Major Jackson : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

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With a nod to John Giorno and other telepoetic projects and events, about five years back (and periodically since then) as a form of extra credit in my courses, I instructed both undergraduate and graduate students to call up friends and family members and read poems on their voicemails, instead of blasting off wishes for return phone calls.
Often the poems were selected from assigned “texts,” but students received even more points if they shared originally composed poems or encouraged others to call my office as well as their friends and family members, and passed on the assignment so like a benign pyramid scheme, we could cash in on the profits of language more subversively and with greater frequency. That’s how a Voicemail Poetry Movement began at University of Vermont.

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06.05.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Major Jackson

Birth of a Sound: Poetry Birthdays

Right now, somewhere on this planet, a poet is being born.
Once, for a whole year, I organized my reading life according to whose birthday occasioned a visit to the bookshelf. Normally I would choose the poet’s most recent work and honor them with an oral reading, voicing their existence and vision. Other times I would reacquaint myself with a favorite poem or seek some theretofore unappreciated poem from an older volume. By no means did I do this everyday, but only when fancy struck.
What I discovered, surprisingly, is that a number of calendar days would feature at least one poet, but then there were days in which the universe seemed particularly kind to planet Earth and bestowed three or more poets on the same day, as if the cosmos needed its own supershot steroid.

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05.30.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Major Jackson

Poem: House in the World

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House In the World
I’m looking for a house
In the world
Where the white shadows
Will not fall.
There is no such house,
Dark brothers,
No such house
At all.

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03.25.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Major Jackson

Eminently Fair

Australia’s leading poet Les Murray is one of the globe’s finest, and he knows it. So much so, a request to blurb a collection of poems by the poet J.K. Murphy becomes an opportunity for him to flaunt his clout. Apparently, Les Murray’s wife is an aspiring author, a social historian to be precise. Like a good husband, Murray thought he’d lend a hand to his wife’s publishing career. Nothing shameful about that, I guess.

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03.04.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Major Jackson

When the Green Lies Over the Earth

It’s the birthday of the poet Angelina Weld Grimké, born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1880, a member of the distinguished biracial Grimké family, some members of which were important in the abolitionist movement and active in civil rights into the twentieth century.
Her father Archibald Grimké, a Harvard Law School graduate, served as the Vice-President of the NAACP and her mother Sarah Stanley was a white woman from a Boston middle-class family. The Stanley’s opposed Sarah’s interracial marriage. Soon after her birth, Angelina’s parents divorced. Angelina lived with her mother until she was seven years old, then was sent to live with her father. She never saw her mother again.

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02.27.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Major Jackson

The 2008 Palm Beach Poetry Festival – A Photo Essay

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02.07.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Major Jackson

Wallace Stevens After “Lunch”

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It happened during the meeting of the National Book Award committee that gave the poetry prize to Marianne Moore. While waiting for Peter Viereck, the last of the judges, delayed by a snowstorm, to arrive, the other five (Winfield Townley Scott, Selden Rodman, Conrad Aiken, Wallace Stevens, and William Cole) passed the time looking at photographs of previous meetings of National Book Award judges. Gwendolyn Brooks appeared in one of these. On seeing the photo, Stevens remarked, “Who’s the coon?” (The meeting, it should be noted, took place after lunch, which for the poet had probably begun with two healthy martinis and continued with a fine bottle of wine.) Noticing the reaction of the group to his question, he asked, “I know you don’t like to hear people call a lady a coon, but who is it?”
– Joan Richardson, Wallace Stevens – The Later Years (1923-1954). New York: Beech Tree Books, 1988. (Pgs. 388-389)

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02.04.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (23)

Major Jackson

Celebrity Poetry

What is it about celebrity poets that rile “serious” writers of poetry? With each new collection of poems by an actor or music recording star, envy mounts as does the high levels of indifference by poets and critics, alike. Such books of poetry are roundly dismissed and ignored by the literati, yet inevitably become bestsellers owing to the legions of adoring fans that seem to have an interminable appetite for mediocre verse. Rest assured, such books do not attract prize committees and are rarely reviewed outside of Publishers Weekly or Booklist. One would think, also, given the stratospheric mega-sales, these books would appear on the poetryfoundations.org bestseller lists. Alas, there too, ignored.

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01.20.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (19)

Major Jackson

Add to Cart

While Professor Stanley Fish argues the lack of relative worth of the Humanities over at the NYTIMES, I thought I would visit a few of my local, online rare books websites to gauge the fair market value of Poetry (Ruth Lilly, notwithstanding), that is, how much hard cash do works of poetry command in the dangerous, clandestine world of literary intrigue, secular humanism, and covert antiquarian operations.
Wallace Stevens’s art collection and furniture has the distinction of being the most expensive purchase at abebooks.com at a whopping $1.7 million dollars, which itself is followed by Petrarch’s 15th century opera at $400K.
While the below represents a personal wish list, if anyone wants to send me an early birthday gift . . . .

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01.16.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (7)

Major Jackson

The History of Art

Journal Entry – Saturday, Jan 12th:
Bennington, VT
At the graduation ceremonies this evening, Frank Bidart began his address with this emphatic warning: “The history of taste is not the history of art.” Although he was speaking to the 25th graduating class of the Bennington Writing Seminars, who endured the loss of its founder Liam Rector last summer, his words echoed through me like one of Moses’ stone tablets.