I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. I enjoy reading poems that are explicitly experimental.

I enjoy reading poems that are explicitly experimental,

poems that undertake an earnest examination of form, language, and meaning.

They help us find the expressive boundaries of an art born out of the needs of our age.

I don't mean works that unleash total anarchy on society, or that signal the end of civilization as we know it, that kind of art is

often met with severe resistance, sometimes outright violence. As with the 1913 premiere of Igor Stravinsky's The Right of Spring,

which prompted a riot.

Or Steve Reich's 1973 minimalist piece Four Organs,

which led to an attendee pounding a shoe on a stage of Carnegie Hall

demanding the performers cease playing.

Today's experiments in poetry spawned from considerations of poetry and technology,

such as AI and blockchain.

However, they do not represent a renewed sense of rigorous aesthetic investigation.

But I do detect a new movement of avant-garde play is on the horizon, one that will match the complexity

of our moment with all of his challenges in need of fervent solutions.

Today's poem is a touchstone example of art that altered how we hear words,

but also how we perform language to transform words into elements of our yielding and will.

If I told him a a completed portrait of Picasso by Gertrude Stein.

If I told him would he like it, would he like it if I told him, would he like it would he like it if I told him would he like it would Napoleon

would Napoleon would would he like it if Napoleon if I told him if I told him, if I told him, if I told him if Napoleon.

Would he like it if I told him if I told him if Napoleon?

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