I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

This morning I opened an email announcement on my phone.

Another former student published a book of poetry this year.

I let out a loud and celebratory woo-woo to my empty house.

When such news arrives in my inbox, I cannot help but one, consider how long I've been

doing this and two, consider our poetic lineages.

In some way or another, all poets fall into or resist traditions of mentorship, guidance

and influence.

I'd like in my students' debut publications to branches.

They grow on the great tree of poetry.

One that includes my teachers, their teachers' teachers' and acquaintances, and so on.

I studied with Sonia Sanchez, who joined a workshop in the late 1950s with poet Luiz

Bogan, who had gained much herself from her friends, modernist poets, William Carlos

Williams and Mary Ann Moore, or maybe lineage is more like a beautiful spiderweb.

When I first met the poet C.K. Williams at a reception in New York City, I excitedly

told him that I read his work in a class with Garrett Hongo.

As a graduate student, I transcribed his poems into multiple journals, looking excited

himself, but vaguely into the distance, he acknowledged our kinship, something along

the lines of, then you're like a descendant.

He filled his plate with vegetables and cheeses, then laughably proclaimed, dipping

a lone characteristic into a mound of hummus, well, this is as good as it gets.

Hongo's other teachers include Robert Hayden, who studied with W.H.

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