In 1996 poet Cornelius Eady wrote a short piece for the New Yorker showcasing the Dark Room Collective—a group, Eady claimed, “that could well turn out to be as important to American letters as the Harlem Renaissance.”

In the photograph accompanying that essay, seven of the members—all young African American poets—pose with eyes closed, faces lifted sunward, except for one. Major Jackson stares directly at the lens, arms crossed: his posture determined, his expression serious and calm.

In person Jackson gives off the same composed aura, although his gravity is broken often by a deep, hearty laugh. We met early one warm morning in the apartment where he was staying in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. Although Jackson lives in South Burlington, Vermont, where he is a professor of English at the University of Vermont, he treks to New York City often to see friends, occasionally taking on visiting teaching stints at colleges such as New York University and Columbia. He also serves as a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars, a low-residency program.

Born and raised in Philadelphia, Jackson initially pursued an accounting degree at Temple University, changing course along the way after becoming part of Philadelphia’s artistic community, where, as he puts it, “the visual artists know the dancers and the dancers know the deejays and the deejays know the performance artists and poets.”

In 1995, at just twenty-six years old, Jackson was awarded a fifty-thousand-dollar Pew Fellowship in the Arts, which gave him two years to write. During that time, he joined the Dark Room Collective, which by then included Thomas Sayers Ellis, John Keene, Janice Lowe, Carl Phillips, Tracy K. Smith, Sharan Strange, Natasha Trethewey, Artress Bethany White, and Kevin Young, among others, and was performing “drive-by readings” at colleges and literary arts centers across the country.

Jackson was one of the first Cave Canem fellows, a group chosen to participate in a weeklong retreat for African American poets; in fact, his debut poetry collection, Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia Press, 2002), was chosen by Al Young for the second annual Cave Canem Poetry Prize and went on to receive a nomination for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2006 Norton published his follow-up, Hoops, which was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award.

That year Jackson joined another interdisciplinary community. Instead of dancers and deejays, he worked with physicists, sociologists, historians, and fellows from other varied backgrounds at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. While there, he began writing what would become his new collection, Holding Company, published in August by Norton. The long lines and poems, many of them sequences about urban life, which characterize his earlier books, have been supplanted in his new collection by concise, ten-line lyrical poems in which Jackson explores new territory—the realm of the ecstatic.

What was the idea behind the Dark Room Collective?
It was a reading series that started off in the late eighties in the house where some of the members lived on Edmond Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I didn’t join up with the Dark Room until the nineties, when I came and gave a reading.

Early on it was Thomas Sayers Ellis and Sharan Strange—and then there was this rotating door of aspiring writers that came through. The series became so popular that they couldn’t squeeze everyone into the house, and it moved, eventually ending up at Derek Walcott’s Boston Playwrights’ Theatre at Boston University, which was its last home.

It was important while it was there. And now people acknowledge it was the Dark Room that cleared a path for Cave Canem to happen. Maybe “cleared a path” is too heavy, but there’ve always been writing groups of black folks who have gotten together to support themselves, support one another, and Cave Canem is a manifestation of that in a time when resources are now available. It’s really wonderful.

You won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize.
Right, the second award. Natasha Trethewey won the first one. I was there at the very first Cave Canem retreat. It was emotionally intense. It was spiritual. I made lifelong friendships—A. Van Jordan was there; Terrance Hayes, a very dear friend. It was up on the Hudson River, so there was something particularly beautiful about that first gathering. It seemed very important for me at that time. And the support has been immeasurable. The publication of Leaving Saturn, under the auspices of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, by the University of Georgia Press, led to a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination.

Was this when you met [Norton poetry editor] Jill Bialosky?
I’d met her before then. She had published a book of poems, and she came to read at my favorite bookstore—Robin’s Bookstore—in Philly. [Poet] Eleanor Wilner was there, and she introduced me to Jill. She said, “This is Major. He’s one of our young, up-and-coming poets, but he’s about to leave us to go to Oregon for graduate school.” Jill said, “Send me your manuscript when you’re done, when you graduate.” And I was like, “My thesis?” [Laughter.]

