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

On occasion, I have read a poem, bold, quiet, salient, difficult, and did not know until

I arrived at poems in that I needed, at that moment, what the poem offered, a sermon

like oration, an incantation, a spell, an appeal, a warning, a promise, or sometimes just

the stone code truth.

I'm talking lines that rescued me.

For example, lines like, you are who I love, carrying the signs, packing the lunches

with a rain on your face by Aracelis Germai, lines that inspired me, the hell-loved body

into which entered milk and music, hunting the cells of him by Mark Doty, and others that

provoked me, unless I learn to use the difference between poetry and rhetoric, my power too will

run corrupt from Audrey Lord.

We make sure, however, not to demand poet's serve in agenda, aesthetic or political,

yet popular tastes carry immense way.

Today's reading public appears to embrace and desire certain types of poems above others,

poems of personal agency, political urgency, and collective healing, for example, and when

they go viral, I smile, for they render mute any disparaging remarks about the relevance

of poetry.

However, I've not seen embrace with the same enthusiasm to Misha Grin, poems whose only

import is the play of language, whose pleasures are found in the unforeseen reach of a wild

imagination.

This is an old argument.

Each generation of poets rewrites the function of poetry and society, and this episode isn't

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