Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

In high school my friends and I, unbeknownst to our parents, played hooky. We saw the matinee showing of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off at the Ritz in downtown Philadelphia. Based on what we’d heard of the film’s plot… truancy only felt fitting.

Ferris talking to the audience from the large screen about his friend Cameron while taking a shower radicalized my notion of art. He broke the fourth wall, a theatrical device conceived by French philosopher Denis Diderot, who wrote: “When you write or act, think no more of the audience than if it had never existed. Imagine a huge wall across the front of the stage ....”

Studying Hamlet’s many soliloquies — monologues not heard by the other characters — did nothing to prepare me for the visceral experience of a large face stepping out of a plot to speak to a bunch of people in the dark. Albeit now a familiar convention in film (think Scorsese), still I startle when the imaginary boundary is exposed, especially in poetry.

Sometimes, a speaker in a poem will acknowledge its own artificiality by addressing the reader directly or by making a self-referential remark, all to say, Hey, reader; I know you’re there, listening in. Breaking the fourth wall in poetry removes pretense and lays bare a vulnerability that creates an intimacy and collapses distance.

Today’s poem breaks down the illusion of art, so that we become active listeners who can empathize with the changing shape of love between a son and a mother suffering from Alzheimer’s.

Fourth Wall Arpeggio
by A. Van Jordan

Lately, my friends ask me, out of love,
have I written about my mother,
who suffers under the storm of Alzheimer’s disease,
and I tell them, “I don’t write about my family,
never directly, at least.” To write this poem seems so

out of character for me, but it’s not about my mother,
as much as it’s about how, as a son, the disease
measures the changing rituals of family.
And 28 lines—all I’ve provided myself—seems so
anemic. Now, I barely have 18 lines left for a love

I don’t have the vigor to describe. Reticence is a disease
I’ve suffered from throughout my life. Without family,
I don’t know what it means to live as myself, and, so,
I hide in the reflection of others, which, after all, others love:
people care more about themselves than a friend’s mother.

I mean, how does one explain to someone who’s not family
how you now see the patterns into which a parent would sew
a quilt to lay over a child, the child neither hip to love
nor Hayden’s “austere and lonely offices”? My mother’s 
silence seems like indifference except I know the disease,

which changes our relationship, the parent and child; I sow
healing from my memory of how she taught me to love,
not knowing her movement through a day as a mother,
as someone whose sole gig was to keep me alive, free of disease
and, whenever possible, embarrassment. But now, family

means playing the parent; I’m still just a son, writing about love,
but, lowering my eyes from the trauma, I lift her body, her disease,
for a shower, straining under all the love she sowed.

"Fourth Wall Arpeggio" by A. Van Jordan. Used by permission of the poet.