I thought she was just being kind, being generous. But when the New Yorker published one of my poems, three years later, she sent a wonderful handwritten note saying, “I’m not sure you remember me. We met in Philadelphia.” I called her after I got that letter. She said, “Do you have a book?” And I told her it just won the Cave Canem prize. She said, “Don’t worry, send me your second book when it’s ready.” And then Leaving Saturn was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It lost to a book by one of Jill’s authors, B. H. Fairchild—Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, a wonderful book that year. And after the awards ceremony she said, “Are you ready to send me your next book?” I said, “It’s not quite done.” She said, “How far along?” And I said, “Oh, 50 percent.” I really only had about three poems. She said, “Well, we can sign a contract.” Sure enough, about two weeks later…

That’s amazing.
That’s been my life—as a writer. People ask me about publication and awards and I just have to say, I am not the norm. Winning the Pew Fellowship in the Arts gave me fifty thousand dollars for two years to write unencumbered—that was before graduate school, two years after I graduated from college. And then I had two years at graduate school. That first book was four years of intensive writing and honing and stripping away at poems and reconstituting them and looking at the manuscript in various versions. By the time it won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize I felt pretty confident that it was going to be a good book because of all the time I had devoted to it. At that time, I didn’t have a family, I wasn’t teaching as much as I do now, so that leisurely approach to writing had to give way to a more concentrated intense time that I have to take away from my life. I go into it now with a greater intensity.

How do you do that?
In Vermont, the house I bought had a pool that the previous owner filled in because the realtor told her she’d have a greater chance of selling it if there wasn’t a pool—but she left an outdoor sauna that was next to it. I recently renovated that sauna into an office and put in windows. Half the office is cedar inside—it’s very nice. Now I write late at night. That’s what I’ve been doing for a long time.

Is that every night or just during summers?
I normally have these writing spurts that can last four months, where it’s just intensive writing. I don’t necessarily have to write five days a week. Holding Company was started at another leisurely moment at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, and I had to get into this really creative routine for myself.

For the first four or five months of the Pew Fellowship, I lay in bed stricken with self-doubt, thinking, “Are my poems worth this kind of endowment, this kind of generosity?” What saved me was going to bookstores. That was part of the process. My library grew exponentially during those two years. It went from, like, three books to maybe three hundred books. And I just read and read and read. And I took inspiration from whomever I was reading at that time. And I did a lot of imitating.

Do you remember who it was who inspired you?
My early influences include people like Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden, a number of contemporary poets—Philip Levine and C. K. Williams. My models back then were poets who asserted the narrative as a framework, as a means of entering a lyrical space.

With the new book, can you tell me about the form? All the poems are ten lines—how did you arrive at that?
I write these sequences, these healthy, robust narrative lyric poems. I wanted to have the art teach me something new, to write a more compressed poem. So I’d been trying to write small lyric poems, and then I got this wonderful assignment. Cave Canem was turning ten years old, and they asked former fellows to write a ten-line poem in honor of the anniversary. The first poem I wrote created this feverish desire to write in ten lines—I wrote a rash of these ten-line poems and put them aside and came back to them and wrote more.

At that time, I experienced separation and divorce and fell in love, so desire, regret, shame—all those emotions were particularly poignant and found their way into the book. It really was my seeking out an exalted tone, an exalted utterance, that wasn’t contrived. We live in an age when that kind of utterance is often met with cynicism.

Frustration with the war informed the work too. Also, when I was writing the book at the Radcliffe Institute, the fellows would gather for lunch every day, and two days out of the week we would talk about our research. Being in that interdisciplinary environment allowed me to make certain connections about what I was doing. I just started to see this idea of engaging one another—through art, music, literature—as one big means by which we celebrate one another, enrapture one another.

These poems are less narrative than your other work.
Oh yeah. So much so that I’m worried about alienating my readership. That’s the fear, but you have to go where your creative impulses take you. You have to honor those particular urges. One of the frustrations I have with certain writers is that they attempt to replicate what they’ve done before over and over again. I understand that pull, but for a poet it can be enormously deadly.

Do you think, with this body of work, you’ve exhausted the form?
That fever is gone, but its impact is still with me. What I love about this art is that it is lifelong. With each book the art form teaches you something about language or rhetoric or form or emotional intensity, insinuation, metaphor—it’s all there. I feel that the impact of writing this book will manifest itself.

And also, I should say, separation and divorce are very huge life moments. Someone said to me that certain life events have to happen before you can become a writer of great mastery. You have to lose a parent. You have to have a child—not that I necessarily agree with this list—you have to get your heart broken, you have to break someone else’s heart. You have to go through these archetypal moments.

