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Overview
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780820323428 |
---|---|
Publisher: | University of Georgia Press |
Publication date: | 02/08/2002 |
Series: | Cave Canem Poetry Prize Series |
Pages: | 96 |
Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d) |
About the Author
MAJOR JACKSON's debut volume of poems, Leaving Saturn, selected by poet and novelist Al Young to receive the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet, was nominated for a 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award and has received critical attention in the Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Parnassus, Philadelphia Inquirer, and on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Callaloo, Grand Street, Post Road, the New Yorker, among other literary journals. Formerly the Literary Arts Curator of the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, he is the recipient of fellowships and awards from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Pew Fellowship in the Arts, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, as well as a commission from The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia. In 2003, he received the prestigious Whiting Writers' Award. He has given readings around the country and participated in many festivals including Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, Poetry Society of America's Festival of New American Poets, and The New Yorker Festival in Bryant Park, New York City. He is a graduate of Temple University and University of Oregon's Creative Writing Program. Major Jackson is an associate professor of English at University of Vermont, a faculty member of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina, and a former Witter Bynner Fellow for the Library of Congress. He lives in South Burlington, Vermont.
Table of Contents
Foreword | ix | |
Acknowledgments | xv | |
I | ||
Urban Renewal | 3 | |
II | Hoops | 17 |
Mr. Pate's Barbershop | 20 | |
Euphoria | 22 | |
Blunts | 24 | |
Born under Punches | 25 | |
Wuxia | 27 | |
Some Kind of Crazy | 29 | |
Pest | 31 | |
The Pantomime | 32 | |
Rock the Body Body | 35 | |
Alleyways | 39 | |
III | ||
Don Pullen at The Zanzibar Blue Jazz Cafe | 43 | |
Oregon Boogie | 46 | |
Leaving Saturn | 48 | |
A Joyful Noise | 51 | |
Crossing Over | 53 | |
Between Two Worlds | 56 | |
IV | ||
I'll Fly Away | 61 | |
Sandpaper | 63 |
What People are Saying About This
One of the gifts of the finest poets is to understand that one's personal voice is intertwined with the voices of other poets and other people, both dead and living, and yet to speak and sound like oneself, neither pretentious nor dumbed down. Major Jackson has that gift. Prophetic scat singer, apocalyptic raconteur, he makes poems that swerve impossibly and yet authoritatively from the ordinary to the miraculous and beyond but always keep their cool. Rich in reference and thick with all he has experienced on his own pulses, Major Jackson's poetry gathers, lifts, and loads, but never collapses. It takes on a massive load, but carries it forward.
With a changeable, questing voice, unexpected shifts in attention and tone, Major Jackson makes poems that rumble and rock. These poems find themselves at home in the mind of Sun Ra or on a Cape Cod beach, in a City Center Disco or the projects of North Philadelphia. Read 'Euphoria,' 'How To Listen,' 'Some Kind of Crazy' and get a jolt of this stuff. Become one of the 'community of believers.
to tradition, to a psychological landscape both American and African American, and to a recognition of that suffering without which 'how else/do we know we are here?' An ambitious debut, for which Major Jackson has coined an idiom and music all his own.