I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. The Slowdown. In high school, my friends and I, unbeknownst to our parents, played Hooky.

We saw the matinee showing of Ferris Buehler's day off at the Ritz in downtown Philadelphia.

Based on what we heard of the film's plot,

Truin C only felt fitting.

Ferris, talking to the audience from the large screen

about his friend Cameron while taking a shower

radicalized my notion of art.

He broke the fourth wall, a theatrical device conceived by French philosopher Denise Diderot who wrote,

when you write or act, think no more of the audience than if it had never existed.

Imagine a huge wall across the front of the stage. Studying

Hamlet's many soliloquies, monologues not heard by the other characters,

did nothing to prepare me for the visceral experience

of a large face stepping out of a plot

to speak to a bunch of people in the dark.

Albeit, now a familiar convention in film, thinks Corsaisey,

still, I stattle when the imaginary boundary is exposed, especially in poetry.

Sometimes, a speaker in a poem will acknowledge its own

artificiality, by addressing the reader directly, or by making a self-referential remark, all to say,

hey reader, I know you're there listening in.

Breaking the fourth wall in poetry removes pretense

and lays bare a vulnerability that creates an intimacy and collapses distance.

...