I thought I was writing with a great sense of urgency with the previous two books, but I wasn’t. I had a great leisure. I was being an artist. This book was born out of very real life circumstances: love and intimacy, desire, falling out of love—all of that is in there—and it’s a conversation that’s been in literature all this time, but I’ve always approached it simply as literature.

When you are composing a poem, what comes to you first?
The lines. That’s been the linkage among all three books in that there’s an insistent need that plays itself out, whereby sometimes the music is more important than what’s conveyed literally in the work. If I were giving a reading, and you were on the other side of a wall and you couldn’t hear the words clearly but you could hear the movement of the voice and the language and how that manifests itself into its own music, its own impact—

Frost’s concept of the sound of sense.
Yes. Where sound and sense are so interwoven that it goes beyond the first dimension of meaning. I think the rewards are greater when you, as Keats says, allow yourself to not irritably reach after fact and reason and allow yourself to engage poetry on other levels that we’re all equipped with. We all love a nice beat, we all love the lyrical movement of sound, which poetry has so much of, because it’s not reliant on music. That’s the difference between me and Jay-Z. Jay-Z has a beat behind him, music behind him. Poets have to create their own beat inside the poem.

I’m very happy to teach, for the first time, rap as poetry to incoming freshmen at the University of Vermont. I think they’re going to be better prepared, interestingly enough, to tackle Shakespeare’s metrics as a result of studying rap lyrics by artists like Quame or De La Soul or Q-Tip. They’re going to be able to get inside of a Shakespeare sonnet or a ballad. People don’t realize it, but rap music is so reliant on telling a story, and oftentimes that story is tragic and it normally winds up in a four-beat line. I’m thinking of De La Soul’s “Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa,” a rap song that when I heard it as a kid introduced the idea of incest by telling this ballad of a girl named Millie and her father. It registered even stronger because it was inside a rap song. It gave the subject a greater kind of authority because the art form spoke to me. And that’s where I get my sense of metaphor and music.

What would you say you’ve learned aesthetically from the new book?
The exalted utterance. I get Rilke now. I get Neruda. I get the ecstatic. A poet like Gerald Stern is a contemporary example. But I wonder if we have an appetite for the ecstatic in this particular day and age. Having that kind of—what Edward Hirsch recently said somewhere—having that very real human scale. To be inside a poem and to be vulnerable and to make it into art. That’s what I learned.

What was it that made you first turn to poetry as an art form early on?
Being a frustrated rapper. [Laughter.] That’s probably one thing. And literacy was hugely important in my family. I grew up in North Philadelphia, in Germantown, and art was important. I had an aunt who was a security guard at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and when you’re seven or eight years old and you’re running around and you’ve made the Philadelphia Museum of Art your playground and you have no other choice but to develop this way of perceiving the world through that particular lens—it was my church.

And my grandparents had a library. It wasn’t a formal library, it was books on the second floor of their three-floor tenement, in the hallway. They were stacked and they were stacked pretty high, so if you ran by them too fast, they fell on you. They didn’t tell us, “You must read.” Just by the mere presence of those books they were asserting the importance of them. There were two books of poetry: Frost, paperback edition, edited by Louis Untermeyer, with this great etching of Frost on the cover, and a hardback edition of Langston Hughes’s Selected Poems.

I also had in my community people who loved to debate, loved to argue about politics. These folks said learning was important, literacy was important. On my block the older people gave me quarters—fifty cents for every A you got on your report card.

As an editor at Harvard Review, what do you see going on in contemporary poetry?
It all just strikes me as utterly and overly familiar—the mom poem, the father poem, poems about family that seem overly wrought. The poems that I’m attracted to, at least as an editor, are those that make me swallow my cynicism, that make me go, “Here is a mother poem, but it’s doing something else either with the language or the form that allows me another doorway into that topic.” I can bring it to my chief editor, Christina Thompson, and say, “Okay, this person is alive.” [Laughter.] The language isn’t dead. The perspective, the point of view is unique.

Other kinds of things I see—overexperimentation. What I call overly inventive poems that are not making a reach toward the human; they are so much more about pastiche. And we’ve had now since modernism almost a hundred years of experimentation in poetry. I’m not sure we can do much more than what we’ve already done. So people are passing it off as inventive and experimental, and it really isn’t. But mainly, it’s the middle-of-the-road poem.

