Poet: Major Jackson
Poet Background:
Jackson, an award-winning poet and essayist, was born in 1968 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He would stay local for his undergraduate degree, getting his bachelor’s at Temple University, before heading out to Oregon to get an MFA at the University of Oregon. From there, his stock has rapidly risen, and he sits in the upper echelon of American poets who are working today.
He has published five collections of poetry, with the most recent being released last year (The Absurd Man), and two other collections of poetry have been nominated for major awards—Hoops, nominated in 2006 as a finalist for an NAACP Image Award, and Leaving Saturn, the 2000 winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems.
Other than publishing collections of poetry, Jackson has been a prolific editor, essayist, literary critic, and professor. He has edited a volume of the Best American Poetry series, Renga for Obama, and the Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. He has published both essays and poems in publications such as American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Ploughshares, and Poetry, amongst many others, and he has been awarded many fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. He has won a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress.
After teaching stints at the University of Vermont and the New York University Creative Writing Program, Jackson can now be found living in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, along with serving as the poetry editor of the Harvard Review.
In other words, Jackson is an elite poet who is a force to be reckoned with today, and he is highly sought after for critical reviews/insights for many different poetical works and essay pieces.
Poem: ‘Leave It All Up to Me’
All we want is to succumb to a single kiss
that will contain us like a marathon
with no finish line, and if so, that we land
like newspapers before sunrise, halcyon
mornings like blue martinis. I am learning
the steps to a foreign song: her mind
was torpedo, and her body was storm,
a kind of Wow. All we want is a metropolis
of Sundays, an empire of hand-holding
and park benches. She says, “Leave it all up to me.”
Analysis:
To me, at least, this is a simple but elegant poem, wearing its heart on its sleeve and not requiring too much digging below the surface. It’s based more around imagery and raw emotion than technical details, and I love it for precisely that reason.
The basic ‘story’ of the poem is a celebration of love—the speaker is describing pure love in its simplest form, and celebrating the kind of euphoria that love can wrap its beholders up in, especially at the beginning. The first few lines of the poem enforces this idea by comparing one single kiss to the idea of a marathon without end, allowing the reader to imagine a race that fades off into the distance, something that endures and requires perseverance but which can also lead to many, many highs and bursts of emotion (the runner’s high is real). Running a marathon is something that takes practice (learning the lessons of heartbreak and what to do and not to do in a relationship from past lovers, in comparison) and commitment, and comparing a kiss to something like that is signaling at the larger theme of love, the totality of such a commitment symbolized by something as simple as a kiss between you and your partner.
Taking the next few lines of that first sentence, Jackson compares a kiss to that of ‘newspapers before sunrise,’ or being alive in the world when everything else is still and quiet. The idea of two lovers embracing and being happy together in the cold, cool depths of the morning, and imagining it as an idyllic place compared to the rest of the world, is both a comforting and enchanting image to think about. Further comparing the kiss to something idyllic, Jackson calls the mornings as ‘halcyon’ in nature, meaning it ‘denotes a period of time…that was idyllically happy and peaceful.’ By combining this word with ‘morning,’ the poem conjures up images familiar to almost everyone of laying together with your partner or lover in bed in the morning, awake still after a long night spent together, or waking early and just laying there together, simply enjoying the company of the other person. It conjures up images of the first twinges of light starting to show around the shades of the window, those first soft greys and blues of sunlight peaking over the horizon and reaching Earth, and the image of a ‘blue martini’ furthers that colorful image.
The next sentence speaks to the turbulence of love, and the overpowering feelings that often come with it, especially new love. By comparing love to ‘steps to a foreign song,’ Jackson is talking about the mystery and learning experience of new love—you have to get to know your partner slowly, dancing faster and faster, metaphorically, as you get more comfortable with them, and it’s finding out the mysteries and quirks and what makes the other person tick that gradually allows the dance to be tangoed in full. Then, by comparing his love to a ‘torpedo’ and a ‘storm,’ Jackson is commenting on the utter totality that new love can capture a person with, the torpedo blitzing through his mind and knocking out all other worries or concerns in the early days, or a storm that does the same thing, wreaking havoc on the surroundings in such a way that you take shelter from it—albeit in a good way here, pointing to the depths of healing found in new love.
Finally, the last two sentences of the poem wrap it up perfectly, allowing the short and sharp poem to mimic the quickness that comes with the swelling of new love in your heart, the idea that you can’t get enough and then you have to leave for work or something else before reuniting again later. Jackson talks of a ‘metropolis of Sundays,’ and an ‘empire of hand-holding and park benches.’ He wants the images of simple, new love to take hold in our mind, imagining them sitting at the park along a lake or watching people throw a football around with friends, hand in hand and not worrying about anything else in the world, while also emphasizing the freedom of this new love, choosing to set it in a time of endless Sundays, the day of the week most commonly related to freedom and the relinquishment of duties related to work or anything else that steals our time during the week. The idea of endless freedom with your lover, and the simplicity of sitting on a park bench and watching the world pass by in front of the two of you, is designed to elicit the emotion of that contentment at the beginning of a relationship, the pure job of simply being with the other person, and the combination of gargantuan-sounding nouns with simple ‘nouns of love’ furthers the emotion of this seemingly-bottomless amount of happiness and love.
And the last line: ‘She says: “Leave it all up to me.”’ It’s evoking that sense of letting go completely with a new love, of trusting the universe to guide you two along a path that will include many, many more Sundays when you can sit on a park bench and watch people walk by. Everyone takes a leap of faith at the beginning of a relationship, and this idea of completely freeing yourself from any encumbrances and trusting the process, even one as turbulent as love and the mind of a new lover, is the biggest of all.
This is ultimately a poem of showing unbridled faith in your new lover or partner, and it’s an ode that, quite honestly, reads much more authentically and real than the odes of the poetic greats of Keats and Blake.
For Future Reading:
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