I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

Those signs are back. A favorite restaurant near campus suddenly closed. My network news show has a new host. My local bagel shop removed the best breakfast sandwich this side of cream cheese from its menu board.

These are reminders that nothing is permanent.

Is anything sacred? Of course not. The only constant in life is change.

A recent debate about the sanctity of the sonnet, 14 lines of iambic pentameter, rhyme,

Volta, and an ending couplet, reminded me something.

How much I love my routines.

I like to sit in the pocket of predictability and sometimes a poor variation.

I am among those whose teenage years were disrupted by sudden and dramatic changes in the home. My daily habits were upended.

The instability of my home life conditioned the pleasures I find in poems whose form and shape are the same.

Such poems sponsor my sense of safety.

The pursuit of regularity ever since in life and art has been existential.

So too, for those who argued for the strictness of a sonnet.

People need their containers.

But time is relentless. People need their containers.

But time is relentless and unforgiving. Even the sonnet is subject to change.

Some poets abandoning all of its strictures, putting an American

sensibility of resistance on it. If the sonnet were a person who looked

into a mirror, it would not recognize itself after eight centuries.

Today's poem acknowledges the force of time, how it burnishes, such that we are no longer recognizable even to ourselves.

Yet, we are poly sets of beings, for which even the new cannot fully erase.

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