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I'm Major Jackson, and this is the slowdown.

A frequent topic of conversation lately with friends is the relatively short-lived reputations of poets.

This thread comes up whenever we recall a poem or poet for whom no one reads or teaches anymore.

We mourn the poets who were giants to us, who ushered our own entree into the art.

They appeared in select anthologies, were interviewed on public radio and television,

showed up frequently on classroom syllabi, and, of course, won major awards.

Back then, we read whatever we could get our hands on and went broke buying their first

editions.

A new poem published in a prestigious journal was a bona fide literary event.

Now, we are shocked whenever mention of their names to our students is met with blank

stairs. We ask, would an emergent jazz saxophonist not know the name or have listened to the iconic

John Coltrane? From Nobel laureates to Pulitzer Prize winners, no one is spared.

Once their collected poems is published, typically the coffin is nailed shut. The road to

canonicity is determined and left up to future readers. If I am among fellow poets, this conversation is typically sobering.

None of us have dreams of becoming the next Shakespeare or Langston Hughes.

We are not delusional.

We simply realize that the already small audience for our poems will likely get smaller.

We see the signs on the wall.

Still, we cannot help but speculate as to why.

...