Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Last year, I celebrated the twenty-year anniversary of the publication of my first poetry collection, Leaving Saturn. As you can imagine, I was thrilled back then when the book received praise in my hometown newspaper and in a few literary journals. I experienced a rare recognition: several critics thought my poems worthy of public discussion enough to write reviews of the book’s merits and themes. I felt immense gratitude for the attention.

However, I have to admit, I winced whenever a book review would only invoke words like “urban” or “innercity” to describe my poetic project. To me, these were typecasting phrases, words that reduced the larger vision of the book to a prescribed set of racialized themes. Ironically, Leaving Saturn was written as a pushback against overly familiar tropes we associate with life in the city.

In writing those poems, I sought fully realized portraits of Black folk based on real people in my community. People such as my childhood barber, Mr. Pate, and Steve, who liked to walk the neighborhood as though he were driving a car. They were people in my life, not caricatures. Unfortunately, those book critics, probably writing under deadline with a limited word count, resorted to short-cuts for readers which did not convey the whole depth of the work and its aspirations.

Such is the burden for both critic and poet. One of the more compelling, if not paradoxical, aspects of writing about something is that the very act both illuminates and obscures the subject. It writes us and erases us.

On one hand, the language in poetry can paint an exquisitely rendered image, very clearly in the mind’s eye, say a childhood memory of carrying a friend home who cuts their foot on a shard of glass by a pond. Then, on the other hand, language, bound on all sides by cliched figures and cultural connotations, struggles to fully reveal the breadth of our humanity and inner lives. We see this today, for example, as we work hard to find language that affirms different forms of gender expression in our society. Language is accountable to varied expressions of humanity. But we have to make the language.

Today’s poem eloquently demarcates these limitations of language. I love the spaciousness of the poem, how it enacts the mysterious container and possibility that is human speech.

Discourse
by Orlando White

When you are naked,

                                                you are unwritten.


                   Put on a dark suit.              Be a letter.


Next to you,            she slips on

a black dress

                                      shaped like a j.


Our bodies              made of ink;           a substance

                                                                            of langue.


                   We only want to be written,

                   to have content.


But, language likes to dress us up.

Position us
     
                                    next to one another,

so we          exist          as characters.


As someone places a hyphen

                   between us,          we feel          conjunct;

                   it can be erased.

When it happens

                                      replace the blank space      with a verb,


                                      put a letter      under erasure.


Sometimes,            things written are contained;


                   not in our control.


Then           we must take off          our outfits

fold them back

                                                remove ourselves    from the page.

“Discourse” by Orlando White from BONE LIGHT, © 2022 Orlando White. Used by permission of Red Hen Press.