Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Have you ever felt utterly foreign to those around you, despite sharing a culture, customs, and language? And if you remove those pillars of your identity, what is left between you and me? What binds us? Do you feel oneness or the feeling of separateness? Most everyone I know, save for the occasional misanthrope, longs to be connected in some way to a group of friends, a community of like-minded people, or cherished loved ones. Yet, there is still that nagging desire of being different, your unique self.

I often think about poetry’s distinct ability to mute what estranges and highlight more of what we share. These poems of lyric interiority and intensity make us feel seen, even poems written long ago. How is it possible, for example, that Langston Hughes’s fictional written assignment for a teacher, Theme for English B, a poem about racial difference, should echo thoughts I’ve long held about being an American.

A poet I deeply admired, somewhat miffed by all the pyrotechnics and the conventionally accepted practices of poetry, which she felt alienated readers, urged poets to “defy the space that separates.” It is one of my favorite phrases, and a great hope for my own poetry. It is her belief and mine that literature provides a framework by which to understand each other’s experiences, to collapse our psychic and emotional pain, and to amplify our joy, so that we can find strength in our shared struggles and triumphs, in our stories.

In writing poems about our lives, we provide pathways for others to feel and understand our common journey of breathing together on our shared planet, and in the best case, to inhabit our various freedoms.

Today’s self-reflexive poem discusses the power of poetry to clear a space for those who most need to discover themselves by inhabiting the voice of the poet, an implicit act of reading that takes a leap toward empathy and self-regard.

on persona
by Raena Shirali

                     fledgling each time i attempt another

body, call it : tired of my own
trauma, the writing 

                     into        & the writing out of.        i want to sing

a song of escape, won’t admit poetry’s 
formula : begin 

                     with an image, spiral out—.

                                           my many masks hang
from window latches.

                     misnomer to call them

adornments. of these works as a whole,
i say, find here no monetary

                     value. no cultural

clout. the papers declare the line-
break         dead            as i write into

                     death : here is a scythe

& here a tree & here, me
pretending. i am offering opportunities to feel

                     taken, like one’s breath away or

by the experience of : as in : take my paayals,
reader, my silver cups, my tarnished 

                     bangles. try to fit

them, narrow, around
your wrists. tell me

                    you feel free

“on persona” by Raena Shirali from SUMMONINGS © 2022 Raena Shirali. Used by permission of Black Lawrence Press.