Note: Verve {in} Verse is my poet-focused feature here at The Kenyon Review in which I converse with poets about their work and interests both on and off the page. Last fall, I kicked off the series with poet Edward Vidaurre and Monica Lewis. This summer I’m finally returning to the blog with poet Marcus Jackson who spoke to me about his latest collection Pardon My Heart (which was recently reviewed in The New York Times), his passion for photography and what he’s working on next. -Rosebud Ben-Oni
Rosebud Ben-Oni: I have to start by asking about your poem “Pardon My Heart,” which opens your more recent collection, and which I first read in The American Poetry Review in 2016, on one particularly snowy February morning that was filled with its magic for the rest of the day. It is one of my most favorite poems of all time. I’ve been wondering about the conception of this poem, how it first came to you, how the music of it came to you, the candor, the whooshing blasts and brass instruments within each couplet all came to you. The “whispering rapture over and over,” as your speaker puts it. Can you tell us about its creation and its relation to the rest of the namesake collection?
Marcus Jackson: Thanks so much, Rosebud. My original hope for the poem was to take some heroic couplets and rub them with some mud, so that their meter and rhyme would be sullied or jettisoned in lieu of finding utterances and images whose immediacy is the foremost characteristic. As soon as a I began drafting, Gwendolyn Brooks’ wondrous lines from “To Be in Love” rose to mind, “your pulse must not say / what must not be said,” and I knew I needed to write my poem in a voice that speaks for that pulse, that heart, which has been advised toward reticence but that cannot keep from singing and dancing. Once I revised the poem, it felt to be a kind of creed that could lead into or activate some of the other poems in the collection. Hence, it seemed natural to give the whole collection its title and to begin the book with the poem.
RB: The poem “If Only” also appears in Pardon My Heart, and it opens with: “If only I could sing like Marvin,/ in a blue room, while the rain sounds/ like raw rice spilling,” and then invokes Muddy Waters and Jimi Hendrix. “If only,” the speaker keens of another singer self, “my voice were swallows/of ripe wine.” Yet what strikes me about your collection is that your work does I myself am a poet who loves to read poetry aloud, out loud, looking for rhythm and all sorts of rhyme and that which could “sing stubborn kings into listening,/sing babies in pain to sleep,” as your speaker, well, sings. Is writing poetry for you an act of singing itself? Or is it the desire to sing? Is there a wish for the poetry to arise from the page?
MJ: Yes, for me, poetry is song. I want songs and poems to have both the urgency and the structure of an animal call—a distinct voice or vocal identity and some type of structure or beat that stages the voice in an essential, subtle way. We have such a primal, nuanced, sacred relationship to the sounds that comprise words, and certain combinations of sounds can thrill and captivate us, regardless of the concept or information the combinations of sounds are constructed to convey. I want lines that honor that fact.
RB: Poets often are curious on how other poets break up their collections into sections. Pardon My Heart is divided into four sections. Can you speak on these different sections as movements toward and/or from themes or progressions?
MJ: I wanted the sections of the collection to each represent their own subject, but I wanted all of them to coalesce or flow into each other. The subjects the four sections primarily embody are: vitality, memory, grief, and love’s contentions with mortality. Once the book’s poems were written and sectioned by subjects and tones, I then rearranged them a bit so that they invited certain silences and crescendos across the totality of the collection. While sequencing the poems and their sections, I aimed for the way wind changes speeds and moods.
RB: I particularly enjoyed the Lucille-Clifton-inspired “Homage to My Wife’s Hips,” which ends the speaker’s awe of “the spell stuns so much/I forget if it’s me or the world/her hips spin unendingly.” What other poets and/or artists inspire you as a poet?
MJ: There are too many to name, but I can pinpoint certain characteristics of art and poems that endlessly inspire me: the blending of narratives and images that thump impulsively; textured sorrow; an exuberance that is perfectly aware of death’s whereabouts; the natural world echoing through the movements of humans and our cities.
RB: What was the most difficult poem to write in this collection?
MJ: If I had to pick one, it would likely be “Dark-Eyed Heir.” From the first draft of it, there was a lot of heavy lifting to do in terms of subjects and focal points—marriage, parenthood, Macbeth, Donny Hathaway, political malcontent, cultural intersection. If I remember correctly, rewriting the poem into tercets was how it found its fullest life.
RB: The photos you share on Instagram are amazing, especially those of your family and your self-portraits, but also just the ones you capture on the street. What excites you about photography that perhaps is different from poetry?
MJ: I love photography because the art form is so heavily invested in narrative distillation and emotional punch. Street photography is an endless exercise in finding, framing, and capturing the comingling of public forces with people’s private thoughts, feelings and expressions. Portrait photography is an endeavor built on justly documenting faces and bodies becoming clear testimonies of what before seemed elusive or ineffable. Snapping and editing photos is so enjoyable because it involves a marvelous combination of technological and measurement-based considerations with the exploration of the soul.
RB: What does community mean to you? How do you balance it with the solitary nature of writing?
MJ: Community is being able to really laugh and grieve in tandem with company. I’m remarkably lucky to have so many family members and close friends. As for the solitary writing life, I’ve always been obsessive when it comes to drafting and revising, and that obsession kept me out of some dangerous situations as well as some generative ones. Nowadays, I make sure to pause and really savor the beautiful relationships and people in my life.
RB: Who are you reading now? What poets excite you?
MJ: I’m reading Lorca’s Poeta En Nueva York for about the 5th time (I first read the collection 15 years ago when I had just moved from my midwestern hometown to New York City). Even across multiple translations, the scope, precision, invention, and sensations that book contains are unpredictable miracles.
RB: What’s next for you? What are you working on now?
MJ: I’m working on a long poem about the tolls that societies’ cultural and professional expectations impose upon marginalized folks. The poem seems to want to spin history’s reels at strange speeds and land on absurd moments and on moments during which wrongly represented people smack away the restraints their fellow humans attempt to tighten.