The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Seven): Major Jackson [by Angela Ball]

Nothing to See Here, Move Along

All through my days, elaborate silken rays
coming through screens carrying
its own occult. I am in the habit of questioning love
which is a storm of rare light
silvering spider webs in a sacred forest,
the silent clock in the town square,
the heavy footprints of the homeless,
the museum we do not enter.

So when I say I’ve subdued
the stallions raging in my blood,
know that I travel here only to watch
the sparrow hawk flying low over marl prairie,
to take in the sedge wren’s flits and jukes
like teenagers learning a new dance.
I’m here guarding my freedom,
rubbing my hands over yesterday fires.

--Major Jackson

Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, including The Absurd Man (2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry London, and Zyzzva. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.

Photo Credit: Erin Patrice O’Brien

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twenty-Seven): Major Jackson

Major Jackson’s intricate “Nothing to See Here, Move Along,”  begins by conflating biography (“All through my days”) with car accident; readers with gawkers. The title, appropriated from law enforcement, suggests not just smashups, but more sinister scenarios involving abuse of power and denial of freedom. We see none of these things, but think of them while witnessing a series of complex relations.

An aura of enforcement, of necessity, surrounds the poem. Jackson’s work resembles John Ashbery’s in its ability to establish a metaphysical place. For Ashbery, his early poem ,“The Instruction Manual,” is foundational—providing an imagined version of a real Guadalajara—later poems travel further, producing mind-dwelling places, “lacustrine cities,” definite in detail. This is the realm we inhabit here, but with a freshness and vitality of image that is Jackson’s own.

Jackson’s first stanza lives in the metaphysical, its “screens” of “silken rays”—light’s waves “coming through screens” (of molecules?) “carrying its own occult.” Its serial definitions of love, the results of “questioning,” are ethereal—

     which is a storm of rare light

     silvering spider webs in a sacred forest,

     the silent clock in the town square,

--until “the heavy footsteps of the homeless” lead us to the ominous museum “we do not enter”—repelled, perhaps, by the pain exhibited inside.

The best poems balance clarity and mystery. Throughout this one, the two get equal play. The stanzas themselves balance each other; the first emphasizing the hidden; the second, the revealed.

The second stanza begins with “So,” making all within it the result of the first and magnifying the white space between them. The speaker, “moving along,” has been caused to renounce the violence of “stallions raging in my blood.” And that violence is considerable. A stallion will crash fences or gates to get at a mare in heat.

Yet beauty arrives, transcending all necessity. Who can fathom the refreshment offered by these lines, that embody two of nature's strongest pursuits, feeding and mating? And a third: watching.

     know that I travel here only to watch

     the sparrow hawk flying low over marl prairie,

     to take in the sedge wren’s flits and jukes

     like teenagers learning a new dance.

We last see the poet “rubbing” his hands, as though himself homeless, over “yesterday fires”—distinct from “yesterday’s fires,” or memories. “Yesterday fires” are continuations, energies passed on to others—as Major Jackson’s “Nothing to See Here, Move Along,” warms us with its creative rub, its friction between what is and ought to be, guarding not just the poet’s freedom, but our own.

--Angela Ball

Comments

[Elliott Freeman]

What a gorgeous poem to examine and unfold!

[Angela Ball]

So glad you enjoyed, Elliott!

[Karen Beckworth]

An outstanding addition to a wonderful series.

[Angela Ball]

Thank you bunches, Karen Beckworth. Glad you are reading.

[Annette C. Boehm]

I particularly enjoyed the moment when the poem turned to the birds. Lovely.

[Angela Ball]

Isn't it lovely! Indeed. Thank you, Annette.

[J. Zheng]

Especially like the contrast in these lines (the silent clock in the town square,
the heavy footprints of the homeless), so suggestive, so haiku (adj.).

[Denise Duhamel]

Terrific poem, Major, and beautifully smart commentary, Angela!