Karen Michel:

Is the environment itself a poem?

Major Jackson:

The environment is definitely a poem. The environment is a poem that is in constant need of revision.

Karen Michel:

That's poet, Major Jackson. This is Dropping In a podcast Omega Institute, exploring the many ways to awaken the best in the human spirit. I'm Karen Michel.

Karen Michel:

This is a spoiler alert about a different podcast you may want to check out, it's called The One You Feed. The title comes from a parable about the tools inside of us. The one identified as good and that other bad. They battle. The one that wins is the one you feed, you decide. And for some great guidance along the way, listen to Eric Zimmer's talks with all sorts of people with advice for living a fuller life. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app. Consider it a meal for your inner wolf.

Karen Michel:

Major Jackson is the poetry editor of the Harvard Review, author of four books of poetry and winner of lots of prizes, including the Cave Canem poetry prize for a first book. All that, and along with two Pulitzer prize winning poets Laureate, Jackson is a member of the Dark Room Collective, founded in the late 1980s as a community of black writers. Jackson was invited to teach and read his work at Orion magazine's environmental writer's workshop, hosted annually at Omega Institute in New York's Hudson Valley. Orion brings together fiction and nonfiction editors and writers to share their work and experiences. The first night of readings in a building off in the woods, inspiration showed up just outside the glass doors when a black bear emerged. Though Major Jackson's poems described a very urban experience, he also alludes to nature. Whether it's described in a book he read or experienced through the windshield of a car he's in, as it was with his first poem of the evening.

Major Jackson:

We were coming from a dinner party and a bear crossed our path and we just stopped and turned off the lights and just marveled at the moment. It's called the Romantics of Franconia Notch.

Major Jackson:

Matthew Dickman and I are fond of resurrecting the spotted faces of state troopers and small-town police we've met over the years. We love their melodrama, the way they peel their aviators in the rear view mirror of my Jetta as they approach the car like shy teenagers on a first date then doff their stiff-brim hats with their yellow braids.

Major Jackson:

There was the pastel-loving cop in Eugene, fond of art deco motels in South Beach and the comic book fan in Littleton, New Hampshire who unlatched his gun holster and the one tormented by Goethe's propositions and thus, led us, choral-like, through a few hymns before issuing a roadside warning in Randolph, Vermont.

Major Jackson:

When they asked us where we are going, we almost always respond, "To the town square, of course, to give the park back to the wretched men and their brown bags of sorrow." We want the crime squad to know we have a purpose, that we sugar our regrets with the honeyed lines of Brodsky, Pessoa and Thoreau whom we were declaiming just that evening, zipping in a dark, past the low-lit Colonials when a black bear jumped out as though chased by the ghost of the bear he used to be and Matthew turned up Jay-Z's Black Album so he'd get a boost and lurch into further darkness.

Major Jackson:

This is called Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action.

Major Jackson:

One could listen to the whole of Kamasi Washington's The Epic and not understand the flora of the scream as antediluvian gesture or how the symmetrical damask weave of a trumpet solo is the calling to fill the carvings of the California black oak, which is currently dreaming of fossilized gang signs engraved on the trunk of our imagination or to stretch that point somewhat when driving through Inglewood to hear the puzzle of a people who suffered centuries darkest plagues, more operatic than Puccini although the saxophonist who hates group narcissism, clings to a conviction that makes his sweat our salvation and his rapid moons, our secret knowledge and his curled haiku like fingers, the hope of a democracy each of us pressing forward into our improvised dream.

Major Jackson:

All I think while reading Marsh's, Man and Nature on American Airlines nonstop to Orlando, having just kicked off my wingtips and revolted against my mind's wish to jazz the evening lights below into some vague allegory of progress or evidence of our ongoing dreadful fear, the plane's low hum, a measure of perceived calm and goodness. We are alone and keep out improvisations hidden in now earbuds, even though each flattened fifth is a mini sermon on the power of endless life. So my fingers fidget and jiggle a mini bag of peanuts when the stewardess announces we are presently crossing a zone of turbulence.

Karen Michel:

Each flattened fifth is a mini sermon. The poetry of music transformed into the poetry of language. As in so many of his poems, Major Jackson's primary environment is the sonic, rather than the natural landscape. He often writes about musicians and music. He calls it, creating his soundtrack. For him, poetry is by nature, all encompassing, which makes sense in light of his surprising academic background as an accountant.

