TRANSCRIPT

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

Too much importance is placed on inspiration, we say. Go with routine, sit down at your desk, and write, write anything until something hooks. I say to students, Don’t wait. Poet Frank O’Hara said, “Just go on your nerve.”

So much around us says, “Go! Go! Go!” And that makes sense for a society built on excess and theories of efficiency and productivity. For a long while, I approached the writing of poetry like the models and methods I studied in business school. 

Then life intervened: divorce, child-rearing, new work responsibilities. The writing halted. I needed to find a way to enter the art differently. I needed to create a routine of writing that did not replicate the same old practice of sitting down at a desk, which I had grown tired of. 

First, I tried to jump start my nervous system through extreme measures like cold showers and sprints around my block, which I’m sure was entertainment for my neighbors. Next, I listened every morning to a highly rhythmic, loud percussive jazz composition by Ahmad Jamal. I sat in my backyard in the middle of the day with the sun bearing down. I meditated for an hour and a half. I even thought of checking into a hotel and handing my clothes to the concierge in order to write in the nude, as I read Victor Hugo, Agatha Christie, and Ernest Hemingway had done. 

Then, exhausted, I realized that no amount of tricking myself was going to work. External stimulus wasn’t going to give me a purchase on language to enter honestly into the act of bearing witness to my life without fear.

Courage is at the heart of writing, and as today’s poem suggests, a wildness of being, that fires away from timidity and into realms of the self as glamorous and unpredictable, as if you had the whole world shook. 

Fowl At Large

by Sarah Giragosian

What honing dial set awry
or false hunch or storm of the century

drives the accidental bird
or dreaming poem to surface?

As for me, I had disavowed hope’s
candle-to-egg devotions, spike-heeled the idea

of someday. Speaking of chicks, newbies,
and baby tortoises, if you sentence

a beehive to a bell jar, those hourglass
bees will one day spill like lava

over every lip and crevice. I swear,
I’ve seen those little torpedoes of joy and sting

meet and greet every goldenrod,
every marigold from here to long

after cocktail hour. Like a cacophony
of cats, so many I’s without apology,

screaming their heads off,
I’ve lost all sense of grace,

thank god. My thirst is deeper;
it shrieks for that kite slicing through unseen 

geographies, lost, windstorm-dazed,
her compass needle wild as a roulette wheel.

“Fowl at Large” by Sarah Giragosian. Originally published in Figure 1. Used by permission of the poet.