I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. The Slowdown.

One of my favorite colleagues over the years, Huck, often pays the hall outside our offices

before his class period, reciting poems from memory.

He wore a suit and tie.

His formulism distinguished him from us,

his younger colleagues.

He possessed the passion for poetry that I feel I have yet to match.

We often walked downtown for lunch or coffee.

He is older than me by nearly two decades,

much of his hair and a gray flop.

So I always presumed the role of junior colleague,

which is to say I mostly listened and let him set the pace.

We exchanged thoughts about poets and favorite poems

with special attention to Walt Whitman,

Emily Dickison and Wallace Stevens.

But he had a special love for the poet Riner Maria Rilka.

I remember once making some orthodox remark about how necessary it is for poets to approach

revision with as much enthusiasm as the first draft. Maybe I was carrying forward the words of James Dickie, who said,

Confession is not enough, and neither is the assumption that the truth of one's

experience will emerge if only one can keep talking long enough

in a whipped up state of excitement.

...