Karen Michel:

Do you think of poetry as a sort of accounting?

Major Jackson:

You know what's interesting is that there is an element like all of the arts, there's an element of symmetry. And when we think about accounting, we look for in fact, a very perfect financial statement tells a story both in terms of its numbers, but also in terms of what are the values of a particular organization. I tend to kind of look for those multiple narratives. And one might say that some of that was that sense of order was nurtured through my education as an accountant. I don't want to discount that side of my brain.

Karen Michel:

There's more of Major Jackson's poetry in my interview with him coming up. You'll hear his thoughts on the relationship between the land and the people who dwell on it. Whether that land is wild or tamed. But first, some accounting. For more than 40 years, Omega has been hosting workshops and retreats on yoga, mindfulness, art, sustainability, women's leadership, health. It's a rich mix of more than 350 programs annually. And with this podcast, I'm introducing you to some of the remarkable teachers exploring Omega's mission to awaken the best in the human spirit. To learn more about Omega visit eomega.org, that's E-O-M-E-G-A.O-R-G. Let's get back.

Major Jackson:

Song as Abridged Thesis of George Perkin Marsh's Man and Nature.

Major Jackson:

The pendulous branches of the Norway spruce slowly move as though approving our gentle walk in Woodstock and the oak leaves yellowing this early morning fall in the parking lot of Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller. We hear beneath our feet their susurrus as the churning of wonder, found too, in the eyes of a child who's just sprinted toward a paddock of Jersey cows. The fate of the land is the fate of man.

Major Jackson:

Some have never fallen in love with a river of grass or rested in the dignity of the Great Blue Heron standing alone, saint-like, in a marshland nor envied the painted turtle sunning on a log, nor thanked as I have, the bobcat for modeling how to navigate dynasties of snow, for he survives in both forests and imaginations away from the dark hands of developers and myths of profits. The fate of the land is the fate of man.

Major Jackson:

Some are called to praise as holy, hillocks, ponds and brooks, to renew the sacred contract of live things everywhere, the cold pensive mornings of clouds above Mount Tom, to extol silkworm and barn owls, gorges and vales, the killdeer, egret, tern and loon; some must rest at the sandbanks, in deep wilderness, by a lagoon, estuaries or floodplain, standing in the way of the human storm: the fate of the land is the fate of man.

Karen Michel:

You have the refrain, the fate of the land is the fate of man. You repeat it, I think, three times.

Major Jackson:

I do. That's right. Yeah.

Karen Michel:

Is your fate the fate of the land?

Major Jackson:

Of course, that's a very good question. Yes, I really do believe that. I happen to be fortunate enough to live in, I've been living in Burlington, Vermont and in the Green Mountain National Forest for 16 years. And it has alerted me to some of the issues that we face as a species. And I didn't preface that quote, but it comes from George Perkin Marsh, Man and Nature. The first arguably treaties, call to arms on protecting the environment. The fate of the land is the fate of man.

Major Jackson:

To some extent, I really do believe it's not, of course I'm using man to represent humankind and I know that that's problematic in terms of gender, but one could argue that without a vigilant attitude towards natural resources, towards how we treat and think about ecosystems, particularly the animals there and their role in that ecosystem, that we are shooting ourselves in the foot. I happen to be someone who really does believe that climate change and the shifts that are happening is owed to our not taking care of both our inner selves, as well as, so there's a symbiotic relationship there. Others far more articulate in this subject matter have discussed it. I happen to believe it because I feel my body change when I moved into a more natural space. I felt it.

Karen Michel:

But I wonder if it's not inverted now that the fate of man is the fate of the land, because as more people are becoming urban again, getting back into the cities, they're destroying the green space to build more apartment buildings.

Major Jackson:

Yes. Yeah, yeah. And that's what I meant earlier. Even in a college town like Burlington, Vermont, you see some of the farmland give way to, and these farms, Vermont prides itself on farm to table. Well soon enough, it's just going to be tables and not enough farms to support our appetite. I think, having a balanced perspective on these particular matters, I think is crucial and essential. I realize that that poem is engaging in and polemics, but it comes from an earnest belief.

Major Jackson:

Rembrandt Took the Best Selfies.

