How do pop culture references interact with more highbrow references in your poems? Jackson at a deli in Spokane one afternoon last April, where we talked about Kim Kardashian, building community, and the seduction of sound. Whether he's inhabiting the persona of Sun Ra or writing an extended epistolary homage to Gwendolyn Brooks, his poems combine striking imagery with muscular, fluid rhythms. Jackson's poetry draws a road map from classic traditions to the heart of the inner city, always with an ear attuned to the blues and jazz rhythms he grew up with. the human concerns of an urban, black population." is his ability to marry without anxiety the traditional forms of the English poetic tradition with. As Andrew Dubois pointed out in a review of Jackson's second book, Hoops, his "greatest strength. A former member of the Dark Room Collective, and current Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review, Jackson experiments with form in his work, without sacrificing the vernacular of the Philadelphia neighborhood he grew up in. Jackson is the author of three collections, the first of which, Leaving Saturn, won the Cave Canem Prize, and was also a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Rescue the underground so they can aim higher." Here, the poet's use of high brow and lowbrow references also connects the present to the past. He asserts that a poem "becomes a kind of time capsule," and as such, can contain references to both Kanye West and ancient Greek mythology, as illustrated in his poem "Letter to Brooks," when Jackson writes: "O, Orpheus grant the skills to stir / the dead like Kanye mixing music with fire, I. Major Jackson's poetry is clear, fluent, and musical, sometimes relying on formal structure, sometimes referencing pop culture, and often investigating how seemingly disparate subjects can interact and inform each other.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |