Hi, it's Major. All year long, you rely on the slowdown for moments of pause, reflection, and poetry.

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

People ask all the time, what is writing poetry like?

I say, for me, writing poetry is like donning special sunglasses, as though one were suddenly cast in a classic, grainy black-and-white film,

riding shotgun in a convertible that travels along a countryside,

in which the cameraman, precariously lodged on the side of a mountain,

suddenly pans in close to one's laughter,

a mouth traveling at 30 miles an hour, while a minimalist soundtrack provides texture and mystery.

No, writing poetry is less performative in its enactment of its special powers of vision,

though most often its form of seeing occurs at the level of metaphor.

Life itself understood by understanding something else.

What you see becomes your muse.

Writing poetry is chiefly a search for language that makes a tidy explanation of both the

present and the past, with the hope our mind grabs on so that the poem emerges also as a

visceral experience of thinking. That is, thinking as an unfolding and awakening, both for the author

and the reader, or in this instance, a listener.

But then occasionally, writing poetry is also an offering to the future, poem as a container

of time, whose language signifies the era in which it was written. Take,

...