I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

And this is the slowdown.

One of my great joys in writing poetry is the manipulation of sounds into a pattern that plays

ordinary language into an intricate song.

Poets are deft at creating Sonic effects that are natural as wind over a summer field.

Yet that seeming naturalness is an illusion.

I and many other poets work with established poetic forms to sonically weave words in an arrangement

that ideally feels inevitable and not forced.

These patterns are deeply embedded in the seasons and rhythms of life,

such that poems appear to tap and to some inner awareness.

We can thank the late poet Aga Shahehead Ali

for popularizing one of the most beloved poetic forms in books, anthologies, and literary magazines,

the Guzzle.

So much so, I cannot hear a guzzle and not think of Aga, who I was lucky enough to meet several times in my life.

He was a big-hearted and kind human being, and not to mention a superb poet.

Every guzzle I read feels like an homage to his presence in American poetry.

A guzzle, which originated with seventh century poets writing in Arabic

and later was embraced by Persian poets, is a form of couplets that repeats the same word at the end of each stanza.

The guzzle also embeds an internal rhyme so that multiple layers of music are heard.

It is a poem that concludes with a signature line.

The poet embeds their last name or some variant in the last stanza, much like an artist's signature on a painting.

In America, we tend to put blue jeans on poetic forms to serve our purposes, to feel, well, less formal.

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