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October 16, 2008

UVM prof to be featured at Black Poetry Day

Deck

By ROBIN CAUDELL

PLATTSBURGH -- Though he averages three reading/workshop/festival gigs a month, things are slowing down for poet Major Jackson.

At the University of Vermont, he is Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor. He is also a core faculty member at the Bennington Writing Seminars. Tonight, he is featured at Black Poetry Day at Plattsburgh State.

Jackson is the author of two collections of poetry, "Hoops" (Norton: 2006), a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literature -- Poetry; and "Leaving Saturn" (University of Georgia: 2002), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.

His third volume of poetry, "Holding Company," is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in 2009.

"It is a collection of poems -- 10 lines long," Jackson said. "It's just a very arbitrary formal constraint and one that is allowing me to explore the power of the lyric. The subject matter ranges from love to divorce to intellectual exchange of the kinds of inheritances we receive, both social and literary."

DIVERSE VOICES

Jackson hails from North Philly and is a graduate of Temple University. He was a reader of poetry before penning his own verse. His achievements include a Whiting Writers' Award. He has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation, in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He was a Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at University of Massachusetts-Lowell. His stint as a creative-arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University led to his eventual appointment of poetry editor for the "Harvard Review."

"Their previous poetry editor (Don Share) went to the Poetry Foundation. He was the curator for the Woodbury Poetry Room in Harvard's Lamont Library. When he went to the Poetry Foundation, they (at "Harvard Review") asked me to help me with the slush pile."

He likened sifting through the reams of submissions to deep-sea diving. He found some jewels that appeared in the journal's last issue. He is credited as poetry editor on the next issue, which features diverse aesthetic voices playing off each other.

"Generational, regional, global. In the current issue, there are poems from New Zealand. It also gives me an opportunity to introduce poets I grew up on and some of the younger poets. It's very exciting to be in on that."

The digital age allows him to edit the journal and not be in Cambridge. Back in Burlington, his activities include hosting the Painted Word Poetry Series, which he started several years ago. At UVM's Fleming Museum, A-list poets are paired with emergent poets in New England.

"It's a wonderful way of honoring the local writer by having a series that highlights their creative efforts, their talents and gifts. They are writing about the particular area where we live."

At UVM, Jackson's creative-writing classes attract English majors who will not likely become critics.

"That has its challenges and its rewards."

On Monday nights, Jackson commutes to New York University, where he teaches "The Long Poem," a graduate class.

"It allows me to interface with students a tad more serious about the imaginative arts. Somehow being in conversation with graduate students helps me to keep my chops going."

TRAGIC STORY

Jackson's latest project is a verse play about Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784), a Gambian child enslaved at age 7 and purchased by wealthy Boston merchant John Wheatley. She was taught to read and write, and her 1773 volume, "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral," was published 13 years after "An Evening Thought," a poem printed on Christmas 1760 and written by Jupiter Hammon (1711-1806), a Long Island slave. Plattsburgh State celebrates Black Poetry Day in Hammon's honor.

Jackson was surprised to learn of Wheatley's missing manuscript and thought he would write a novel centering on that.

"She wrote these poems and attempted to sell them as a means of taking care of her and her children when things became really tough. Her husband (John Peters, a free black grocer) was sent to debtor's prison, and she died while he was in prison."

At the time, she worked as a servant in a Boston orphanage. Wheatley was freed from slavery Oct. 18, 1773.

"She caught some disease. Her daughter died, and she died on the same day. It's a pretty tragic story. She was one of America's early literary stars. She was greeted by British gentry. In fact, they were responsible for getting her first book published."

Once hailed by Gen. George Washington, she faded into obscurity after the Revolutionary War. She and her child were buried in an unmarked grave.

"That's a side of Phillis Wheatley we don't hear. We hear about the child prodigy, the young lady stripped of her native culture and her almost Herculean abilities to adapt to this country and learn the language, myths and absorb the Bible and write with a kind of authority that was unheard even for the most educated Boston, male population. She was somewhat of a freakish oddity to Bostonian or New England's cultural and political elite."

Wheatley appeared before a white all-male panel whose members asked her questions about her poetry to authenticate it.

"I'm curious about her last years mainly because there is a story of triumph, of course, in her early years, but there is also tragedy there," Jackson said. "I think we need to explore her life a little more to get at the complexity of literacy, freedom and race in this country."

rcaudell@pressrepublican.com

If you go
WHAT: Black Poetry Day featuring Major Jackson, author of "Hoops" and "Leaving Saturn."
WHEN: 8 p.m. today.
WHERE: Krinovitz Recital Hall, Hawkins Hall, Plattsburgh State.
ADMISSION: Free.

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