Hey, it's Micah. Next week we're going to be taking a quick break and so we'll be running some of our favorite episodes from Majors 10 years so far. We'll be back with new episodes on September 25th.

The slowdown is supported by the Collective Trauma Summit. You're invited to attend a free online event featuring in-depth interviews and poetry readings by eight award-winning poets, including Ada Lemone, Natasha Trethway, Jericho Brown, Carolyn Forshay, Andrea Gibson,

Claudia Ranking, Jake Skeets, and Padreco Tuma. They will all be appearing at the Collective Trauma Summit, an online gathering of artists, activists, scientists, and visionaries to explore the effects of trauma in our society, and to inspire a collective healing movement.

Go to CollectiveTraumaSummit.com slash poets to register for the free event which starts September 26th.

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

It seems that all across the country curriculum is being examined. As I write, the state of Florida just restricted the teaching of AP Psychology.

This limits the age where students discuss gender identity and sexual orientation at an academic level.

Many see this as part of a conservative movement, and in more progressive universities and community workshops, poems featured on syllabi are under scrutiny.

Many long-cherished poems appear to some to fall outside prevailing notions. These poems appear to reify destructive attitudes that undermine rather than amplify our student's sense of humanity.

When we debate the relevance of what is taught in schools, if given the opportunity to revise the canon, I truly wonder, what would happen if we tossed out all these classic poems?

What would be the implications by by Billy Shakespeare, or Rev. Miss Dickinson, see you later, Langston?

What would replace these iconic poets, and what contemporary poems are worthy of supplanting their genius?

However frustrating, I sometimes find it, I am inclined to embrace this moment. I am witnessing society struggle to evolve and adapt, hopefully for the better.

This is what it must have been like to have a front row seat to the Renaissance. What was considered socially entrenched is challenged by the sheer fact that old categories used today deny a person's ability to live with dignity and without shame.

Our efforts would only be successful if we at once relished the journey up to this moment and abandoned a cultist relationship to the past, which I admit I am guilty of.

I bristled last year to learn some published poets do not reportry other than their own and definitely not poetry from the past.

It feels like a lost opportunity to gauge one's humanity. Every poem we encounter, new or old, invites us to grasp their relevance and power in relation to all the poems we have read before.

It's a way to fill how well poetry itself revises how we perceive each other through language.

And while we cannot have the language of the Yesteryear guide us, we need monuments rather than mirrors to measure how far we have traveled.

Today's monumental poem keeps alive the fighting spirit of one of the great minds of the 19th century whose eloquent speeches and books brought into focus freedoms we sometimes take for granted.

Frederick Douglass by Robert Hayden

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air, usable as earth.

...