppressed historical events and banned books of the Southwest, enough to keep a critical classroom busy for weeks. For that reason alone, Mowing makes for a terrific teaching tool: a road map to forbidden historical knowledge. Combining accessibility, provocation, and scholarly reference, Sedillo gives the newcomer plenty to respond to, while challenging even experts to dig deeper. So much has been buried, so much forgotten.
But if Mowing Leaves of Grass foregrounds those who were constitutively excluded from the promise of the “American Dream” from the get-, Sedillo’s most recent book makes clear those people are not alone. City on the Second Floor takes on a neoliberal capitalism that increasingly throws overboard even those who, once upon a time, might have been offered a slice of American prosperity pie.
Consider Second Floor’s opener, entitled simply “Post.” The poem begins with the double-edged nuclear security of “yesterday,” (“a man on the moon / and a finger on the button”) then quickly spins its dissolution. “Tomorrow doesn’t show up all at once,” he writes:
But when it does
Liquidate the pension
Automate the factory
Auction off the options
“Don’t worry bout me,” speaks Sedillo’s new precariat, “I worry free”:
Free-lance contingency
Smile at your service to gig economy
Side hustle, millennial, postindustrial standard
Hire me as an adjunct
Fire me as a contingent
Into a city I cannot afford to live in
Tell me my credit score
Better yet, tell me yours
Promise me the world
then show me the door (1).
Sedillo speaks here for the generations “Born sometime after the foreclosure,” facing a “Neoliberalism feasting on the marrow / Of the past and the present / the jobs of tomorrow / gone today.” He closes the poem by strumming a familiar irony for working class millennials, denied access to the prosperity they were raised to desire, yet often blamed for that situation. “Tell me another for the fire,” the poem closes, “Tell me the one where I killed the economy” (3).
Of course, Sedillo very much would like to kill this kind of economy. We can thus imagine the closing fireside chat as post-apocalyptic, or …as post-capitalist.
Or, maybe: both.
Here and elsewhere, Sedillo dwells with the dystopian future emerging in the present, American ‘dreams’ dissolving into nightmares of precarity and police violence, stagnant wages crashing against rising sea levels and rising rents.
From such a dystopian precipice, it’s infamously easier to call for system change than it is to give a clear sense where such change will come from. Sedillo’s work does not stand outside of this radical conundrum—whose work today can?—but his poetry makes a contribution to limbering up our dreams of liberation, by putting radical hopes into dialogue with real obstacles we face. Even as the ranks of the super-exploited and excluded grow, increasing the ‘objective’ basis of a mass movement capable for system change, there remain difficult ‘subjective’ challenges to realizing this potential.
The title poem “City on the Second Floor,” for starters, calls our attention to the vertiginous spatial and class divisions of Los Angeles, Sedillo’s hometown, where even the very skyline seems to conspire against clear social thought. Inspired by the actual above-ground urban bridges of the Bonaventure hotel, “City on the Second Floor” represents a place at once physical and ideological:
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
The poem critiques not only Big Capital, but the sterile instrumentalized life worlds of micro bosses (think ‘assistant managers’) who like to think they’ve climbed beyond the reach of the working-class. But it also shows these suspended second-floor bosses being fooled by the system. They may fancy themselves ‘above’ the street, but really, how far are they from the “working stiffs” below?
Working stiffs
In cheap imitation
Or 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 (11).
The referent here grows fuzzy—does “working stiffs” refer only to those on the street, or also to those “walking dead” on the second floor? But maybe the blurring is the point. Those on the second floor, though “disconnect[ed]” from the street-dwellers, still hover so close that their proximity enables imitation from those below, just as the perched 2nd floor wannabe exploiters themselves “dream” of “penthouse suite[s]” that they, too, “will never reach.”
