What's up? It's Major. Starting this Monday, February 3rd, our next two weeks of episodes will be hosted by the poet and writer Maggie Smith. We hope you enjoy. I'll return to your feeds on Monday, February 17th.

I'm Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

At an airport gate, I watched the mother attempt to guide her toddler daughter into a line that was boarding.

Over the loudspeaker, the gate attendant made announcements about tagged bags and group numbers.

The little girl would not be contained. She pulled out of her mother's grip, ran to a nearby

passenger, then bent low to stare into the muzzle of a service dog. Then Amelia, the name I heard

her mother call, ran up a seating owl, giggling and flailing her arms in front and behind her,

her little feet knocking over a passenger's coffee, her mother trailing. She made me smile.

I loved young Amelia's self-possession, her unmitigated spirit of exploration and delight,

her child-laden joy and sheer wildness.

It reminded me of the nature of the writer's bounty and the writer's dilemma.

Our poems emerge out of the tension between a roaming and untamed consciousness and a

composing imagination that wants to impose order.

What set of circumstances and fortunate events first brought us to the pleasures of working

language are chiefly unknown to a reader, but it is what drives us to tell stories, to sing.

Then we seek this transcendent feeling each time we sit down to write.

It is what sanctifies our existence.

Few experiences match the sensation of writing a world, of giving a portrait of our inner lives out of language such that the world is forever marked by our presence.

Then again, today's poem has me contemplate the people who nurture that wildness of spirit around them, or, I guess,

in some instances, those who accept and endure, even as they attempt to manage their own wildness.

A sword shall pierce your heart by Padraig Otuma.

"'What's your mother like?' he asked.

...