Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Absurd Man Poems by Major Jackson The Absurd Man: Poems by Major Jackson. Publication Date: Feb 11, 2020 List Price: $26.95 Format: Hardcover, 80 pages Classification: Poetry ISBN13: 9781324004554 Imprint: W. W. Norton & Company Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Parent Company: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Borrow from Library. Inspired by the philosophy of Albert Camus, Major Jackson’s fifth volume subtly configures the poet as "absurd hero." With intense musicality and buoyant lyricism, The Absurd Man follows the titular speaker as he confronts the struggle for meaning in a technological world and the difficulty of social and political unity, finding refuge in intellectual and sensuous passions. At once melancholic and jubilant, Jackson considers the journey of humanity, with all its foibles, as a sacred pattern of discovery reconciled by art and the imagination. From "The Absurd Man at Fourteen" He punched her again, a woman called the house, some yelling then us out the door leaving the kitchen phone cord swinging. More books like The Absurd Man: Poems may be found by selecting the categories below: Major Jackson. Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, including The Absurd Man (2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019 , Renga for Obama , and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems . A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, 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 has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, the New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry London , among many others. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He serves as the poetry editor of the Harvard Review. Major Jackson: A Reading and Conversation. Major Jackson is the author of five volumes of poetry, including The Absurd Man , Roll Deep , and Leaving Saturn , which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. He has edited Best American Poetry 2019 and is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Writers’ Award, and his work has appeared in American Poetry Review , The New Yorker , and the Paris Review , among other publications. The poetry editor of the Harvard Review , Jackson lives in South Burlington, Vermont, where he is a University Distinguished Professor at the University of Vermont. Major Jackson starts off the reading and conversation with VSC by talking about the book’s opening poem “Major and I,” which he says was inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ poem “Borges and I,” and that follows the same conceit. This same kind of humor and playfulness is found throughout The Absurd Man , adding a lightheartedness to even difficult and painful topics. The original prose poem by Borges is below. The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity, but those games belong to Borges now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him. I do not know which of us has written this page. —Jorge Luis Borges, translated from Spanish by James E. Irby. The poem “Major and I” opens with “Major and I / hand in hand remove our dark suits, but / the other Major prefers to undress in glass / revolving doors.” In the interview, Major discusses, with a slight smile, how this indicates the level of comfort he has in addressing personal material in the book—that it is an act of imagination but also an act of courage. Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus , and the question it poses about what gives life its meaning, is a driving force of this book, as Major seeks to find his own answer to the question. “One of the journeys of my life is learning to see closer and closer, to pay attention, to be awakened to the world around me, and the people,” he says in the interview. Further reading & listening. Two poems in the book that didn’t make their way into the reading and conversation that I recommend checking out are “Thinking of Frost” and the book’s closing poem “Double Major.” This important and powerful piece “Letter from Vermont: Fighting for Black Interior Lives” was recently written by Major. “We Will Not Give Up on Each Other” is an interview with Major by former Vermont poet laureate Chard deNiord. You can listen to Major’s reading on his most recent visit to VSC as a Visiting Writer on our SoundCloud archives here and his earlier reading from 2015 here. From June 22-July 3, Major will curate the Poem-a-Day series of the Academy of American Poets, and he discusses his selections for the series here. The interview took place on Friday, May 29th over Zoom. VSC Writing Program Manager Carlene Kucharczyk interviewed VSC Trustee and Poet Major Jackson at his house in the Green Mountains National Forest from her studio in the Church Studios building at Vermont Studio Center. Major reads seven poems from his new book The Absurd Man: “Major and I,” “Dear Zaki,” “You, Reader,” “Now That You Are Here, I Can Think,” “Vermont Eclogue,” “The Romantics of Franconia Notch,” and “Double View of the Adirondacks as Reflected over Lake Champlain from Waterfront Park.” Major Jackson. Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry including the forthcoming collection The Absurd Man (Norton: 2020), Roll Deep (Norton: 2015), Holding Company (Norton: 2010), Hoops (Norton: 2006) and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia: 2002), finalist of a National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. He is the editor of Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems . A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, 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 has published poems and essays in Agni , American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and World Literature Today . Major Jackson lives in South Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard A. Dennis Professor of English at the University of Vermont. