Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

One question that people frequently ask me: do I compose poetry longhand with pen and paper, or on the computer. I can never tell if the question embeds a bias, one in which handwriting is like slow-cooking and a keyboard is closer to fast-food. I hear the past in my ear: “Make Handwriting Great Again.”

The question carries a belief that scribbling a poem on a pad or journal is keeping it real. I wonder if ancient Egyptians or the monks that created the Carolingian script raved and debated the effectiveness of new writing tools in their day:
“Yo, you try that new animal bone?”
“Nah. I’m good; I’m too analog. I’m sticking with my old-school reed pen. It’s still funky with the ink.”

The question also puts me in mind of elementary school. Mrs. Morgan started mornings with the meticulous exercise of writing upper- and lower-case letters across lined-paper. Then, we’d write out words in cursive. Each day had its own letter. Once we completed all twenty-six, we’d begin anew. She’d call us up to the blackboard to replicate our work. I still smell the chalk. I see the horizontal poster of the alphabet above the blackboard showing arrowed directions. I see little Major at the board straining intensely to render a perfect “Z.”

I loved the discipline of writing in cursive, how each letter demanded its own elaborate movement, and how the power of repeating made muscle memory of thinking. I felt the cadence and rhythm of my hands as my mind formed letters into ideas, ideas into words, words into sentences. Eventually, writing evolved beyond mere technical proficiency. It became a place to stylize, to be expressly myself. The very motion of my hand marks the world with my thoughts. But, these days, I take notes in journals, scribble on pads or nearby scraps of paper, and I compose it all on the computer.

Today’s poem venerates the power of writing as an exchange with the world, how our thoughts travel outward, but then, in the end, bring us to the center of our own existence.

Penmanship
by Allison Joseph

I wrote too slowly, teachers groaned,
laboring over letters and words as if
each one crafted was meant to be
a work of art. I couldn’t help it,
I loved the cursive loops—the L,
the H, the strings of S slithering
across ruled paper. When I got older,
teachers swore, Write faster,
get all I say down, until I no longer 
cared what I was writing, but wrote
for the physicality of it, spreading 
ink over paper until my hands 
were blue with it. Then one teacher
put a long, skinny, plastic quill
in my hands, showed me how
to hold it at 90 degrees, to dip
the metal nib into ink so dark
it seeped for good into the wood
of the art room’s shaky tables.
She chided us to take this writing
slow, to hold this pen like no other,
our touch delicate to free the ink,
but firm to make the letters look
like they’d sprung up from the pages
of a medieval scribe. Finally, she said, 
Be proud of the ink your hands collect,
of letters you’ve shaped without speaking.

“Penmanship” by Allison Joseph from CONFESSIONS OF A BARE-FACED WOMAN © 2018 Allison Joseph. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Red Hen Press.