Hi, it's Major. As I close my time as host of The Slowdown, I'm grateful for the opportunity

I've had to share poetry with you these past few years. The Slowdown has a deep store of

episodes, and for the next few months, we're reaching into the archive to bring you some of our

favorites. Here's one for my time on the show.

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

Music I enjoy reading poems that are explicitly experimental.

Poems that undertake an earnest examination of form, language, and meaning.

They help us find the expressive boundaries of an art born out of the needs of our age.

I don't mean works that unleash total anarchy on society, or that signal the end of civilization as we know it.

That kind of art is often met with severe resistance, sometimes

outright violence, as with the 1913 premiere of Igor Stravinsky's The Right of Spring,

which prompted a riot, or Steve Reich's 1973 minimalist piece, Four Organs,

which led to an attendee pounding a shoe on a stage of Carnegie Hall,

demanding the performers cease playing.

Today's experiments in poetry spawned from considerations of poetry and technology,

such as AI and blockchain.

However, they do not represent a renewed sense of rigorous aesthetic investigation.

But I do detect a new movement of avant-garde play is on the horizon,

one that will match the complexity of our moment with all of its

challenges in need of fervent solutions. Today's poem is a touchstone example of art that

altered how we hear words, but also how we perform language to transform words into elements of our yielding

and will.

...