Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

For as long as I remember, I’ve been enamored with books as objects, maybe even before I started reading them. They were in our home, stacked floor to ceiling, crowding the second-floor hallway. I enjoyed the feel of clothbound books and loved running my hand over embossed lettering. Gold-edged paper made reading a kind of treasure. As a result, I became addicted to the hunt and discovery of new books whose appeal was sensory.

My curiosity as a child led me to used bookstores as a brooding teenager. There were plenty. My favorite being Bookhaven on Spring Garden in Philadelphia. I fanatically rummaged for first editions, rare printings, broadsides, and chapbooks in antiquarian bookshops, breathing the musty smell of molded pages.

Then, as an adult, I became interested in the author as a human being, more than an exalted literary figure. I was curious about their daily existence, their triumphs, and shortcomings. I sought to grasp the relationship between art and life. I read biographies and visited museums, or if I were lucky, traveled to estate sales. Several years ago, I was among hundreds in Wilmot, New Hampshire at poet Donald Hall’s home. I hoped to score a stash of correspondences or notes left in his books, to find some record offering insight into his writing process. Instead, Hall's library lamp, antique rug, and old transistor radio, on which I imagined the famed baseball fan listening to Red Sox games, all now sit in my home office.

I came to believe even the curios of poets were tinged with the spirit of their making. To encounter the objects of an admired writer, something that they touched, browsed, or gazed at even, gave me some clue as to how to practice my own writing.

None of the above prepared me, however, for a visit to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, where I was invited to turn the pages of Sylvia Plath’s scrapbook of hotel matchbooks and restaurant ephemera. There, I encountered a dried chicken wishbone; I’ll say it again, the dinner remains of one of America’s most widely read poets.

I’ve pondered that wishbone since, its symbolism, and of course, why she’d kept it among the letters from her boyfriend. I wondered why the wishbone remained unsnapped. Had she split the bone and made a wish, she might have lived a different life. Yet, the greatest evidence of Plath’s life is not to be found in the archives but in the poems.

Today’s poet makes use of the poem as a repository of autobiographical facts, all while dramatizing larger questions of origin, citizenship, immigration, and nationhood.

Split
by Paul Hlava Ceballos

At birth my parents pulled my legs
and split me lengthwise like a wish.

Rumiñahui saved his city
from Spaniards by striking two stones,
holy temples made pure as ash.

When a concerned citizen pinned
me to airport wall to check my 

origin, I whispered, thank you.
My dad says, Good, we’re safer now.
My uncle: then leave the country.

Christmases, I stay home in bed.
Only the chaste were burned alive.

One mind replies, I want to live.
The other: I want to live well.

“Split” by Paul Hlava Ceballos from BANANA [ ] © 2022 Paul Hlava Ceballos. Used by permission of The University of Pittsburgh Press.