Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Some poems are so important to me that I never discuss them. I hold them close like cherished songs or spells, only turning to them when the occasion absolutely calls for their voicing. And even then, I try not to say them out loud, but whisper, with hopes the wind swallows up their sounds. When reciting such poems, the histories of their words come alive. I don’t want their vibrations to accidentally land in someone’s ears and find that suddenly a bouquet of zinnias magically blooms from their heads.

These are poems that are meant to enter the body at the right time, to exist there, to do their healing and be on their way; they are not for close reading or exegesis. They protect the threshold between the living and the dead. They remind one of old roads. They return the frog to his kingdom.

I wish not to drain these poems of their powers through too much talk nor debase them with inferior lectures about meters and such. The last time I committed the error of guiding a class to the secret treasures of one such poem, I praised the general sweep of language, how it rumbled and sought steadiness through the extended conceit of a broom, and how emotion builds such that the speaker, no, the poet, could do no more but treat her loves to a cavalry of singing. I broke into a sweat and was nearing tears thinking of the poet before she soared.

The class wanted to know if she was being ironic; if the broom was a symbol of impertinence and rebellion. I accused them of not ever being in love, nor having their hearts handed to them in an old leather valise with the lost key. As they filed out, they left their copies of the poem all over the seminar table; I silently retrieved them into a pile. My fingers burned. Later that night, boarding a flight, I placed them behind airplane seats where they belonged.

Today’s poem doesn’t tolerate poetry that only scratches the surface, that merely entertains. Sometimes, we need the most urgent of words, powerful as though they were spoken straight from the mouths of the gods.

Reading Poetry in Illness
by Anya Krugovoy Silver

Certain names are sacred to me. 
I no longer waste time on books
that don’t wrestle with angels,
leaving my fingers bruised
as I turn the pages of slim volumes.
The great ones—only regular humans,
with the same problems as thousands
before or since. But God took them
and held them before a dry wind,
and their helpless bodies swallowed
all the swirling sand, rocks, and blood,
and from this, poems forced their way.
I won’t mention their names,
lest their spirits recoil at praise.
But the lashes on my skin that their words
have left—see how they flash golden,
like the spot where the enchanted bear’s pelt
has been ripped away by a briar.

“Reading Poetry in Illness” by Anya Krugovoy Silver from SAINT AGNOSTICA, © 2021 Anya Krugovoy Silver. Used by permission of Louisiana State University Press.