Transcript

Today’s moment of pause is a shortened version of an interview with Minnesota Public Radio’s Kerri Miller. The full version of this interview is available in the Big Books & Bold Ideas podcast feed, and as a video on our YouTube channel.

I’m Major Jackson, and this is a special episode of The Slowdown.

Kerri Miller: Tell us a little bit about your experience with Gwendolyn Brooks.

Major Jackson: Oh, yes, Gwendolyn Brooks. Um, early hero, whose aesthetic of writing about her neighborhood, um, and one of my friends said, you know, you can pick up a Gwendolyn Brooks volume and you pretty much are reading about a four block radius around Bronzeville, where she, where she lived.

Um, that was inspiring to me early on as a project of wanting to write about North Philadelphia and Germantown. Um, in my home, home city, which is to say you can write about the people, you can be very particular about which streets, um, you can, in a way, divine the everyday, or divine the people in your life.

You don't have to write poetry with capital P subject matters, you know.

Kerri Miller: The Moon.

Major Jackson: Time. The Moon. Exactly. Uh, so I did get to meet her after hosting her in Philadelphia for a reading and she was, she had just won the Jefferson Lecture Award, which is the highest art award that Congress gives artists.

And she famously did not like to fly. She took the train in that, that kind of old fashioned, like, get on a train that was comfortable and, uh, and see the land. And so she... Came to Philadelphia from D. C. and she's on her way up to New York and she asked me and some friends to drive her and I had this, I knew she was precious cargo, so I went under the speed limit.

I did not want to go down in history as the person who had an accident with Gwendolyn Brooks. And, uh, we arrived to the Park Hotel on Central Park and, you know, the doormen wear all their regalia, their coats, and this gentleman... came up, opened the door, I don't know how he knew my car, but he saw Gwendolyn Brooks and he opened the door and said, Welcome back, Miss Brooks.

And he knew her from all the years that she came to New York since the 1950s. This was early, uh, this would have been about, I want to say about, uh, mid nineties. And she, um, she said, Well, escort me up to my room. So I went up to her room and she said, You're not leaving, are you? I said, Well, we're going back, hour and a half.

She said, Oh, just hang out a bit. I want you to write a, read a poem, at, tonight before I give my reading. And we were two friends, none of us had any poems, so I went around the corner to a cafe and wrote some haikus.

Kerri Miller: Wow.

Major Jackson: And if you remember Gwendolyn Brooks, her readings were short. Her signing books was as long, doubly as long, as her reading.

So, she made sure that we did not leave. So we had to stand around while she talked, which was fine. I saw some of my heroes. Um, I met, for the first time, my dear friend Marie Howe, then. I reminded her that we met there. And, um, And then she wrote us out a check after she signed everyone's book. And that was how I paid my rent that month.

It was a big check. It was pretty wild. It was very encouraging. I hadn't published a poem. I hadn't done anything other than write a few poems at that time.

Kerri Miller: I mean, you ran around the corner and wrote haikus for Gwendolyn Brooks.

Major Jackson: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Kerri Miller: That's either crazy or, what? Bold or desperate. What do you think?

Major Jackson: It set me on the path. That generosity.

Kerri Miller: Wow.

Major Jackson: That generosity. And she was almost as, uh, equally, uh, revered for how she modeled to be a commu— to be a, uh, artist and an artist in community.

Kerri Miller: Mm.

Major Jackson: Um, she did that for so many people. Yeah.

Kerri Miller: One last poem, and then we will open it up to some questions, if you will.

Major Jackson: This is called Making Things, and it's the second poem in the book, and it's, I'm reading it because the title is in the poem, Razzle Dazzle. And there are times in which I, very self consciously, want to high five the people behind me, both teachers, mentors, but definitely family members who I know made sacrifices for me to be where I am today. Um, but it's also a poem, um, about very simply writing poetry. So if someone asks me, what is my creative process?

Here's what I'm going to read to them.

Making Things
by Major Jackson

Suddenly I had to skewer all my prayers
and slow-roast them in
the open-air kitchen of my imagination.
I had to shovel fire into my laughter
and keep my eyes from blinking. I had to fuss
like a cook simmering storms.
I had to move like a ballet dancer but without the vanity
and self-consciousness of tradition.
I had to blur my scars so I could write into time,
and carry the sensation of walking like a morose
and heavy American sporting a yellow ascot
over Pont Saint-Michel. I want to be 
all razzle-dazzle before the dark-cloaked one
arrives for a last game of chess.
My font of feelings is a waterfall and I live
as if no toupees exist on earth or masks that silence
the oppressed or anything that does not applaud 
the sycamores’ tribute to the red flame like the heat 
beneath my grandmother’s heart who never raised a ghost
but a storm. So, look at me standing on the porch laughing
at the creek threatening to become a raging river.

“Making Things” by Major Jackson from RAZZLE DAZZLE: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS 2002-2022 copyright © 2023 by Major Jackson. Used by permission of the poet.