Q&A: Major Jackson of The Slowdown

Following poets laureate Ada Limón and Tracy K. Smith, poet Major Jackson steps into a new role as host of the celebrated podcast, sustaining and encouraging listeners to find new possibilities within poetry.
Jump to navigation Skip to content
Following poets laureate Ada Limón and Tracy K. Smith, poet Major Jackson steps into a new role as host of the celebrated podcast, sustaining and encouraging listeners to find new possibilities within poetry.
The author of I Am the Most Dangerous Thing introduces five journals that first published their poems and engaged them in community, including Sixth Finch and Prelude.
The Poetry Society of America, the nation’s oldest poetry organization, was founded in 1910. Its mission is to build a larger and more diverse audience for poetry, to encourage a deeper appreciation of the vitality and breadth of poetry in the cultural conversation, to support poets through an array of programs and awards, and to place poetry at the crossroads of American life.
Located in Chinatown, Manhattan, Yu and Me Books is a bookstore that showcases immigrant stories and creates a home for the community. It is the first female, Asian-American owned bookstore in New York City. The initials of the bookstore, YM, are the owner’s mother’s initials and represent the stories that have been passed down to them for generations.
In this Books Are Magic event, Karisma Price reads from her debut collection, I’m Always So Serious (Sarabande Books, 2023), and discusses the inspiration behind her work with poet Terrance Hayes. “As a poet, oddity is good,” says Price. For more from Price, read her installment of our Writers Recommend series.
P&T Knitwear is a family-owned independent bookstore, podcast studio, event space, and cafe in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The name dates back to the knitwear store the founder’s grandfather Hymie Tusk and his business partner Mike Pudlo started in 1952, after surviving the Holocaust and emigrating to New York City.
“I love to take an object made all but invisible by its mundanity—an egg-shaped container of pantyhose, a lawn chair turned on its side—and break it open to expose the full dimensions of the human vulnerability it carries,” writes Danielle Blau in her Craft Capsule essay “Somewhere Somebody Is Doing Something Right Now,” in which she explores how she creates characters for her poems. Write a poem that attempts to expose the full dimensions of an object and how it offers a reflection of a person, whether yourself or another character. What is the significance of this object and how does it exemplify human vulnerability?
“Everything you are afraid of will be surpassed by desires you cannot yet imagine.” —Elizabeth Metzger, Lying In
The author of peep considers the ecstatic freedom of writing poetry.
“For me, poetry is the act of paying attention. It pushes me to pay attention to a moment, a feeling, an idea, an image.” Clint Smith speaks about what poetry means to him, the themes in his new collection, Above Ground (Little, Brown, 2023), and reads his poem “All at Once” in this interview on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.