PRINTA Major event
Jackson scores with Hoops
Erica Patrice O'Brien
Major Jackson will look to create community through his poetry reading tonight.
March 20, 2008 | 12:00 a.m. CST
Major Jackson wants you to drop the remote and start engaging.
“I love to watch American Idol,” he says, “but it doesn’t do anything for me. I’m just receiving it. Poetry engages us in a way that TV and popular culture cannot.”
In the Mecca, Gwendolyn Brooks
Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop
Inferno, Dante
Homegirls & Handgrenades, Sonia Sanchez
Omeros, Derek Walcott
Event Info
What: Major Jackson poetry reading
Where: Reynolds Alumni Center, MU
When: Thurs., 7:30 p.m.
Cost: Free
The writer and professor has written two books of poetry, Leaving Saturn and Hoops, and has been published in several periodicals, including The American Poetry Review and The New Yorker.
Jackson began teaching as a grad student at the University of Oregon in 1997. Then, in 1999, he was a tenure-track professor at Xavier University of Louisiana. He’s now an associate professor of English at the University of Vermont, where he’s been since 2002.
Poetry didn’t interest his former student Lily Smith until she went to one of Jackson’s readings. His class changed the course of her education. “He turned me on to poetry,” she says. “He’s a great ... modern poet and a brilliant mind.”
Jackson’s favorite thing about teaching is helping students enjoy poems they probably would have never read. “I enjoy talking about their perceptions of what the poem means and introducing new poets to them like Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks,” he says.
Brooks is one of Jackson’s own idols. He admires how she encouraged students to articulate their lives in an important, original way that reaffirmed their existence. “She was able to write with great clarity and creativity about people in her neighborhood,” he says, “and that’s exactly what I wanted to do.”
Jackson says his poetry reflects the tragedies and triumphs of growing up in Philadelphia, where he saw many street fights and group maulings.
“On a few occasions, I had to duck into friends’ homes after hearing gunfire,” Jackson says. “Kids I once walked the hallways of elementary school (with) or sat next to in a classroom in middle school, I would never see again because they were killed as a result of the proliferations of guns in my beloved city.”
Jackson is proud that people retained their dignity in the face of unforgiving social and economic challenges. He says the ability to maintain hope and find joy in circumstances that could have crushed their souls is triumph enough to him.
The poet himself finds joy in creating a sense of community through touring. “It’s all about connecting with audiences who care equally about contemporary poetry, literary arts, music and so forth,” he says. “Those are my people, my tribe.”
He finds inspiration in the language of his own life and the lives of others. “Language is the material of writers,” Jackson says, “much as movement is the material of dancers and oil is the material of painters.”
