Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

On occasion, I have read a poem — bold, quiet, salient, difficult — and did not know, until I arrived at poem’s end, that I needed, at that moment, what the poem offered: a sermon-like oration, an incantation, a spell, an appeal, a warning, a promise. Or sometimes just the stone-cold truth.

I’m talking lines that rescued me, for example, lines like “You are who I love, carrying the signs, packing the lunches, with the rain on your face” by Aracelis Girmay. Lines that inspired me — “the held loved body into which entered / milk and music, honeying the cells of him” by Mark Doty. And others that provoked me — “unless I learn to use / the difference between poetry and rhetoric / my power too will run corrupt” from Audre Lorde.

We make sure, however, not to demand poets serve any agenda (aesthetic or political). Yet, popular tastes carry immense sway. Today’s reading public appears to embrace and desire certain types of poems above others — poems of personal agency, political urgency, and collective healing, for example. And when they go viral, I smile, for they render mute any disparaging remarks about the relevance of poetry.

However, I’ve not seen embraced with the same enthusiasm, to my chagrin, poems whose only import is the play of language, whose pleasures are found in the unforeseen reach of a wild imagination.

This is an old argument. Each generation of poets rewrites the function of poetry in society. And this episode isn’t the first time I’ve chimed in. I once wrote: “poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social function.” I still believe that, but also know that poems which attempt to re-envision a better world, one that is kinder, more humane, more just, those poems are reaching for the greatest possibility to impact.

Today’s poem articulates a resolute wish that many poets share, to reorder our consciousness toward beauty.

Invented Landscape
by L.A. Johnson

It is the world as I’ve never seen it—
the sky, a kaleidoscope of orange blossoms 
and seagulls that drift soft as dandelions
                                                                   and snow that falls

but then changes to glossy clouds, thin as cotton,
that float in gentle breeze; where the glow
from a high balcony becomes a portal 
                                                                   to an orchard

untouched by human hands, where every tree
blooms with tufts of ivory, the rain descending
with low music, as the earth cools and smells
                                                                   of soap; a kite

in the sky loops higher and higher in the wind
until the kite is a circle with no beginning,
a day that never ends in night, and a child glimpses 
                                                                   wonder beneath

its salt-air sail, holding all mystery on a string.

This is the world as I’ve never seen it.
I’ve woken in dark rooms, I’ve toiled days facing
                                                                   an empty wall.

I want to write the world gorgeous
enough for my father to return to it. A world 
where oceans meet. A world of lands 
                                                                   never split

with fire. Where you can tell the time
by the stars or the sun or by the dimming
minutes themselves, the way they feel
                                                                   light in your hands.

"Invented Landscape" by L.A. Johnson. Used by permission of the poet.