30 Under 30 7/30: Morgan Parker

Editors Note: As any poet worth they salt knows sometimes when you're doing a 30/30 life gets in the way. Our esteemed scribe has been driving a group of unruly undergrads across country and so we've been without his glorious voice for a few days. But Danez is back like the (actual) Harlem Shake. We'll post a few a day to catch up. Keep reading. Let's get it. 
-Nate Marshall, 
                                                                    Asst. Poetry Editor, Muzzle


“I learned this right hook here
when I was only six. Bitch, please.
I’m so real my hair is going gray”

- from If My Housemate Fucks With Me I Would Get So Real (Audition Tape Take 1) 
 
Morgan Parker is a gangsta, y’all. I mean that in the thuggist way possible. Her work is not concerned with your conventions, your feelings, what you have deemed ‘acceptable’ for a poet to poem (verb) about. Why? It appears because she is having fun with this here art. Morgan writes about her personal connection to Kate Hudson, about her potential as a cast mate on the Real World, about the Jupiter eclipse and even there she hides work about race, pop culture and the fantastically dangerous world of drugs. Morgan very much is active in the realm of her generation. Why not let your poems soak in reality TV shows and celebrity culture? If art is to be a mirror for society, or vice versa, then Morgan’s work is covered with looking glass bouncing back light and life in every direction. This work is as intelligent and smart-assed as it is real and biting as it is fun and light as it is necessary and forward. This is a poet who has figured it out. Morgan’s work invites us to play inside it, but to also be critical of ourselves in that funhouse full of stretched out, widened, shortened, flattened, and eventually offered a bottle of wine. I want to drink with Morgan’s poems, they seem like they get into some wild stuff on any good Monday night. I want to live in their world, which is my world, but through their lens. It is brilliant that through her work, Morgan does not attempt to denounce the culture of today as many do, but rather she accepts it and figures out how to make it work for her, how to carve a space out fit to sit and belly laugh in. So you, with the soul and the brain, if you care about either one of those, go get into Morgan Parker and see what you really look like.

-Danez Smith

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