The New Salon: Poets in Conversation
Major Jackson is the author of Hoops, a finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature-Poetry, and Leaving Saturn, winner of the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Date: ,
Location:
Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues
 | Major Jackson is the author of two collections of poetry: Hoops (Norton:
2006) and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia: 2002), winner of the
Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Hoops was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding
Literature - Poetry. His third volume of poetry Holding Company is
forthcoming from W.W. Norton. He is a recipient of 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 served as a creative
arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University
and as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at University of
Massachusetts-Lowell. Major Jackson is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold
Professor at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington
Writing Seminars. He serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review. Photo Credit: Erin Patrice O'Brien |
| How to Listen
Copyright by Major Jackson I am going to cock my head tonight like a dog in front of McGlinchy's Tavern on Locust; I am going to stand beside the man who works all day combing his thatch of gray hair corkscrewed in every direction. I am going to pay attention to our lives unraveling between the forks of his fine-tooth comb. For once, we won't talk about the end of the world or Vietnam or his exquisite paper shoes. For once, I am going to ignore the profanity and the dancing and the jukebox so I can hear his head crackle beneath the sky's stretch of faint stars. |
