JacksonPoetryFall2020

 Horses feel. And grasshoppers, yeah, grasshoppers. They feel too. But when we get to plants, not animals, I become rather curious as to just how much of writing on these things are closer to anthropomorphization than uncovering the true secrets flowers keep in their petals and seeds.  How are we to know about grass or trees? I speak to them daily but doubt I'm any closer to understanding. I guess I'm maybe searching for the wrong thing from them? Trees have made me wise, but have they helped me understand?  It strikes me at how brilliantly simple James Wright can be. Here's a guy who's literally writing about experiences, seemingly pretty verbatim. He adds in some thoughts about them, but mostly he allows the tone with which he writes of events to give his thoughts on it.  So, are poets made with a pen or with experiences? Anyone could've had that experience, but few have. And among those that have, only Wright can put it so beautifully in so many words. Not even t...

  I learned why children move out of their parents's house. Again and again and again.  I learned how important it is to have somewhere to go that's your own. Somewhere you can be yourself with no witness  but  yourself.  I learned that for every minority uttering "I can't breathe" to a cop, there's some idiot claiming they can't breathe while wearing masks and thus refuse to wear them in public...y'know, despite the unprecedented global pandemic.  I learned you can make a movie in your basement by yourself so long as you've got a camera.  I learned that international crises do not make women any more understandable or less confusing.  I learned how impossible it is to be in a 21-year-old male body that wakes up on fire every morning without the possibility of inviting a girl over later for fear of killing his family.  I learned what love looks like in the form of my brothers helping me not freak the fuck out after I fell asleep at the wheel ...

  Outside of music, I don’t regularly consume poetry.  For me, as I’m sure for many, it started with Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky and the like. I would wake up hours before school just to run to my desk and write poems for a while. I was in elementary school, so I don’t really think I was baring my soul on those pages or anything, but certainly I was falling fast in love with the fun you can have even playing with things as simple as formatting, spelling, grammar, syntax, etc.  It wasn’t until Walt Whitman and Robert Frost later in middle school and high school that I really began realizing what poetry is, or perhaps what it is considered by the academic world. I was astounded how I could be moved far more by a few stanzas than I’d been by entire books or even entire series. It wasn’t just that they knew the right words to write or the best words to write; they chose the only words they could’ve told that story with. That class of economy in writing practically hau...