My name is Aida Nique and I financially support the slowdown because the show

allows me to understand poems on a deeper level. I love the thoughtful lead in

major provides before each poem. Join me in making a gift to the slowdown

today. Head to slowdownshow.org slash donate.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

In my teen years, I admired the large canvases of a now deceased artist known for

his portraits of faces. In conversations, I'd enthusiastically referred to them

as wall-sized photographs. One day, a friend checked me. They aren't photographs.

We finally made a trip together to MoMA on a Sunday afternoon to settle it once

and for all. Once there, I read the museum label beside a portrait of

composer Philip Glass and stood in embarrassment. Before me, in fact, was a

colossal painting. All this time, what I thought was an outsized picture blown

up, framed, and hung on a wall. For nearly 10 minutes, I absorbed its power

with a newfound appreciation, admiring it even more. Previously, I believed its

virtuosity resided simply in the artist's selection of their subject. Now, what

gave the canvas its sublime quality was its scale and hyperrealist reproduction.

Painted, tiny pixels combined to make a face. Philip Glass's droopy eyes and

signature black curls match my own look of befuddlement and awe.

Sometime in the last century, American poets sought to write poems about personal

experiences in a style that had the immediacy of a photograph. These poems were

more like unadorned anecdotes of events and people, often in jagged, unrhymed

lines, and without the artifice of art, or famously put by a then-popular

...