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review . Author Alerts. Get updates about Major Jackson and recommended reads from Simon & Schuster . Plus, get a FREE eBOOK when you sign up! By clicking 'Sign me up' I acknowledge that I have read and agree to the privacy policy and terms of use. Free eBook offer available to NEW US subscribers only. Offer redeemable at Simon & Schuster's ebook fulfillment partner. Must redeem within 90 days. See full terms and conditions and this month's choices. The Absurd Man by Major Jackson. This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access. New York. W.W. Norton. 2020. 112 pages. Major Jackson’s fifth book of poems is troubled by its own age. “The soil overruns with honey,” says the speaker in “I’ve Said Too Much,” a confession ripe with seasons of overindulgence. But satiety may not quite be what Jackson has in store for us this time. As though it had spent the five years since the release of Roll Deep (2015) weighing a smattering of gray hairs before embracing salt-and-pepper, The Absurd Man brings a different feel to Jackson’s perennially strong poetry. With a dose of self-awareness that is by turns playful, thought-provoking, and heartbreaking, the poems in this book offer up a collective narrative to complement their stand-alone lyricism. Return readers will mark a change in this book’s “Urban Renewal” suite, a recurring, sequential section that Jackson has described as a sort of autobiographical bildungsroman spread out across his collections. As in the book’s earlier poems like “November in Xichang,” the poetry in this section deploys Jackson’s signature roaming ekphrastic. But, often, Jackson doesn’t quite rhapsodize, leaving us a handbreadth short of the rapture of his habitual syllabic alchemy. Ultimately, his keenest lyric notes come not in poems like “Paris” but in the last half of “North Philadelphia” (the home of Jackson’s youth): “ tunes / not so much learned yet risen, earth’s laments / gardened in our throats from black soil, a slow grumbling, / fitful drawn-out grunts grafting onto gospel notes / not recognized but felt, a ring-shout.” He ends, “I’m still in that dimness, several rows behind their wails, / writing their moans so you can feel them like Braille.” In The Absurd Man , the tune of Jackson’s most tactile, Braille-like passages takes after Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus , whose epigraph heads the section, valorizing the art of “the absurd creator.” In many ways, though, the epigraph toes the line between being a deceptive frame and an ironic foil, a presiding duplicity the reader is alert to from the book’s coy opener, “Major and I,” a playful take on Jorge Luis Borges’s “Borges y yo” that similarly exploits the sometimes troubling implications of a writer’s multiple personae. Indeed, the speaker resists the absurd in the latter poems of “Urban Renewal,” which are a diminuendo of despair weakly combatted. Both the pristine landscape of “Double View of the Adirondacks . . .” and the blasted mountain barrenness of “The Valkyrie” equally prompt the speaker to somber existential realizations—“My crimes felt mountainous . . . I’ve no true friends, my verse’s / mediocre at best, a white captivity”—that attempt, in the last octet or so, quick reversals through transcendent symbols. A speaker who once trumpeted poetic triumph now becomes self- reflective, chasing a dram of venomous self-castigation with the occasional attempt at antidote, a flinch from the absurd. The reader who calls bullshit finds affirmation in the sobering confession of “Augustinian,” the third poem in the book’s titular collection. In the end, this is not a volume in which redemption undoes the fall. And so we come to “The Absurd Man Suite.” Drawing its name and inspiration from a chapter of The Myth of Sisyphus, the book’s final section is an arc of loves, lusts, and pensive mornings-after that pencils a discourteous portrait of the artist as dilletante. Boasting wry titles like “The Absurd Man Swipes Left in New York,” the poems have the air of a pileup of perfumes from a month’s worth of one-night stands. The risk of repetitiveness is offset by Jackson’s knack for form and rhythm play. In “Why the Absurd Man Doesn’t Dance Any More,” strobes of sensation pulse in enjambed tercets, a quick whirl that stirs the heavy scents out of stagnation. In the penultimate poem, “The Absurd Man in the Mirror,” the recurring symbols of indulgence, reflections, and mountains rear once more, this time not unkindly as “winter mountains reach / across a page the color of honey.” The book’s final line—“You’re smiling, and that’s all / the defending I’ll ever need”—leaves us with the sense that there is no reason that tomorrow should not be perfectly pleasant, just as there is no reason that it should be. No reason at all—the least possible amount of promise. A standout collection with many a standout poem, The Absurd Man leans heavily into themes of family (“My Son and Me”) and, as ever, pays homage to peers and predecessors (“Dear Zaki”), but it also traffics more deeply in symbols than books previous. Multifaceted connections between pieces create a compelling array of narrative, lyric, and symbolic arcs, joined or joinable, that mutually suggest a way of being that I’ll dare to call “deeply human,” in that it strips away any flattering illusions as to what exactly that means.