Sedillo gives us a snapshot of an open-air hierarchy that enables working-class self-alienation, as well as petty bourgeois delusions of grandeur. In Sedillo’s Los Angeles, almost anyone—anyone allowed to access the Bonaventura bridge, at least—can imagine their future ascent to a “2nd floor” view. The architecture of the city makes it possible for even those who are struggling to momentarily imagine themselves superior to someone else ‘below.’ In this America, even the poor man can imagine himself one day rich—and that’s a problem.
In “King of Los Angeles,” Sedillo floats—and flattens—the appearances that lend credence to such American get-rich fantasies. In “Downtown Los Angeles,” he writes:
When moving at the right speed
It is easy to reimagine
Yourself king
Map out the geography
Claim principality
Over stilted steel
Money stacked so high
Seems like
It belongs
To everyone
It doesn’t. (53)
How then to forge socialist subjectivity and collectivity—in a society where “second floor” (individualistic, wannabe boss) mentalities are so pervasive, the spoils of accumulation so tantalizing? Not to mention a society where racist apartheid and settler colonialism have sown deep rifts in society, even among the multinational working class.
Sedillo offers a range of forceful poetic responses to this terrain.
One move is to pull back to the Big Picture, focusing on the grotesque and growing extremes of the World at large. In several poems, Sedillo hits us with the extremes of social and ecological disaster created by capitalism run amok, dwelling with the growing homeless population on LA’s Skid Row (“where all the complexities of an economy are laid bare”) as well as with the coming super storms born of a poisoned sky (“For what profits a man / Should he gain the world / But cannot breathe its air”).
Similarly, Sedillo hits us with the extremity of the Enemies we face, personifying a ruling class whose powers dwarf the many differences that persist among those below. In both books he ventures into persona at length, giving voice to “The Devil” and “The Rich”—here they are roughly equivalent—as they brag about their control over the rest of us. At times, Sedillo almost seems to revel rubbing our noses in these rulers’ audacity:
We’ll privatize the water supply
Then copyright the tears
Falling
From
Your
Eyes (City, 14)
But Sedillo does more here than dramatize the extremity of capitalist expropriations of nature (external and internal nature alike). He also confronts readers with our own present lack of power. “What the fuck are you going to do about it?” his nasty speaker asks us at the end of “The Devil.” “We’re the rich, who the fuck are you.”
The icecaps are already melting […]
And we’ll get away with it too
Nothing we say or
Do
Is ever held against us
Haven’t you been paying attention
We’re rich
Sedillo advertises the impunity of the contemporary capitalist class, not just to make us angry, but also to make us reckon with the utter inadequacy of so much of what passes for ‘opposition‘ these days. What does the usual kind of protest really amount to in the face of such a shameless enemy? How much does voting for this over that politician amount to when both answer to this demonic master, Capital?
It’s a risky approach. Even well executed—and Sedillo thrives in this mode—it runs the risk of courting despair. After all, if the odds are so stacked against us and if the ruling class really is all-powerful, then isn’t resistance futile? Why not just be thankful for the scraps we can get?
Taken in isolation, such poems might appear to paint a hopeless picture.
But these persona poems are paired in Sedillo’s universe with another frank recognition: that without workers’ compliance, the ‘powerful’ wouldn’t be able to perpetrate their predatory plans in the first place. Their ruling power ultimately depends on our obedience. Here he turns to a classic marxist theme, the revolutionary possibilities latent in alienated labor.
“This city rides by night,” Sedillo writes in “Camelot”:
Runs off the sweat of the backs who work it
Laying the very brick
That walls them off (41).
It’s an image of irony and injustice, but also of veiled potential working-class power. For hands that know how to raise walls might one day pull them down. “Long live the hymn of the brick that escaped the city’s wall,” Sedillo writes, imagining bricks repurposed as weapons amidst a coming street insurrection. (“A brick / shattered the chapel of print / smashed the mint”)
Similarly, in “Cheney’s Sparrows,” the long list of US imperialism’s unpunished crimes does not rest with moral condemnation of the former Vice President, but ends by addressing the reader directly:
I want you to remember
That men like Dick Cheney
Could not have accomplished a single thing
Without little expendable toy soldiers
Just like yourself
And isn’t that something to write home about (70-71).