The workshop poem?
I’m reluctant to call it the workshop poem. It’s just the middle-of-America poem, that’s what I’ll call it. It’s, like, right down the middle. It doesn’t challenge you. If anything, it kind of reifies a particular kind of thinking about culture, about art, about society. These poems don’t challenge us; they don’t push us toward a fuller portrait of ourselves. Gwendolyn Brooks wrote “The Mother,” and now we have an abortion poem. There are poems that come along to approach that topic, but she wrote it back in the 1940s and that was really radical at the time. Robert Lowell—at the height of his manic-depressive fifties—uttering, in his poem “Skunk Hour,” “my mind’s not right.” That totally sums up existential angst and the allure of that moment. That was pretty radical. I’m looking for those particular moments, and it really does take a vision for the art and a vision for the human. When those two things come together, it speaks to me as an editor.

With the rise of the MFA, do you think the MFA program as an apprenticeship is a good thing?
I think it’s excellent.

Why?
To take two years out of your life to leisurely learn the art…and we have a number of low-residency programs. I teach in one, the Bennington Writing Seminars. So you take twenty days out of the year to surround yourself with other writers and you’re in one-to-one correspondence. If I could do it over again, I’d do a low-res program, because I could make money as an accountant. [Laughter.] Let’s see, I had three poems discussed in a traditional MFA program per semester so that was six a year, so that would have been twelve poems that got discussed around the table. My students send me five poems a month over five months, so twenty-five a term—that’s a hundred poems on which they got direct feedback.

I will defend the MFA on the grounds that it is as legitimate as law school or as someone’s taking two years out of his life to become a physical therapist.

I want to go back to one thing you said about Cave Canem—your experience there and how emotional it was. I’ve heard that so frequently from poets I’ve known who’ve gone to the retreat. Can you tell me why?
I think anyone who practices an art, whether they are a saxophonist or a watercolorist or a poet, when you are writing or creating art, you are exercising a very innate freedom. You are your most free when you create. Particularly, when you’re not beholden to a particular idea or notion of how a poem should operate.

So here you have this group of African American poets who have a very unique relationship to the art of poetry and have been in a long conversation because of the tradition of African American arts, African American politics, have been thinking so often about freedom. We are the metaphor for freedom in this country, if you think about it. So to get together and to realize there are no encumbrances. You don’t have to worry about what the teacher down at the other end of the table is going to think. You don’t have to worry about your nonblack peers, whether or not they get an allusion or they get a cultural reference. You can just get down to the business of the form and the art and whether or not it’s working.

The first level of freedom is the moment of creation; the second level of freedom is that moment of sharing. It was emotional because we had never experienced that kind of freedom before. We are post–civil rights. We’re starting to get there, to really value what it means to be a country that is made up of all these individuals from different parts of the world, and I believe African American poets and writers have been pushing and making central that conversation all along, even still today. I think the fact that we have in this country writing today Yusef Komunyakaa, Adam Zagajewski, Tina Chang, Marilyn Chin, John Murillo, Martín Espada, Gerald Stern—the richness of American poetry is unlike any other country’s. It’s phenomenal. We haven’t yet as readers come to value that. There’s no reason why John Murillo’s Up Jump the Boogie isn’t selling as well as Mary Oliver or Billy Collins.

So anyway, Cave Canem—where those conversations are happening at that level but also at the level of art, that kind of range of conversation about what the role of poetry is in American society, what the role of the black poet is, should we even call ourselves black poets, all those conversations from that level to the level of metaphor and rhythm and meter—it’s a really amazing, impactful experience.

And that kind of conversation doesn’t typically happen in a traditional workshop setting?
Noooo, not even in the low-res or places where I visit. To have conversations about the political or social dimensions of poetry is taboo. And the fact that we have Muriel Rukeyser or Adrienne Rich or Amiri Baraka or Martín Espada or Karl Shapiro—we have a long tradition of political poetry in this country, and yet we still are hesitant. For me, the first order of business for a poem is its aesthetic dimension and then it starts moving out in waves, and it’s that resonating out to the other areas that’s wonderfully profound. We’re cheating ourselves as readers when we don’t value all the dimensions a poem has to offer.