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

So many times I witnessed it. No, I felt it. A young trumpet player with a raw need to hear the notes in her head, played at the speed in which she fills them. Or the rapper, whose delight is wordplayed to the nth degree, but even more, locates the ciphers so deep within that the joy is not cleverness.

But the way the atmosphere changes when his rhymes hit the air.

Or the modern dancer, striking moves with such force,

we in the crowd feel concentric waves of energy pulsate to our seats.

Equally so, the actor who delivers their lines so convincingly,

parts of ourselves are reawakened.

I used to believe great art emerge from intense passion, a committed discipline driven by a purity of purpose.

Of late, I used the word hunger as a measure of art, as an aesthetic value, hunger as that inexplicable quality that confays the

artist's works as their unique form of living, how they breathe where creation is existence.

When I read a poem of such power, articulation, and image-making, I closed the book,

thinking the writer had no other choice. The poem came into the world out of a voracious need.

Even in the quietest of poems, set in a forest or garden, I hear an intense longing for solitude, for evidence of our

connection to something larger than our selves. On this subject, today's poem is unapologetic.

Its rhythms are bound up in the speaker's self-worth and their massive feelings.

With such depth of cadence, repetition, and emotion, I cannot help but be moved.

Playback by Lauren Camp

Let there be footfall and car door. Let me be finished with fire. Let the man get on a plane

for his morning departure, erasing each reverie. Soon there will be only daylight, maybe a blue

envelope torn, maybe bracelets of color from the

petunias. I will need to know how to recover the familiar, how to open the door in the evening,

how to again lock it. Almost everything about me goes unspoken but commas and colones.

...