Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

New to our neighborhood in Vermont, my family and I were anxious to make new friends. Walking together to the annual pumpkin carving contest in our local park, my neighbor said he was making his way through my poetry collections. He had just completed reading my first book, Leaving Saturn. I was delighted. He was a psychotherapist, originally from Colorado, with an abiding interest in poetry. We took a few more steps before he looked at me with a serious and concerned expression, and said, “You’ve a lot of trauma in your past.” Autumn leaves crunched beneath his feet.

I loathed his presumptive and ill-formed piece of critical feedback. It felt…like he thought he had me all figured out. Hadn’t he noticed the formally inventive usage of language? The sweep of allusions across philosophy, religion, history, and popular culture? What about my rhymes, man?

I don’t think that anyone writes poetry for the purpose of having their life publicly mulled over and assessed. Poets are interested more in how they are changed after writing the poem, how they are freed as a result of the process of constructing and tinkering with language. Yet, many presume a book of poems is a fixed, autobiographical work that traps in amber a poet’s neuroses and emotional states.

As our kids, dressed in pirate and superhero costumes, played sword-fighting, I recalled that to write and publish poems is an extremely vulnerable act, an art of exposure whose careful making is mostly meaningful to poets. What makes me, a poet, a craftsperson of metaphors and sinuous language, a guru for lessons on how to live?

Today’s poem imaginatively addresses how we suffer a condition of being instantly perceived or misconstrued, especially if we exist in bodies in which language already frames us. For both poet and reader, the best poems can offer a pathway out of the prison of false assumptions and the dangers of snapshot generalizations.

from “fabula: towards a black mirror”
by Victoria Adukwei Bulley

a question, since
unreflected as such,  what might it mean to have a blackened mirror,  a black mirror?
since,  as  we  know,   black  absorbs  all  light  &  denies  its  outward  reflection,   it  is  the
polishedness  of this  black surface  that gives  this  black mirror  its mirrorness,  into this
inner  black  mirror  she  looks  &   she  who   looks  back  out  is  not  fully seen  &   yet  she
who  looks  back  out appears  fully;  deep  it.  she  appears  not entirely  there  but  in  her
closebutnotquiteness  she  is there  in entirety.  &  all that  is seen  of her  is  not  all there
is,  the perfect lighting,  the complete image,  is  not  most  honest  for her  true  likeness
abhors  a  vacuum,  a  [     ]  room  under  harsh light;  what can  she say  in such  incarcer-
ations,  such interrogations but nothing,  as is her right;  her  true likeness  lives wherein
she knows her self as much by what she sees of her self  as what she cannot see,  which
with  this  blackened  mirror  might just  about mean anything,  thus everything,  held  as
she is  in her half-reflection,  with room enough left for the possible.  with scope enough
for the imaginary. dark & potent as space itself. she looks, she sees & pleased, then, she
says: there now, see, here I am.

From "fabula: towards a black mirror" by Victoria Adukwei Bulley from QUIET © 2023, Victoria Adukwei Bulley. Used by permission of Penguin Random House.