Transcript

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

I love the notion of the poem as a carrier of time, a capsule of a period, a container of a moment. The poet’s distinct privilege is to divine the era in which they live — simply by casting their composing eye (and ear) in the direction of their passions and observations. The poet gets to preserve in language what they insist as important to note, and to carry that across time to future readers. What matters to the poets, matters to us.

As such, I am curious as to what is brought forward into the present, when the poem in all of its manifestations subverts the work of time, which is chiefly one of erasure, its predominance, and our ephemeral nature. If you listen close enough to a poem, especially to the very best of them, you can hear on their surface, the poet’s breathing and silences shaped by the pace and noise of their age. You can hear a voice fastened to the page, the speech of the era in which the poem was written, along with images that float into our mind’s eye which are also of a period like red wheelbarrows, pool players, frigates, and 8-track cassettes.

I hear the spirit of 19th century America in Walt Whitman’s pioneering lush lines. In the poetry of T.S. Eliot, I hear the fragmentary sped-up consciousness of the period between the World Wars, and I hear the spirit of radical resistance of the 1960s in Amiri Baraka’s poems.

But the surefire means of framing yet also transcending time is to capture an emotional state that lives forever inside a poem. We popularly say that human beings only experience a handful of emotions: love, grief, hope, desire, pain, and doubt, for example. There are no newly invented emotions. Yet, how a poet stylizes language, through sound, through figures, determines the extent to which the poem will preserve a feeling long into the future.

Today’s lyric poem was written in the fifth century B.C., although it reads as if it were written yesterday. The portrait of a speaker viscerally filled with jealousy is evidence of the endurance of human emotions across the ages.

Fragment 31
by Sappho, translated by Christopher Childers

He seems like the gods’ equal, that man, who
ever he is, who takes his seat so close
across from you, and listens raptly to 
your lifting voice

and lovely laughter, which, as it wafts by,
sets the heart in my ribcage fluttering;
as soon as I glance at you a moment, I 
can’t say a thing,

and my tongue stiffens into silence, thin
flames underneath my skin prickle and spark,
a rush of blood booms in my ears, and then
my eyes go dark,

and sweat pours coldly over me, and all
my body shakes, suddenly sallower
than summer grass, and death, I fear and feel,
is very near.

“31” by Sappho, translated by Christopher Childers. Used by permission of the translator.