Such insight raises the stakes of the struggle for these “toy soldiers’” consciousness; their refusal would deprive the rulers of their power. What then is it that stands in the way of more of these “soldiers” making such a choice?
Here, left-wing radicals can learn a thing or two from Sedillo, who lingers with working-class resistance to radicalism, without ever letting go of the need for radical change. His poetry reckons with reaction, not only in the form of overt state repression, but at the level of ideology, in the minds and hearts of working people themselves.
In this spirit, Sedillo’s poems about the ruling class do not just ‘expose’ capitalists, but also the ideas that make their dominance appear as acceptable or inevitable—ideas that too-often capture the minds of working people too. He works to unearth and expunge hegemonic fatalisms which naturalize capitalist class domination as unchanging and unchangeable facts of life. Thus, the speaker in “The Rich” preaches a so-called “gospel of wealth”:
Cause it is what it is
And that’s all it’s ever been (13).
Indeed, if one accepts these two premises—as all too many in the US do—the present order may indeed seem inevitable and natural. Their falsity needs to be exposed, by recovering suppressed histories of resistance, by restoring to popular consciousness a sense that the present order is, and has always been, contested and open to transformation.
*
In the poem “21st century,” Sedillo explores the contradictory consciousness and existential challenges facing American working-class men in particular—a pressing topic in the wake of Trumpism. The poem presents a moving account of a “Twenty first century / American / Male proletariat” that is “Pushed and prodded / Tried and tested / Pulled in many different directions” (50), silently struggling with “Questions / Like/ What is my birthright? / To what am I entitled / And to whom do I owe” (51). “Taught something about freedom / Something about ethics / Independence/ Opportunity/ Citizenship,” and prompted by a vague sense of Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “dream” of racial tolerance, this American working man is left “wondering / Why men must be judged at all.” He wonders where the “content of character” itself comes from:
Under what conditions
Is man’s character truly formed
And am I really its content
Or merely the documents
Stitched upon birth
To the lining of my pockets
The weight of my wallet
The shirt on my back
And are the stars made of dust
And am I
Made of that
And are those mountains
Not older than nations
The proletarian speaker here raises fundamental questions about his own (lack of) identity, pondering how, in light of life’s cosmic brevity:
Why then
Must I spend my life
Shining shoes
Pressing suits
Digging ditches
In preparation
Of my own burial
It is no easy thing for Sedillo’s American working man to come to terms with the ways in which the socially recognized ‘content’ of his character—from nationality to financial status to occupation to gender—is not in fact one’s own at all, but instead the product of historical forces not of his choosing. The outward signs of the ensuing identity crisis may be troubling –“He gets drunk / He gets loud / then very, very quiet / Stumbles around” (51). But Sedillo suggests that the working American male who seems like just an angry drunk, on a deeper level, may be contemplating essential issues: like why in this too-short life he must spend so much of his time zombified in compulsory wage labor.
Contrary to what some might expect from this avowedly ‘proletarian’ poet, Sedillo seldom presents us with outwardly rebel workers. But he shows us proletarian consciousness in the process of struggle and transformation, running up against fundamental questions that ruling institutions and ideology cannot truly answer. That these struggles may not be externally visible makes them all the more important to grasp.
Sedillo makes it clear that it’s not just working-class American men who are facing a kind of existential crisis under the current system. So are all people who would identify as communist or socialist revolutionaries. Here he confronts a fundamental challenge facing the movement, especially in reactionary times. In short, as I’ll put it:
How can we sustain belief in—and thus build praxis towards—a radically new world, when we are so mired in this one? How can we come to believe in ourselves and those around us as potential leaders of revolution when we, too, are so often so laid low by the system we face?
