Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Poetry propels us to new places, physical and of the mind, but also towards new human beings. I love stumbling upon poems written by someone whom I’ve never read before, never met, truly a new voice! As readers of poetry, we get to engage with and listen to the mind of a poet who, in the normal course of a day, we might not casually encounter. For this reason, I treasure the anonymity of the page. We meet the speaker in the poem on their own terms without any preconceived notions. In curating poems for The Slowdown, the great wealth of humanity reveals itself. How limited my own perspective would be if I were to read only poetry that merely reflected my worldview and identity.

I’ve engaged in many discussions about the role of poetry, and have asked: what if poetry’s ultimate function is to apprise us of the connection and interdependence of all life? What if language attunes us to not just ourselves and our feelings and thoughts, but the collective merging of humanity and the natural world? What if the poem is a collapsing of the great chain of being and other hierarchies and supremacist notions that have so damaged our sense of ourselves and others?

If so, then the craft of the poem physically reassembles who we are:

the meter or the cadence of a poem modulates our breathing as a form of transfiguration; a line break becomes emblematic of our emotional and physical breaking, where our heart and body open to the possibilities of restoration and bonding.

Today’s compelling poem models beingness by discarding the paltry notion of time and an individuated selfhood disconnected from life. The poem advocates for the knowledge that poetry distinctly brings, that we are living and dying at once. Its innovative empathy helps us carry forward a sense of care, responsibility, and stewardship — both of the planet, and of each other.

Poem
by Jorie Graham

The earth said 
remember me.
The earth said
don’t let go,

said it one day
when I was
accidentally
listening, I

heard it, I felt it 
like temperature,
all said in a 
whisper—build to-

morrow, make right be-
fall, you are not
free, other scenes
are not taking

place, time is not filled,
time is not late, there is
a thing the emptiness 
needs as you need

emptiness, it
shrinks from light again & 
again, although all things
are present, a

fact a day a
bird that warps the 
arithmetic of per-
fection with its

arc, passing again &
again in the evening
air, in the pre-
vailing wind, making no

mistake—yr in-
difference is yr
principal beauty 
the mind says all the

time—I hear it—I
hear it every-
where. The earth
said remember

me. I am the
earth it said. Re-
member me.

“Poem” by Jorie Graham from [TO] THE LAST [BE] HUMAN © 2022 Jorie Graham Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press.