I recently
did a poetry reading at The Book Loft, a wonderful independent bookstore
in Columbus, Ohio. The Book Loft is one of those safe harbors where you can browse
to your heart’s content in a labyrinth of levels, leaf through books on benches
in their garden, or hear authors reading their work.
The author
I had the great pleasure of reading with was Marcus
Jackson, poet and instructor
in the MFA programs at The Ohio State University and Queens University of
Charlotte.
 |
| Poet Marcus Jackson |
Since the reading, I’ve been pouring over his book Pardon
My Heart,
published in 2018 by TriQuarterly Books. It’s an amazing collection of
poems, utterly sophisticated and polished in the poet’s use of metaphor and the
music of words, and deeply grounded in streetwise, North American urban life.
My
daughter Miranda attended the reading that Marcus and I did in Columbus—she’s
used to hearing her dad's poems about topics that relate to the angst of graying
hippies. She was surprised by how much she could relate to Marcus's writing. “I felt his writing resonated with the millennial esprit,” she enthused.
What’s so terrific about Pardon My Heart
is that the poet not only speaks of growing up in the late 20th and
early 21st centuries, and the world of pickup lines in bars, new
marriages, and babysitters, Marcus Jackson writes about those topics with all
the polish and panache of an author who’s been doing this for decades.
Here’s a
short poem from Pardon My Heart where
Marcus Jackson reflects on his mother:
Ashtray
Filling
with my mother’s smolderings,
this
tawny, six-sided, three-pound glass dish
has
sat forty years at the table’s center.
During
lapses in labor or happiness,
Mother
smoked Merit after Merit, her mind
a
crowded parlor of plans, self-hate,
and
urgent glimpses of encounters long past.
She
split the skin atop my father’s skull
once
with this ashtray as he grabbed her.
Weekly,
after she emptied and washed it, Friday’s light
entered
the drafty sash and upheld this ashtray
as
the crown of one woman’s quiet country.
This
moving portrait, a capsule history of a family in twelve lines, is studded with
dazzling details. In line 1, the ashtray holds the mother’s “smolderings,” which
tells us so much about her temperament and fate. The word “lapses” in line 4 gives
us in one word the understanding that labor and happiness were major parts of her being in the world. The brand of her smokes, Merits, is a both a
tribute to the mom and a word that adds to the alliteration in a line where
that repetition suggests chain smoking. When violence explodes in line 8, the
poet describes it in perfect iambic pentameter: “She split the skin atop my
father’s skull,” with the rhythm reinforcing the hammer of the ashtray. By the
end of the poem, the author has alchemized this commonplace ashtray into a
crown, testimony to the mother’s creating tranquility for her child in a stormy
world.
Marcus
Jackson also describes African American life with insight, irony, and pathos.
In the poem “Homage to My Wife’s Hips,” he writes
In
the presence of her hips, thin
White
women lower their heads
like
children who’ve broken a dish.
Another
amazing metaphor, from a poet who is so adept at them.
Marcus
Jackson has the heart, the craft, and the intellect of an important poet. Enjoy
his work!
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry?
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry
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