Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I always thought that if I learned enough poems by heart, I would stave off memory loss. I came to this conclusion after watching poet Stanley Kunitz recite a poem at a celebration of his 100th birthday. Following a host of speakers, his daughter escorted him on stage at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. Before an audience of nearly a thousand people, he initially looked confused, unaware of the occasion. (When you live as long as Stanley, you, too, are likely to have as many former students and admirers show up for your fête.)

When she pointed to a book, he reared up out of his bent posture and recited his poem “Touch Me.” Stanley was changed, suddenly half his age, his voice, untrembling, strong as he recited his famous words “Summer is late, my heart.” He never looked down at the page. At the end, the audience stood up in applause.

Close to a decade later, a celebration for another poetry hero challenged my belief about the long-term benefits of reciting poetry. When I walked into the statehouse chamber in Vermont, I made my way to the honoree, Galway Kinnell, whom I knew, not as a student, but a devoted admirer who attended his poetry readings and once, even read alongside him. I said hello and was met with bewildered stares. I realized he did not recognize me. But memory loss is not only tragic, it feels largely random.

His appearance on stage was preceded, too, by a host of admiring poets and friends, as well as an emotionally stirring reading of a poem by his granddaughter which left not a dry eye in the room. Galway, who in the past had given us so many memorable recitations of his poems, marked this public appearance with a final sporadic search for words of gratitude to every one of us there, and not there, that afternoon.

It is peculiar that those of us who write, who labor towards clarity of speech, a fluidity of consciousness, hear a call across the void of silence, what Kinnell calls, the valley of the not-knowing. Then, eventually, that void returns to some of us, and overwhelms our sense of memory and language.

For Kinnell and Kunitz, and the many writers who fall into silence, or at worst, suffer dementia, their poems and works become the lifetime gift — an undaunted imagination that we cherish in wake of their silenced tongues. Their voices and words live inside of us.

Today’s poem understands the sacred exchange of contemporary literature. It is a spiritual and creative dowry of the mind and heart that is consecutively passed from writer to writer, from writer to reader.

Dear Red
by Jonathan Maule

If what we forget says more
than what we remember 

then we have said much
in our forgetting

each of us the dark spot
floating in the other’s eye

a single blurred moment
drowning in a day—

on the stove      my silver kettle
spitting its insides over a spidered flame

or a bus                   unclenching at the stop
gathering us as strangers

My memory has cataracts
a black sky pocked with glowing mouths

I stare right at them
I build you from these spaces

wait for you to speak
in the halls of our forgetting

something we can dance to
an offering

I never gave you               a digging tool
a mollusk              a wind-up kangaroo

a poem you may fold
into a star

“Dear Red” by Jonathan Maule from THIS SIDE OF THE FIRE © 2022, Jonathan Maule. Used by permission of the poet.