10 lines on 10th Street, February 10th

© Erin Patrice O'Brien

Poet Major Jackson read before an adoring, largely student crowd at
NYU’s Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House on West 10th Street, but
more importantly, shared insights about the joy of writing something
aesthetic and finding the “music underneath [a] poem”, which he
suggests, “makes the themes of the poem incidental”.  Very important,
really, because Mr. Jackson gave poets in the audience what poets in
an audience always want—tools, clues, and insights about how to write
corporeally and spiritually about a world we alternately live in and
transcend.

Introduced by Deborah Landau, Director of the Creative Writing Program
at NYU, she asked Jackson to describe the stylistic departure
represented in his new collection Holding Company (2010), which is a
long sequence of poems which are ten lines each. The poet spoke of the
intensity of writing poetry that was “not constructed” and came “from
the self” before launching into reading from his third volume of
poetry.

Jackson admitted to nervousness performing in front of his students as
well as having become addicted to ten line poems before reading from a
prepared list of poems that informed the 10-line structure of Holding
Company, including Jewel-Tongued, Manna, Fever, Designer Kisses,
Picket Monsters, Strangers and Not Strangers and More Feeling.  He
continued reading selections from Hoops: Poems (2007) then returned to
Holding Company for the penultimate “On Removing the Wedding Band”
which included strikingly sentimental worlds like reverse, lost, undreaming,
empty in an surprisingly unsentimental poem.

Asked to talk about the lyric sequence poem, Jackson suggested that it
is “as distinctive as [the] American long poem and talked about the
“non-linearity of how we live” and the fragmentation of our lives”,
and that he wants to go back to the narrative poem, adding that the
lyric poem “stops time” and the narrative poem “pushes time”.

Jackson spoke of working with musicians on future projects before
concluding with the optimistic “Leave It All Up to Me”.