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I'm Major Jackson and this hosting the slowdown is the great experience of reciting poems out loud for your pleasure.

Some words are liquid in the mouth.

Others feel like squares of caramel.

Then there are those words and phrases, as my producer

Michael would say, that have me going through all kinds of word yoga. I stretch and bend my jaws and cheeks and lips to accommodate

their correct enunciations. I am of the same mind as the critic who states an audible reading should be

quote more than a reading of poetry allowed that a recitation should appeal to, quote, the mind's ear as well.

When reading for recording, I coaxed words, I treat them gently so that they arrive as a distinctively heard

piece of verbal music. Attention to the lyric qualities of a poem also underpins how I teach poetry.

For years I have urged my students to get inside language. At times not fully sure what I actually met. I am

not dogmatic about much when it comes to poetry, but I am convinced that one of its core characteristics is an

acute attention to sound. 18th century poet Alexander Pope said,

sound must seem an echo to the sense,

a way to reach a reader through a marriage of meaning and music.

Philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson believed such a poem is a thought so passionate and alive

that like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.

Some poets aim for meaning and clarity of emotion.

And then the best does that and more.

They also play language as though words were comprised of tones and notes,

...