I'm Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

Some years ago, a visual artist friend asked me, who of my generation most quieted their

own terrors through their poetry? Who best turned their suffering into art? She stated

her belief that poets today are too professionalized, too tamed by their quest for acceptance,

and that only tortured geniuses are worth paying attention to.

I disagreed. For too long, we've propagated a notion that writers whose lives are unstable

bring the fire. I do not believe in suffering as a prerequisite for great art.

So I have this wacky idea. What if we de-centered the classroom and workshop? What if instead

of two years in graduate MFA programs, we proffered two or three years' worth of travel expeditions,

looking lessons, plan, air, painting, museum going? I wish graduate creative writing programs

re-imagined themselves as an intense education of the senses, alongside a mastery of literary

craft. I'm talking a series of full-on, immersive experiences that encourage a radical

attention to our inner lives and forgotten histories, to natural spaces and their inhabitants.

Great writing emerges out of the writer's intense experiential relationship to their

world, as well as emotional and spiritual stability. Today's poem exemplifies the kind

of deep historical and sensory awareness only possible when one has turned their senses

into a laboratory of feeling and wonder. And yet, here's a confession. Today's poet

taught me in a workshop. Who among you knows the essence of garlic by

Garrett Hango? Can your foreigners know smell mullets roasting in a glaze of brown being

paced and sprinkled with novas of sea salt? Can you hear my grandmother chant the mushroom

sutra? Can you hear papaya's crying as they bleed in porcelain plates? I'm telling you

that the bamboo slips long-pliant shoots of its myriad soft tongues into your mouth

...