Major Jackson:

It's my turn to wrestle light out of this blur of death. It's my turn to dignify a gilded frame with an imperial profile. What is left of me shall drifts like a cloud curdling above a village spire. It's my turn to isolate evil like the barbed wire of a fence post. Behind my grim stare is jubilance, which never grows old. Below this feathered hat is the first morning of man. All canvases are temples to my bright exhalations. I welcome your vigils. Think not of looted countries. Think not of the tyrant's clammy grasp of your hand as he guides you to his first pimple, nor his unethical single peel of a hard boiled egg, which is a faint performance of ego. He's preparing to eat your babies.

Major Jackson:

Can you guess when I wrote that? Narcissism, Rembrandt, self portrait themes.

Major Jackson:

Here's a poem last, I'm a big fan of Elizabeth Bishop and I love her poem, The Moose. And when I moved to Vermont, I thought, I'm going to see moose every time I go out in the wilderness. Not true, not true, but I wanted that experience until last year, driving along route 125, I saw a moose. And then the next day I saw a different moose going back there. That has nothing to do with the poem. This is called You Reader.

Major Jackson:

So often I dream of the secrets of satellites and so often I want the moose to step from the shadows and reveal his transgressions and so often I come to her body as though she were Lookout Mountain, but give me a farmer's market to park my martyred masks and I will name all the dirt roads that dead-end at the Cubist sculpture called My Infinity, for I no longer light bonfires in the city of adulterers and no longer smudge the cheeks of debutantes hurriedly floating across the high fruit of night, and yes, I know there is only one notable death in any small town and that is the pig farmer, but listen, at all times the proud rivers mourn my absence, especially when, like a full moon, you, reader, hidden behind a spray of night-blooming, drift in and out of scattered clouds above lighthouses producing their artificial calm, just to sweep a chalk of light over distant waters.

Major Jackson:

This was a long winter for us in northern New England and I got a lot of poems. I normally don't write about nature, not directly, but how can you not in the deep dark winter? Winter.

Major Jackson:

The boughs have been naked for weeks. Snowplows scrape the highway clean of its sugar. People withdraw into their nests and study the language of fire. A group of high school girls on their way home in the afternoon dark falls into an embankment and flaps their arms and legs as though cloud-swimming towards the coming world. The blank silence of dead earth forces us to gaze up, harvest the black music that belongs to all the eyes in the future who will also turn to the spheres and study too whatever light to fill their emptiness.

Karen Michel:

Now you're at an environmental writers conference, you're being presented at as an environmental writer. And I think the default assumption about environmental writers is that it's nature, but your environment is very urban and your poetry references, both nature, the Adirondacks, for example, a bear and urban environment. Do you see a difference in terms of when you write about the environment, does it matter whether there are paved roads or no roads?

Major Jackson:

Landscape is in us and so wherever we travel, we bring that consciousness with us. For me, it's in my poems. And so if we're going to talk about environment, we have to stretch out ideas of what we mean by the environment, what we mean by a natural spaces, because those are as much emotional and interior as they are exterior. And what we come to accept iconically as that particular literature that pays attention, quote unquote, to the terra firma, the earth and its inhabitants, its creatures. Fortunately for me, and a number of friends who grew up in a city and write about the city, many of us are the descendants of families who came from the South and have very strong connections. My family hailed from Nashville, Tennessee and Louisville, Kentucky and small towns in between and on my father's side, Georgia and the Carolinas. And so summers was an adventure in changing landscapes. And even relationship to time, I would say. One very much slowed down. I guess that's what I mean is that those memories, those impressions are still there and they all intermingle.

Karen Michel:

Is environment itself a poem?

Major Jackson:

The environment is definitely a poem. The environment is a poem that is in constant need of revision.

Karen Michel:

I hope you'll keep an ear open for the next episode of Dropping In for a different perspective on poetry and the environment from Orion's environmental writer's workshop with Anne Haven McDonnell. She lives and teaches in the American Southwest desert lands.

Anne Haven McDonnell:

I've never seen a bear bared to air skinned to a pearled blue. The color of inside shells or secrets.

Karen Michel:

Dropping In is the presentation of Omega Institute, dedicated to awakening the best in the human spirit. If you like what you hear, tell your friends, leave us a review on Apple podcasts, it helps new ears find us. And to learn more about Omega, visit our website at eomega.org. I'm Karen Michel. Remember to check out The One You Feed. It's a podcast that will feed you. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app. And to learn more about the show, go to www.oneyoufeed.net. Dropping In is produced and edited by me, the music and mix by Scott Mueller and Rob Harris is the executive producer. Thanks for dropping in.