Sedillo is not afraid to confront the existential tension between revolutionary dreams and present precarious realities In a rich, historically informed poem entitled “Last Night I Dreamt I was Vladimir Lenin,” he confronts us with the inspiration of previous generations of revolutionaries (including Lenin, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro), but also with the yawning gap between today’s radicals’ waking and sleeping selves, between our idealized ideological aspirations and our immediate circumstances. (The very text of the poem is arrayed on the page as a series of long, margin-to-margin zigzags.) At one point the speaker asks:
Who was I
Who lived life
In such a selfish way
To dream such things [as revolution] (90)
Sedillo dwells with the difficulty of bringing revolutionary dreams to life, avoiding the twin dangers of romanticization (where the yawning gap between dream and reality is ignored), but also cynicism (where that gap is used to undermine the revolutionary dreaming, period).
These days, the latter—cynicism—might be the primary danger.
Why is cynicism such a threat? Didn’t Marx and Engels foretell of all romantic abstractions being drowned in the icy waters of economic calculation and the callous cash nexus? And wasn’t that, at least for the early Marx of the Communist Manifesto, supposed to be a good thing? A positive step on the road to workers of the world uniting, compelled by capital to a sobriety beyond romantic illusion? (“All that is solid melts into air. All that was holy is profaned…”)
But such cynical sobriety is not enough, as Sedillo makes clear. For the task of revolution will require—has always required—the work of projecting beyond the currently visible, verifiable, or ‘realistic.’ Yes, we must recognize “the worlds of difference / Between dreams and a plan,” Sedillo writes, but also
that nothing began
Without a vision
Without some small conceit (90)
The cynical calculations of what some call ‘capitalist realism’ (following the late Mark Fisher) threatens to strangle such world changing conceit in its crib.
“Capitalism is a Death Cult,” City on the Second Floor’s closing poem, explores this existential tension from its profoundly dystopian endpoint. “Capital is dead labor,” Sedillo writes:
Born buried alive
In the dirt of yesteryear
Personified calculations
Dawn the mask of worker
Pour sweat
Into assembly
Until all existence is doubled
And all purpose is split (99).
Crucially, the focus here is not just on the injustice of exploitation. The danger runs deeper, in the way that capital threatens to commodify the very imaginations of those it conscripts.
The death that capital cultivates is thus not just a matter of literal ecocide or class war or imperialist mass murder (each of which Sedillo also treats directly in various poems). Capitalism is a “death cult” not just because it kills—or ‘makes a killing’ from that killing—but because its “personified calculations” erode humanity’s very sense of purpose: sapping our very species being, dissolving our sense of a connected community, exchange value colonizing and undermining pursuit of human purposefulness. Human beings spend more and more of their life reduced to mere means, chasing dollars, fracturing substantial connections between needs and ends.
Precisely because so much of workers’ life and time has been taken from them:
In their free time
[…they ]attempt to stretch
Some
Meaning
Out of something
That is theirs alone.
Their best is generally kept
For grandkids
At the knee
Or for funeral speech
Some pray for a steady hand
Some for a second chance
Others simply for a quick end (99)
Workers’ human purpose here persists, of course, but it is pushed into individualized compartments that accommodate rather than contest the system. Perversely, capital’s death cult can lead even workers “To a morbid chant of survival…
In an ugly dance of conviction
As they discipline
Any sign of dissent
That might arise from within them
Instead of rising up
They praise the rich
In the midst of a global pandemic
They praise illusions
So obvious
They are should be embarrassment
To all who hear or speak them (100).
In these lines we hear the echo of irritational ‘conspiracy theories,’ yet Sedillo focuses here not on the easy-to-mock particular appearance (QAnon and the like), but its underlying essence: the way the rise of such potentially fascistic illusions, at least as far as working-class people are concerned, is a symptom of the way that capitalism systematically strips meaning from people’s lives, while at the same time pushing them to fill that existential gap in ‘safe’ ways that will not elicit the system’s wrath.
