I'm Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Who are we if not what we are consumed by?

Our identities are constructed by our passions.

Some know me as a poet, others as an ardent teacher, and yet I am as much of a reader as

I am a writer and teacher, as much of an outdoorsman of bicyclists and devoted listener of jazz.

My descent into those activities, like traveling into a book, is one of my most treasured journeys.

The womb-like experience of becoming envelop in an obsession marks us all from the world.

It is a psychological harbor of both comfort and awakening.

But then, at times, what consumes us from the outside can look like loss of control,

can look like helplessness, like being taken over.

Today's poem dramatizes the hidden transaction of our obsessions.

We are claimed by the world as much as we take in, sometimes even more.

This is a poem by Joshua Weiner.

The figure of a man being swallowed by a fish is not a man being swallowed by a fish with

eyes like eight-point-throwing stars.

It's a man being swallowed by a war, a man being taken into the mouth of a woman, or

being swallowed by his work.

It's a man traveling far inside a book, a man being swallowed up in smoke.

He swallows the smoke that blends around him like a thought.

It's a man being swallowed by a sound.

He shapes it so he lives inside a song of a man being swallowed by his kin, his skin,

a man being swallowed by the state, Leviathan in 1948.

...