![\"major-jackson.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/09\/major-jackson.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\nI live on the roof of the world among the aerial
\nsimulacra of Things, among the faded: old tennis shoes,
\nvanished baseballs, heartbreak gritted with dirt. My mind
\nflickers like lightning in a cloud. I’m networked
\nbeholding electric wires and church spires.
\nI lean forward and peer at the suffering below—
\nSartre said: man is condemned to be free.
\nI believe in the dead who claim to believe in me—
\nsays, too, the missing and forgotten. Day darkens
\non. I hear our prayers rising. I sing to you, now.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nThe poems in Holding Company<\/i><\/a>, the third collection from Major Jackson<\/a>, share the formal bond of a ten-line structure—because, he told Identity Theory<\/i><\/a>, “I wanted to teach myself how to create an exalted utterance in a poem, how to create something that was emotionally heartrending, that did not need a lot of scaffolding. I wanted to go in a new direction and allow that compression to sing the poem\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s themes louder, sing emotive declarations by shrinking it further.” Sometimes there are other interesting connections between the poems; the last line of “Roof of the World,” for example, will turn up again in “Forecast<\/a>” (from Poetry Out Loud<\/i>), and another line from that poem finds its way into “White Power.” <\/p>\n
Other poems in Holding Company<\/i> include “Here the Sea,” “At the Club,” and “Maithuna” (all from Salt Magazine<\/i><\/a>) and three other poems that inspired short animated films: “Leave It All Up to Me<\/a>,” “Zucchini<\/a>,” and “Migration<\/a>.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I live on the roof of the world among the aerial simulacra of Things, among the faded: old tennis shoes, vanished baseballs, heartbreak gritted with dirt. My mind flickers like lightning in a cloud. I’m networked beholding electric wires and church spires. I lean forward and peer at the suffering below— Sartre said: man is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}