Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I belong to a group of writers called the Dark Room Collective. Lately, I am intensely nostalgic because one of our members recently passed.

Danielle Legros George was decidedly one of the most brilliant people I’ve known. Her poem “A Dominican Poem” was featured on The Slowdown last year. She possessed a transatlantic imagination that was fiercely committed to a purposeful literature. She was kind beyond possibility. Danielle and I went long jags without seeing each other — but recently had connected at least once a year either in her hometown of Boston, or at writers’ conferences. Her passing took me to unbox some early photographs of the Dark Room Collective and thus, back to all the memories when we first saw futures as writers.

I contemplate the journey of the lives of the Dark Room Collective, and am moved by the steadfastness of each person’s vision and commitment to their art.

I thought, too, about the bonds created away from our desks and books and poems. I particularly recall all those moments we communed: our parties, our nights at restaurants, our dancing, our cutting a rug. Kevin in Charlottesville at Fred and Rita’s, then later at a club downtown. Sharan in Maine. Natasha at Bread Loaf. Tisa and John K in Philadelphia. Tracy K in Bennington. Bethany in Tampa. Elizabeth in South Beach doing the Nae Nae. Twirling beneath the rafters at Nick’s barn party.

But the nature of my youth was one in which my passion for art lived out in my passion for life. At times, there was a recklessness about it. Like Greg, Quraysh, and me spilling out of a Soho bar at first light, having debated literature and writers with a seriousness that felt like life mattered, truly mattered.

Today’s poem reminds me how the artist’s relentless, indomitable spirit is lived out in their relationships, in their relationship to time, in their art.

5 A.M.
by Michael Ondaatje

     for Stan Dragland and for Kris Coleman

The wilderness of our youth, an empty barn, 
dancing with friends into the small hours,
then daylight and the cars swerving away
wordless into the dawn

It arrives all at once tonight,
not as memory, but like a gift
from forgetfulness,
as a desire can wake you

or this poem
based on the accidental change of speed
in a friend’s camera into slow motion.
So now I remember
the rest of our shadows
as we danced, all our heartbeats
under the thunder

and I can speak to you the way
we once sang farewells out of our cars
late at night, when those
goodbyes remembered everything

“5 A.M.” by Michael Ondaatje from A YEAR OF LAST THINGS © 2024 Michael Ondaatje. Used by permission of Penguin Random House and the poet.