Transcript

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

One of the honors of hosting The Slowdown is the great experience of reciting poems out loud for your pleasure. Some words are liquid in the mouth. Others feel like squares of caramel. Then there are those words and phrases, as my producer Myka would say, that have me going through all kinds of “word yoga.” I stretch and bend my jaws, cheeks, and lips to accommodate their correct enunciations.

I am of the same mind as the critic who states, an audible reading should be “more than the reading of poetry aloud.” That a recitation should appeal to “the mind’s ear as well.” When reading for recording, I coax words. I treat them gently so that they arrive as a distinctively heard piece of verbal music.

Attention to the lyric qualities of a poem also underpins how I teach poetry. For years, I have urged my students to get “inside language,” at times not fully sure what I actually meant. I am not dogmatic about much when it comes to poetry, but I am convinced that one of its core characteristics is an acute attention to sound. Eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope said “sound must seem an echo to the sense,” a way to reach a reader through a marriage of meaning and music. Philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson believed such a poem is “a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”

Some poets aim for meaning and clarity of emotion. And then, the best does that and more. They also play language as though words were comprised of tones and notes, as though the poem were a musical composition. They treat language as a resource by creating echoes through rhyme or cadence or incantation. Others give language a skin by utilizing words that have a roughness to them. Then other poets map a route to individuality by capturing words, and phrases and heard speech only particular to a region or group of people. I like language that is connected to family and kin, idiomatic and vernacular speech.

Today’s poem makes me aware of the extent to which poems evidence a poets’ love of words, first and foremost. Words are like a river of sound. In writing against the tide of sameness, sometimes we tap language’s inner workings to say the new.

But Beautiful
by Rodney Terich Leonard

				                          Beauty brings copies of itself into being.
				                          —Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

Apple orchard limb-jubilant tree
Fuji aplomb for every belly.
A hungry man’s happy-red moan
Quicker you pluck ’em quicker they gone.
Grandma’s been fly for years
Kodak’ed once between her tears.
Teeth brushed of corn & snuff
Jet-black beehive mauve powder puff—
In a nectarine high-draped skirt.

Pool-hall juke Big Maybelle
Stereo-stewed hog maws to quell.
The gent of lower crooked tooth
Bedford-Stuyvesant’s claim to hoof.
Without a mate is neo-angular
The whiff of weed leaps rectangular.
I’m about to flip not quite qualm
Scant time for frangipani or psalm—
Beauty bucked me for renting love.

“But Beautiful” by Rodney Terich Leonard from ANOTHER LAND OF MY BODY © 2024 Rodney Terich Leonard. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.