Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

A frequent topic of conversation lately with friends is the relatively short-lived reputations of poets. This thread comes up whenever we recall a poem or a poet for whom no one reads or teaches anymore. We mourn the poets who were giants to us, who ushered our own entrée into the art. They appeared in select anthologies, were interviewed on public radio and television, showed up frequently on classroom syllabi, and, of course, won major awards.

Back then, we read whatever we could get our hands on and went broke buying their first editions. A new poem published in a prestigious journal was a bonafide literary event. Now, we are shocked whenever mention of their names to our students is met with blank stares. We ask, Would an emergent jazz saxophonist not know the name or have listened to the iconic John Coltrane?

From Nobel laureates to Pulitzer prize winners, no one is spared. Once their collected poems is published, typically the coffin is nailed shut. The road to canonicity is determined and left up to future readers. If I am among fellow poets, this conversation is typically sobering. None of us have dreams of becoming the next Shakespeare or Langston Hughes; we are not delusional. We simply realize that the already small audience for our poems will likely get smaller. We see the signs on the wall.

Still, we cannot help but speculate as to… why? Social media is a good source for poetry but does not begin to capture the wealth of great poetry to discover. Maybe yesterday’s poets were bolstered by a now outdated, critical conversation that held them up as exemplars. Maybe the lack of a shared aesthetic, where we all agree what a great poem or book looks like, has us overlook older poets. Maybe we suffer recency bias and can only focus on the new poet everyone is talking about. The more cynical of us believe the egocentric nature of the art has caught up with us. We lack a regard for elder voices because we cannot see ourselves in them or the relevance of their words.

I do not have any answers. But I can say that those who speak to the needs of the people, whether politically and spiritually, are those whom we wish to invite into our ears and imagination. Their idioms and use of language remain relevant to our sense of ourselves.

Today’s sharp poem was written by one of our most revered living poets. Its analysis could not be more pertinent to our political reality today.

small comment
by Sonia Sanchez

the nature of the beast is the 
man or to be more specific 
the nature of the man is his
bestial nature or to 
bring it to its elemental terms
the nature of nature is 
the bestial survival of the 
fittest the strongest the richest
or to really examine
the scene we cd say that
the nature of any beast is
bestial unnatural and natural
in its struggle for superiority
and survival but to really
be with it we will say that the man
is a natural beast bestial in
his lusts natural in his 
bestiality and expanding
and growing on the national 
scene to be the most 
bestial and natural of
any beast. you dig?

“Small Comment” from COLLECTED POEMS by Sonia Sanchez copyright © 2021 Sonia Sanchez. Used by permission of Beacon Press