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I'm Major Jackson.

And this is

I'm Major Jackson

and this is the slowdown. In the past few years, I've lost several family members. In my bereavement, I've turned to reading poetry.

One of the animating forces in art is death.

For poets, overcoming that sense of time's annihilation involves leaving a body of work, a corpus.

Time may subsume our physical cells, but our presence can still be felt in individual poems, books,

recorded performances, and broadsides. Our family can find consolation in our words, words that will hopefully give them calm, that

will assuage anxieties about their own passage between life and death.

That's the whole Ars Longa Vita brevis thing.

Every single one of us, while living, is in some way in the process of dying.

My friend Kate facilitates a poetry writing workshop for people living with cancer.

She reports it is one of the most moving honors of her life.

Ultimately, we do not know the experience of dying. We can only imagine. Artists, though, have fun playing with the mystery of what happens

...