I'm Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I once met the great Afro-futurist jazz composer and poet Sunra while working at a contemporary

art center.

He encountered not only left me enamored but also able to see the possibility of living

as an artist.

While he and members of his big band rehearsed for his annual holiday concert, I acted as

a stage-hand and set up the mics, monitors, and lights.

His music, his while glittering robes, and his mystical persona announced a freedom

of being I had yet to encounter until then, shortly thereafter, he passed away.

In graduate school, as an antidote to self-indulgence, which, let's admit, poetry can sometimes

spiral into, I wrote persona poems.

I wrote poems in the voice of other people, including Sunra, to achieve a naturalness

and authenticity of voice, I acquired most of his available music.

I read his poems and accounts of Sunra's life, including John Swed's biography Space

is the place.

My first book, Leaving Saturn, is even titled as a nod to the mythology of the big band

leader, which is that he was sent from the Ring Planet to save Earth with his music.

We have a long history in American poetry of dramatic monologues, of taking on a character

in our own expression.

Mass-wearing is one of the important means by which we become less indeterminate to each

other, and thus more compassionate.

Lately, however, I've had trouble working out the ethics of portraying someone other

...