I'm Major Jackson, and this is the slowdown.

New to our neighborhood in Vermont, my family and I were anxious to make new friends, walking

together to the annual pumpkin carving contest in our local park.

My neighbor said he was making his way through my poetry collections.

He had just completed reading my first book, Leaving Saturn.

I was delighted.

He was a psychotherapist, originally from Colorado, with an abiding interest in poetry.

We took a few more steps before he looked at me with a serious and concerned expression

and said, you've a lot of trauma in your past.

Autumn leaves crunched beneath his feet.

I loath his presumptive and ill-formed piece of critical feedback.

It felt like he thought he had me all figured out.

Hadn't he noticed the formerly inventive usage of language, the sweep of illusions across

philosophy, religion, history, and popular culture?

What about my rhymes, man?

I don't think that anyone writes poetry for the purpose of having their life publicly

mold over and assessed.

Poets are interested more in how they are changed after writing the poem, how they are

freed as a result of the process of constructing and tinkering with language.

Yet many presume a book of poems is a fixed autobiographical work that traps in amber

a poet's neuroses and emotional states.

As our kids, dressed in pirate and superhero costumes, played sword fighting.

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