*
Here it may be that, for our side too, myth and legend still have a role to play, as guides for consciousness and action in disorienting and cynical times, as shields for staving off despair. “Myth that is legend,” Sedillo writes in his poem “Camelot,” gives
A sense of direction
When you can’t trust your senses
Materially
Historic and dialectic
Mysterious until it isn’t (43).
Myth and legend can help sustain a sense of revolutionary possibility, even when it’s not yet fully in evidence on the streets or the shopfloor. Such radical conceits—informed, to be sure, by history and theory—have an important role to play if we are to keep the dream of revolution alive in reactionary times. “Camelot” imagines a time-transcendent insurgency of proles that, finally, after countless attempts, overtakes the shining city.
Another kind of modern mythic image comes to us in the poem, “The Sky,” where Sedillo stages a contrast between imperialist drone bombers and militarized space stations, on the one hand, and a “beautiful brown mobile proletariat native to the continent / displaced by imperial capital,” represented here by…the butterfly. “Crossing rivers and canyons” he writes:
The flight of the monarch butterfly
Represents freedom, represents movement
Guided by ancestral knowledge
Along a path set generations before them
It makes for a poignant counter to the imperialists who, deaf to tradition, “lay claim to clay”
Claim to soil
Claim to all that stand upon it
To all that grows out of it
The enemy here seeks “To colonize the heavens” with a literal “space force.” But just as dangerous is its attempted colonization of the horizon of human thought. Do we accept the premise that imperial powers should own and control the skies above us? Raising the precarious butterfly as a political symbol, Sedillo links the racialized position of the Chican@ working-class to the defense of nature and the land as a commons, estranging the present on the wings of a creature that defies borders and recognizes no private ownership.
Yet another kind of legend comes when Sedillo imagines future scenes of post-revolutionary carnival and proletarian revenge, offering images of “Pissing / On the graves / Of all who had made the world as it was in the time before” (“After the Revolution”). It’s as if he’s trying to whet our appetite for revolt with a promise of just desserts.
We should not be surprised by the anger here. Mowing Leaves of Grass appeared in the second year of the Trump presidency and bears the outraged stamp of those years, as borne by communities subject to Trump’s worst toxic spew. But even at his most heated, Sedillo is never just addressing the extreme ignorance and racism embodied of “Donald / Fucking / Trump” or his minions, but the social forces that made them possible in the first place.
In City on the Second Floor, published just into the Biden presidency—with its historic Cabinet of rainbow militarists—Sedillo does not spare the liberal or multicultural exploiters. His work makes it clear that more equal ‘anti-racist’ inclusion within the current structures is not enough, and indeed, often functions as an alibi for continued oppression.
In “To Serve Hispanics,” Sedillo rebukes prevailing “Diversity, equity, inclusion” efforts that target and funnel minorities into STEM programs to benefit institutions like the Department of Defense. Such “Access and achievement” programs feature
Boards of trustees
Debating
Safe spaces
For students
To sleep in
Parking lots
Perchance to dream
Of a way of life
That died
Decades before they were born (44).
Highlighting student homelessness, Sedillo conjures the stark class realities and economic trends that make superficial racial ‘inclusion’ inadequate. At the same time, across his work he reminds us that the USA is full of institutions that demand not racial integration, but anti-imperialist abolition. If we’re serious about defending Black and Brown lives, he suggests, we should not be calling for a diversity makeover for the empire, but an international and multi-racial movement to take that empire apart.
Sedillo’s work offers us a powerful example of how what might appear superficially as ‘identity’ politics can become a vector and a vehicle for communist praxis. Yet in keeping with a revolutionary socialist internationalism, Sedillo does not merely affirm all invocations of national or racial identity either—even as his deep respect and appreciation for the struggles of Mexican working people is clear (See for example “La Reina”). Locating his authorial origins in East LA (“born into struggle”), he demarcates his perspective from establishment multiculturalism, which too often focuses on merely changing the complexion of oppression.
