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Reviews
On Major Jackson’s Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems
W.W. Norton | 2023
reviewed by Beth Brown Preston
"One's growth relies on one's gift to exceed one's reach." (from "Letter to Brooks")
In his new book, Major Jackson has assembled work spanning two decades into a multi-layered and vibrant collection. The poet opens this collection with a selection of thirty-eight recent poems, written and compiled during 2022, and presented under the title “Lovesick.” The remainder of this volume is composed of poems selected from his five previous collections arranged in chronological order.
In his long poem titled “Letter to Brooks” (Hoops, 2006), Jackson acknowledges the influence of the Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks on the earliest development of his aesthetic—heading each poem with the name of a street located in his native city of Philadelphia: “Fern Rock,” “Olney,” “Logan,” “Wyoming.” A reader familiar with the neighborhoods in Philadelphia will recognize these streets by their names. The poet's yearning for and memories of his home stand in contrast with images of the self-imposed exile’s travels abroad—to Ireland, to France. He compares himself with other major African American writers who chose to seek their authentic selves in exile—James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Richard Wright, and Chester Himes.
However, just as Gwendolyn Brooks rules the realm of Jackson's aesthetic, his politics reflect the years he spent studying under his teacher and mentor Sonia Sanchez at Temple University. He dedicates Razzle Dazzle to Sonia Sanchez. In his poem “Hunting Park,” again named for a street in Philadelphia, the poet describes his political aspiration to create an art beyond the boundaries of class and race:
Those who would revoke my poet card,
who would charge me with class ascension,
Who would banish me to the stockyard of
single-raced anthologies or mention such asinine
folly as, “His attention
To rhyme? -weak shot to procure a public. It's little wonder this
will ever publish.”
As an avid reader of Major Jackson, I am fascinated by the syntactic achievement in the series of poems presented in his volume Holding Company (2020). These are wondrously crafted verses, each a stanza of ten lines, depicting urban vignettes, landscapes, scenes of war, or messages to a lover. Yet, even in these brief ten-line poetic spaces, he writes from the perspective of a Universal Poet, the Poet of the State: “Plato knew the poem as a sword moonlighting / as a mirror which correctly angled caught a surfeit / of light and threatened to blind the Republic—” (from “The Door I Open”). And this poet’s expression of erotic love within these intricately stylized stanzas experiments with an imagery he claims from the legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks. But his metaphorical stance also can be traced to the lineage of Latin American poets like Lorca whom he imitates and acknowledges. He writes in the poem “Lorca in Eden”: “This moonlight is gruesome, / so many hearts teased to a nakedness then bleached, / frayed, deflated, flapping like scarves in nightwinds-- / their radiant mangling all over this meadow of silk.”
Major Jackson describes his landscapes as extensions of his own body, as in the initial poem taken from his 2015 collection—Roll Deep—a poem titled “Reverse Voyage.” Within this long poem, he tells the reader why he has departed from his native city of Philadelphia to “call a taxi or pack my rental / and inaudibly say no.” Saying “no,” refusing to remain in the very landscape that shaped his youth, transformed his life into a life of books, a refuge from the temptations of the streets, a life of “ambition,” his eyes traveling “elsewhere or nowhere, open and determined.” A recurrent theme in his poetry is the fact that one never actually leaves home, no matter where one wanders. He quotes Simone Weil—“We must be rooted in the absence of place”—in his masterful “Urban Renewal” series in which he evokes scenes from his travels around the globe: America, Greece, Spain, Brazil, and to the homeland of Kenya. He has resided and taught in the state of Vermont—another landscape that plays an important role in his poetry. Yet, ultimately, Jackson’s work calls for a return to our home, both in body and in spirit.
Major Jackson’s badge of honor is his survival of the Philadelphia streets that sought in his youth to claim him. He credits his love of language as his way of overcoming so many trials in his life, a love for language with which he has faced even the fear of his own mortality. He writes: “I am a life in sacred language. / Termites toil over a grave, / and my mind is a ravine of yesterdays. / At a glance from across the room. I wear / September on my face, / which is eternal, and does not disappear / even if you close your eyes once and for all / simultaneously like two coffins” (“On Disappearing”).
Major Jackson’s New and Selected Poems represent a much-anticipated achievement. This work will satisfy faithful followers of his poetry, lectures, and his daily podcast “The Slowdown.” For readers new to his work, this volume offers an opportunity to become familiar with the finest work of one of our finest poets.
Bio:
Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist with two collections of poetry from the Broadside Lotus Press and two chapbooks of poetry, including OXYGEN II (Moonstone Press, 2022). She is a graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program of Goddard College. She has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania; and, a Bread Loaf Scholar. She is at work on two new poetry collections -- OXYGEN I and OXYGEN II (to be published by the Aquarius Press/Willow Books in 2025) -- a collection of short fiction, a memoir, and a new novel. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Callaloo, Calyx, Cave Wall, Euphony Journals, North Dakota Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, World Literary Review, and many other literary and scholarly journals and magazines.