“Ode to Everything”: Six Questions for Major Jackson
I have always been drawn to the moments where doing something normal feels electric. Taking a test and knowing you are going to do really well, standing in the rain at night, laying down and listening to music, just to name a few. In those moments I sense that poetry isn’t just something made in quiet rooms with soft jazz playing, it’s alive and in every street corner, crowded restaurant, every kitchen. When I read Ode to Everything, I felt that the poem is very accurate in describing that feeling and enjoying or respecting everything in life.
Born in Philadelphia in 1968 and raised amid the urban life of Philly, Jackson moved from studying accounting at Temple University to becoming one of America’s most respected poets. He won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for his first collection, Leaving Saturn, and has followed it with several acclaimed collections, including Hoops, The Absurd Man, and Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems 2002‑2022. He is also a professor at Vanderbilt University and the poetry-editor of the Harvard Review, which means he not only writes poems but helps shape the poetry of our time. What I find particularly compelling is how Jackson bridges the urban and the spiritual, the supernatural and the ugly truth. He doesn’t just depict the city, he listens to it, honors, and challenges it. In our conversation, I asked him about the making of his poem in Best American Poetry 2022, his influences, and his perspective on American poetry today.
Your biography shows you were born and raised in Philadelphia but now live and teach in Nashville. How has moving from a large and historic city like Philadelphia to a music-centric city like Nashville changed the rhythm or the subjects you choose for your poems?
In the 90s, I departed Philadelphia for graduate school in Eugene, Oregon. I drove across country; it was a very dramatic change of scenery and locale. I very much loved getting a sense of the country by traveling its roads and highways and byways. My friend and I stopped in small towns, camped by the Colorado River, drove through Death Valley National Park and the giant sequoias and redwoods of Northern California. Moving to Nashville, like many other cities I’ve made home, including New Orleans, Boston, parts of the Midwest, only heightened my curiosity. What is satisfying is that I do not abandon all the places I’ve lived or have written about but experience an appreciation and accretion of the many cultures and people that make up our nation. Moving to Nashville has made my vision whole, and yes, you’re right, the pacing is slightly different, but I’m bringing my cadence, my walk to the rhythm of the place I am in, which reminds me of a section of a Mark Strand poem:
“When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.“
“Ode to Everything” is based on the act of thanking, and uses casual phrases like “My bad.” Why did you choose these modern, almost casual phrases for apology for a poem that feels so grand and important?
I believe that poets should use different registers of language, the full range of human speech. This is what gives a poem its vitality. I am not a fan of poetic diction [capital “P”] that alienates a reader. One runs the risk of pomposity. Then again, a poem that uses only every day speech may not rise to the occasion of artful language. A poet orchestrates the colloquial and the formal in such a way that a reader is sensitized to the innate properties, pleasures, and meanings of words and phrases.
You thank things that are beautiful, like the “purple trout lily,” but also things that are painful, like your teacher that punished you with “three-taped rulers.” Why did you include these difficult memories in a poem about gratitude? What do you mean by thank “everything?”
We are shaped as human beings by the joy that visits us, but also in the challenges we face. How we respond to adversity is how we grow and develop a king sense of empathy, but also resilience.
The ending ends with a promise to the “scar on a friend’s face that lengthens when I walk into a room” This is a very powerful and intimate image. What does the “lengthening” scar represent? Is it a symbol of history, joy, or something else?
The scar on a friend’s face that lengthens when I walk into the room is their smile, a symbol of joy and friendship. The scar is evidence of pain and healing; scars are reminders about falls and hurts. Maybe we can serve as a source of comfort; maybe we can engine laughter in each other.
Who did you admire when you started out reading and/or writing poetry, and are they the same poets you look up to today, or did they change and if so, who are they now?
Early in life, I encountered the poetry of Langston Hughes and Robert Frost. For similar reasons, I admire them both, chiefly their wide accessibility, ability to give portrait to a place and its inhabitants (Harlem and New England), and since of literary inheritance. I have so many poets who have influenced me, and yes, even though I have in a way read through them, which is to say, absorbed as much as their poems have to offer, they still provide pleasure.
In my class, we talk about how poetry can be hard to understand. Your poem “Ode to Everything” feels very relatable and open. What do you think is the most important job of a poet today, to challenge readers with complex language, or to connect them through connected moments and experiences?
I don’t think challenging the reader should be a poet’s job but offering up an experience with language that underscores and widens and strengthens our sense of our selves is penultimate. Thank you for comment about Ode to Everything but as you have problem noticed I inhabit, out of a duty to play and variation, several registers and modes of language such that other poems might seem difficult to absorb but I cannot stress enough the muscle and skill and beauty that is gained from sitting with a poem patiently and letting its currents reach you where you are.