Sedillo is not one to confuse either revenge or integration with revolution. Nor is he just a passive prophet of the apocalyptic revolutionary event. His is not a ‘wait and see’ nor a ‘rush to riot’ radicalism, but the ethos of a cultural worker who devotes his waking hours to crafting symbolic tools we can use to help bring the big change closer.
Nowhere is this clearer than in his remarkable “Party Hymn,” which deserves to be quoted in full and shared widely:
Party Hymn
Some say it begins from within
Some say it has already begun
Some say wait upon conditions
Some say inevitable
Some say impossible
Some say it is a process not an event
Some carry signs
Some sign petitions
Some block politicians
Some back politicians
Some become politicians
And I have seen
Academic’s metaphysics
Swallow reality
Then spit back a peer review tenure track salary
And I have seen organizers of labor
Embrace parties of capital
And I have seen age old cowardice
Dishonesty, careerism
Parade as groundbreakingly new
And I have seen courage
Burst into spontaneous flame
And I have seen fear in the pig’s eye
And I have seen rebellions
Light the night sky
Then fade to smoke
Some speak against the need
For political education
Some speak against the need
For party structure and discipline
But I know
Without theory
History does not move
And I know
Once the line is set
Organization is key
That there are decades
For the taking
To be wrenched from weeks
That we cannot wait upon the impossible
That none can do it alone
That every day we must work to make
Victory inevitable
That if we wish to see
Revolution
Within our lifetimes
We must
Organize
Organize
Organize2
A 21st century Leninism comes through here in fresh, accessible language, rising at a driven pace. The poem reaches its closing mantra via a series of oppositional snapshots, pointing out the limits of identifiable dead ends, from academic obscurantism to electoral opportunism to trade union class collaboration, to various individualistic, voluntaristic, anti-intellectual, and spontaneist sorts of activism. Alone, neither courage nor genius is enough. The revolution to come demands collective organization: the capacity for united action, strategy informed by theory, discipline that can hold up in the storms of struggle.
But beyond this injunction to ‘organize,’ Sedillo’s work broadly helps us to flesh out the meaning of what it means to organize in this moment, in terms of what we are up against. Crucially, he reminds us that what we’re up against isn’t just ‘out there;’ it’s also ‘in here,’ internal to the movement of would-be revolutionary organizations, to the contemporary working-class itself, and to the very existential challenge of sustaining radical hope in reactionary times.
It may be here that poetry, and art in general, has its role to play. Not only in highlighting the crises and enemy structures we face, but in helping to sustain and develop the individual and collective spirit needed to make the changes we now theorize and dream about. In part this involves daring to imagine a world that may yet seem ‘impossible.’ In part it involves working through obstacles out loud, enabling others to reflect together on the historical baggage that holds us back from what we might—what we must—become, if another world is to become possible.
The exact form of the revolutionary solutions the world needs at this point in history may be far from clear. But many key elements of the enemy hegemony in the USA certainly are discernible: from perpetuating get-rich quick fantasies and mass spectacles to entice working-class identification with capital, to blaming the people the system has run over for their own wounds, to sewing divisive and invidious group rivalries, to instilling popular fatalism and cynicism about possibilities for change, to simultaneously exploiting yet excluding racialized labor, at home and abroad, while at the same time glorifying ‘democratic’ multicultural militarism without end. By raising critical consciousness about the nature of key aspects of this deadly program, and the way it conscripts so many of its victims, Sedillo’s work aids the cause of working-class self-clarification and proletarian becoming. At their best, Sedillo’s poems creatively condense arguments that could fill articles and books, making history and social theory widely accessible to masses of people often locked out of gated academic communities.
But even for those of us inside those fine-bricked enclaves, Sedillo’s poems might serve as tools to chip away at the walls, walls that too-often block from view the work that really needs doing, and the people we need to do it with. Perhaps by sharing these poems—with our colleagues, our students, our comrades, our neighbors—we might help loosen some of the bricks between us, revealing to ourselves and to others a crucial fact: that, though the walls have long muffled the sound, we are struggling against one and the same system.
Just look at all these bricks.
