I'm Major Jackson and this is the Slowdown.

Last year, I celebrated the 20-year anniversary of the publication of my first poetry collection,

Leaving Saturday. As you can imagine, I was thrilled back then when the book received

praise in my hometown newspaper and in a few literary journals. I experienced a rare

recognition. Several critics thought my poems were the public discussion enough to write

reviews of the book's merits and themes. I felt immense gratitude for the attention.

However, I have to admit, I went whenever a book review would only invoke words like

urban or inner city to describe my poetic project. To me, these were typecasting phrases,

words that reduced the larger vision of the book to a prescribes set of racialized themes.

Ironically, leaving Saturday was written as a pushback against overly familiar tropes we

associate with life in the city. In writing those poems, I sought fully realized portraits

of Black folk based on real people in my community. People such as my childhood barber, Mr.

Pate, and Steve, who'd like to walk the neighborhood as though he were driving a car.

They were people in my life, not caricatures. Unfortunately, those book critics, probably

writing under deadline with a limited word count, resorted to shortcuts for readers which

did not convey the whole depth of the work and its aspirations, such as the burden for

both critic and poet. One of the more compelling, if not paradoxical aspects of writing about

something is that the very act both illuminates and obscures the subject. It writes us and erases us.

On one hand, the language and poetry can paint an exquisitely rendered image very clearly in

the mind's eyes, say a childhood memory of carrying a friend home who cuts their foot on a

shard of glass by a pawn. Then, on the other hand, language bound on all sides by cliched figures

and cultural connotations struggles to fully reveal the breadth of our humanity and inner lives.

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