Undisciplining the Fields — Major Jackson with Tonya M. Foster: February 29, 2024

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The Poetry Center in conjunction with City Lights Books co-presents Major Jackson, reading from his poetry amid a conversation with Tonya M. Foster, George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University. This event takes place as one in a series of conversations in Foster's series she titles "Undisciplining the Fields," upstairs in the poetry room at City Lights Bookstore, on Columbus Street in North Beach, San Francisco. Jackson reads at intervals several poems from his collection Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems 2002–2022 (W. W. Norton), and Foster reads a poem from Fady Joudah's [...] (Milkweed Editions, 2024). Peter Maravelis, of City Lights Books, opens the evening, then Steve Dickison introduces Tonya Foster, who in turn introduces Major Jackson.

Undisciplining the Fields is a new conversation, reading (and sometimes performance) series that will invite writers, artists, filmmakers, and scholars from a range of fields to discuss and share their cross-disciplinary practices and thinking. Initiated by Tonya M. Foster, in collaboration with The Poetry Center, the series is envisioned as an unruly exploration of the ways that practice is developed and encouraged through interest, study, and accident; and of the ways that creativity motivates / instigates investigations of the possible.

Publisher: BECA (Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts)
Location: City Lights Books, San Francisco
Date: 2024-02-39
Event Run Time: 01:37:44
Contributors: Peter Maravalis; Steve Dickison
Rights: ©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu.
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Major Jackson with Tonya M. Foster (01:32:09)

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Tonya M. Foster thanks her hosts, then introduces Major Jackson, formally, with a reading of his biography, and informally, as someone who's known friends common between them for many years. Throughout their conversation they speak to Jackson's background in Philadelphia, the uses of poetry, the "spiritual valence" (Jackson) of art, of putting themself "on parole from love" (Jackson) and "the labor of love" (Foster, in reference to Sonia Sanchez and her generation of Black writers).

They speak to the loss of contemporaries and elders, of Bob Kaufman's vow of silence and the police violence exercised against him, of the poem holding the unbearable (in reference to Fady Joudah), how the poem, and art more generally, can "help us harp on being" (Foster) by "disrupt[ing] business as usual" (Jackson). Jackson notes, too, that there is a particular language of the Emergency Room that's intended to expel emotion, to emphasize immediate needed action.

At Foster's request Jackson reads, spaced throughout their conversation, from his poetry: the title poem from his debut 2002 book, Leaving Saturn (coming out of his early experience in Philadelphia of Sun Ra and His Arkestra), "I'll Fly Away," "Double Major" (from Absurd Man), and "Let Me Begin Again."

Foster, midway through, reads a poem by Fady Joudah from his book [...], then about to be released from Milkweed, beginning "I am unfinished business, the business that did not finish me...."

From the audience, someone asks about strategies of gathering one's poems for a book, and Jackson speaks to his work on the "new and selected poems" volume he'd recently assembled. Someone asks about communities of writers and how that enter's Jackson's writing process. Someone else asks about the gap between what one tries to write and what another reads there.