Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I’ve come to view The Slowdown as an opportunity to present ideas wrapped in poems, or feelings wrapped in ideas, or ideas and feelings wrapped in language. However, language, itself, is fragile: meanings shift; words are zapped of their energy from overuse. Suddenly, language is exposed for its inadequacy and loses value. Previous generations of experimental poets viewed the conundrum as an opportunity to be transparent about language’s limitations and the elusiveness of the communicability of this form. Do poems signify essence, or do they create presence? Are words merely signifiers of objects and of phenomenon, including our emotions? And yet: there is poetry and then there is the theory about poetry.

At The Slowdown we are earnest and sincere in our wish to put into perspective our world through the great powers of verse. We believe in poetry as much as we know a flesh and blood human being wrote the poem out of their own complex circumstances.

Our commitment is not theoretical. Sometimes, in our daily work, perspective does not come, but we are willing to embrace the most salient and radiant questions, directly. The poems we present guide us to clarity sometimes, but other times, they hold us in the harbor of the ineffable. In either case, we know we are better human beings for the mere journey of listening to each other.

We are not always seeking poems whose function is to illuminate human struggle and whose goal is enlightenment. Occasionally, we want poems that we can chew on for their chewiness, for their taste in the mouth. Plus, poetry should not just carry the burdens of the world. Sometimes, poetry wants to step out the woods and off the path and find itself in a funhouse or theme park. Sometimes we want our minds massaged as well as hear our hearts through a stethoscope while laughing at the wonder of its sound, beating in our ears.

Today’s poem gently refuses to consign poetry to the world of philosophical musing, semiotics, and language games, which many have experienced in the difficult and wildly associative poetry of the great American poet, John Ashbery.

In An Elevator with Ashbery, Crossing Stanzas, Bashfully
by Alina Stefanescu

This poem is not concerned with language.

Not concerned with clauses or splendor's intended awning.

Not tracking the dissolute significance in the presence of that slurred cologne.

Not intrigued by the scent's attachments, the perfume's tailed fusillade. 

Could not care less about connecting the odor of him to a corner in the crowded room.

Could barely care less about which is stranger: the one who exists or the one who remembers. 

This poem is not interested in naming the nameless.

Not aiming to rekindle ferocity.

Not pining for that erotic velocity.

Not hiding the one who keeps moving behind the word evinced from the image. 

"In An Elevator with Ashbery, Crossing Stanzas, Bashfully" by Alina Stefanescu. Used by permission of the poet.