Transcript

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

At a public talk, someone said out loud, “I do not feel. I have no emotions. So, I write poetry to produce my emotions.” 

Poets often think of their writing as an excavation of emotions. Because society asks us to repress our inner lives, we write to bring to surface embedded feelings. I have long espoused poetry as a means of achieving personal expression. But that poetry generates emotion in the person who does not have any emotions is new to me. 

Essentially, the speaker confessed to lacking sentience, that writing creates them rather than unearths them. Imagine eating a peach and not experiencing its texture, juiciness, sweetness, only until after you sit down to write a poem. Or imagine boarding a heart-stopping rollercoaster, that suddenly drops, but you do not feel the terror of the ride until that moment you find language to describe it. It is a wondrous idea, that to write is to complete human activity. 

Today’s poem points to how and where in our bodies we experience the world. I like to believe that my senses are open as I take in music, food, travel, new adventures, new friends. I like to think poetry makes me extrasensory. But, then again, my wife would argue I spend too much time in my head, thinking my life away. I enjoy how today’s poem makes it a goal to be keenly aware, intuitive, and innate.

What the Body Gives Away
by Saba Keramati

I wear a new pair of shoes to a friend’s wedding and the backs cut
into my heels. I hide my bleeding throughout the night,
pretend it does not bother me. It’s a familiar phenomenon
by now. My therapist asks me where in my body I feel
my hurt, and I say my mind, but I don’t know if that counts.
T says that is Western logic, but I wonder whether I am too aware—
or else too disconnected, though they are opposites—of my own body 
that it confuses me so. For there are things I’ve seen in animals
that I do not see in myself. The way the cats’ tails point straight to the sky
when I open the front door. The way a mother bird shields her young
from a hailstorm, wings outstretched, risking the very thing that makes her bird.
The bats under the bridge know when the sun sets, without clocks,
with their eyes still closed. When I wanted to chase the full moon,
I held my phone in front of me, counting the seconds before Google told me
it would rise. Siri, make me more animal, I want to say.
Let me trust the way they do, moving their bodies with instincts unknown 
to me. I’ve seen a deer judge the ripeness of fruit with no concept
of ready. I want to search “how to know less,” but to do so would already
be a failure. A spider does not know where its web will land 
before releasing its thread. The wind carries it. Drops it
where it’s meant to be.

“What the Body Gives Away” by Saba Keramati. Used by permission of the poet.