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

This summer, I learned of the passing of the man who purchased my very first effort at publishing poetry,

a self-made chapbook co-written in college with a friend.

That man was Mr. Charles L. Bloxen, an obsessive collector of books and ephemera relating the black life across the globe.

We walked into his office at Temple University.

He was a historian there.

Embarrassingly, we practically demanded he buy a copy of our pamphlet of poems, freshly stapled at kinkos.

But he beamed, pulled out his wallet, and shared the story about meeting Langston Hughes.

Enveloped in a disarming positivity that I've sought to mimic my entire life,

he said, you are the carrier of our stories, tell them well, then your book will always be available here for readers.

We had not even dreamed of our little collection of poems existing beyond our lifetimes, so we heated his words.

Today's dramatic monologue, about another central high alum, reminds me that poets are also archivists, storytellers who celebrate the past.

We go beyond ourselves as subject matter to become humanity's finest chroniclers.

Elaine Locke and Stoughton Hall by John Keane.

Between their theses, he writes his own.

Between the general theory of value and beauty consisting in ideal forms, he pins fresh hypotheses.

Back, past Pliny and Mary Locke to the first ones, speechless and staggering sick with sea and living memories of sour, sour gold weights, delta deities ghosting into mass lines.

Dread of these four lawn shores, dread of salty tongues renaming them, their own names buried under wintered paving stones.

In the spirit's graveless ruckus, the cries of two centuries mute knights, he has grasped his nation's true history, resistance and the cold hearted ability to make oneself a new, remain his true inheritance.

His journey from colored Philadelphia to the square, the heroes solitary trajectory.

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