Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

In my teen years, I admired the large canvases of a now-deceased artist known for his portraits of faces. In conversations, I’d enthusiastically referred to them as wall-sized photographs. One day, a friend checked me: “They aren’t photographs.” We finally made a trip together to MoMA on a Sunday afternoon to settle it once and for all. Once there, I read the museum label beside a portrait of composer Philip Glass, and stood in embarrassment. Before me, in fact, was a colossal painting – all this time, what I thought was an outsized picture, blown up, framed, and hung on a wall.

For nearly ten minutes, I absorbed its power with a newfound appreciation, admiring it even more. Previously, I believed its virtuosity resided simply in the artist’s selection of their subject. Now, what gave the canvas its sublime quality was its scale and hyper-realist reproduction: painted tiny pixels combined to make a face. Philip Glass’s droopy eyes and signature black curls matched my own look of befuddlement and awe.

Sometime in the last century, American poets sought to write poems about personal experiences in a style that had the immediacy of a photograph. These poems were more like unadorned anecdotes of events and people – often in jagged, unrhymed lines, and without the artifice of art – or famously put by a then popular poet: “tennis without the net.” The mere recalling of details alone gave the poem its heft and eminence. Therapeutic gains of telling one’s story were of more importance than verse that echoed forever in some anthology or in the ear of the people. My friend Eddie refers to it as “a poetry of human scale.”

And yet, people questioned, “Is it art?” Can a stripped-down poem, lacking the virtuosic advances in metaphor and form, exist alongside Shakespeare, Milton, and Dickinson? Some asked, weren't such poems more like diary entries? Nonetheless, the method of using accessible language organized into heterometric lines took hold. People new to poetry increasingly saw themselves reflected in this democratic style; they felt affirmed in their own efforts to write with clarity and directness.

Today’s poem affirms the simple approach of narrating our lives as a means of shining a light on our complex era. Given our quick passage on earth, the poem argues that to tell our stories and name the people who populate our lives is noble and rewarding enough.

Epilogue
by Robert Lowell

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make 
something imagined, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter’s vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everything I write 
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life, 
yet paralyzed by fact.
All’s misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

“Epilogue” by Robert Lowell from COLLECTED POEMS, © 2003 Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.