Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

It feels like many people are passing from our lives. Not that the death of a poet is any more devastating, but when a poet dies, my grief is heavier. The year 2023 saw the loss of many poets I admire, including Benjamin Zephaniah and Louise Glück. When poet Donald Hall died in 2018, I noticed a great shift of voices, one generation exiting as another emerged. We will no longer hear their music in language. Maybe, this has always been the case.

I am lucky to have shared dinners with former US Poet Laureate Don Hall. He modeled a pitched reverence for writers that I share. Before audiences, he’d extemporaneously talk about celebrated poets, beginning: The year was 1954. I had just arrived in London and who should I run into in Russell Square, but T.S. Eliot himself. Some joked his stories traveled back in time when he wasn’t even alive: The year was 1897. Oscar Wilde was just released from prison; we had tea at a quaint café near Trinity College.

I recently visited the Stuart Rose Manuscript Library at Emory University where I placed all my papers. The precious web of poets I belong to revealed itself. I picked out of a box a program that memorialized Audre Lorde, which I helped to organize. I read old correspondences with poets Michael Harper, Jane Cooper, and others. The web trembled when I thought back on their friendship and guidance.

Today’s poem rages at death, at the sheer number of friends undone by it. Yet, it exalts the poem as a container of memories, and as a vehicle of consolation.

Rant
by Nathalie Anderson

Practicing all morning every morning
for a week before the wake, practicing
hard, repeating myself, speaking over
and over my small spliff of consolation,
in shower, by mirror, in larder, by
heart, and every time making myself cry
 
with poetry. Hating myself for how
my voice cracks, grief sloshing out in gasps and gusts.
Hate how I shake, deep tremor, after-shocks.
Hate how flash it comes, and out of nothing:
rip tide, dry lightning. Hate how words do this
so fast I look soft, cheap, mawkish, easy.
 
Whose poem? Not that it matters much, but
this time it’s Millay. I hate her, too, for how
from words that could mean anyone at all –
“the intelligent, the witty, the brave” –
I see my friend, his beard grown hermit-wild,
his eyes still glacier-blue, lifting his hand
 
to his breast bone, saying “what I feel now
is the world’s pain, the essential pain: both
essence of pain, and essential to me. I
don’t want to feel, yet feel I need to feel it.”
Where’s he gone, that man who danced like the wind
and thought like he danced? And where’s that woman
 
whose eyebrows always almost met, who
crinkled when she smiled? Or that woman who
ruled the roost like a banty cock? Or that man
with the nervous foot, the over-anxious heart?
Is this essential pain? I want my friends.
I want Allen. Linda. Joan. George. Janet.
 
O double-dealer, you with the shell-game,
the bait-and-switch, the predatory loan,
who one by one takes back each gracious gift
you give, I hope you’re reading this. Out loud.
In public. Before witnesses. Read it
again and again, why don’t you? Read it and weep.

"Rant" by Nathalie F. Anderson. Used by permission of the poet.