Razzle Dazzle: New and Selected Poems 2002-2022

by Major Jackson

An exuberant collection of two decades of Major Jackson’s passionately intelligent poetry.
A preeminent voice in contemporary literature, Major Jackson offers steady miracles of vision and celebrations of language in rapturous, sophisticated poems. With selections from five acclaimed volumes—including his Cave Canem Poetry Prize–winning debut, Leaving Saturn (2002); the NAACP Image Award finalist Hoops (2006); and his vulnerable, philosophical latest, The Absurd Man (2020)—along with three dozen new poems, Razzle Dazzle traces the evolution of Jackson’s transformative imagination and fierce music. Whether addressing racial conflict and the ongoing struggle for human dignity in America, bearing witness to the plight of refugees, or grieving the contradictory nature of humankind, these dexterous poems proclaim the remarkable power of renewal, justice, and accountability.
From “The Ocean You Answer To”

Unseen, many marveled in the comfort of their tiny utopias.

But you stood like music with your breath outstretched

waiting for eternity to enter your arms.

Genres: Poetry

268 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 5, 2023

About the author

There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.

For the poet, see: Major Jackson

Reviews

[Evelyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

It Must Be the Supermarket in Me

It must be the supermarket in me
all lit from inside, full of wide aisles
and thoughtful shelf stocking
where you'll find my feelings and
memories. That's why on the outside
I look so ordered and put together.
My inner supermarke contains
an old-world butcher shop
with no trace of the slaughter.
Shoppers arrive with unfathomable
hunger which I relieve by
offering freshness, quality,
and value. Some are penniless
and can only fantasize, licking their lips
at rows of artisanal cheeses and meats
behind glass display cases, the clothbound
cheddars and goat, at ropes of cured
salami and prosciutto. Still
they taste. I offer free samples
at stations throughout
my supermarket so people will
come to know and like me.
In the produce department,
many test my pears and avocados
for ripeness. In the floral area, they sniff.
Some walk off with my bouquets.
I contain cheerful baggers
who will escort you to your car.
At times, truthfully, I dislike this
about myself, forever accommodating.
I've not always had a supermarket in me.
It began when the church in me
lost its congregation and when
I lost my mother's love to cocktails
and other stimulants. There is no place
for anger in my supermarket. I keep
it in the backroom with a sign that reads
"No Trespassing: Employees Only."
It's a way of being in the world,
a self, full of checkout lines and refrigerators,
until someone runs through me,
knocking down my pyramids of canned
goods, or panic shopping, leaving empty aisles.

I met Major Jackson briefly at AWP years ago, if you can call the fraught exchange when you get a book signed at AWP "meeting." He makes everyone in that long line feel special. Jackson is a standout in the literary world for his talent of course but you can't help note how much more down to earth and approachable he seems than many literary stars-- warm, sunny, thoughtful. Yesterday I saw him read this poem and others, and that made me think about the cost of that approachability-- especially as Jackson is also a teacher. I know this is not the only way to interpret "It Must Be the Supermarket in Me." especially as the lines about his mother precede "there is no place for anger in my supermarket." I love the transparency of this poem and the way it builds to the anger that's kept "in the backroom with a sign that reads 'No Tresspassing: Employees Only." Those lines made me reflect on how our most beloved are the ones who get to deal with our anger and other unsightly emotions. I will also mention that when Jackson read "I contain..." I started in my seat, expecting him to riff on "I contain multitudes" in some very direct way. Maybe that's an example of the expectations we project onto our artists. If you have a chance to see Jackson read in person, I highly recommend doing so-- find his work to read, look him up on youtube. A bonus for those of us who grew up in or near Philly is that references abound in his work new and old. I was delighted when he claimed his enduring Philly accent on stage yesterday.

[Alegra Starks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Had the opportunity to attend a live poetry reading by the author at Calvin Coolidge State Park in Vermont, summer of 2024. This sparked my interest in purchasing this book, which was well worth it. I never tire of poetry.

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every so often one has to
make a sound like a massive season kept in the pocket,
a beaded amulet for when the temperature lowers.
The imagination is a matinee of memories with a side
of parsley like this one: rifle fire complicating
a bed of wild begonia, which is to say, the skies burn indigo
and your breath can be anything possible,
raucous as a church service or the quiet crunch of leaves,
earth's golden confetti held between palms.

My crimes felt mountainous, yet perspective
came with distance, and like those peaks, once keening
beneath biting ice, then felt resurrection in a vestige
of water, unfrozen, cascading and adding to the lake's
depth, such have I come to gauge my own screaming.

This is a collection of his older poems and essentially a book of new poems, and I can’t believe how powerful and evocative they are, and how long it took me to find them. I listen to the Slowdown podcast which the poet took over from Ada Limón when she became poet laureate, and I appreciate his voice and insights and selections, it hinted at the depths of his own work. The use of words, the rhyme and song of his sentences, the subjects, the modern twists and turns, are everything. My favorites, as usual, are nature based or holding some true wisdom, but the lens that the poet turns on all the layers of living in the world as a US person in the world is THE lens, and this should have won all the awards. It is everything.

A few of my favorites:

OF WOLVES AND IMAGINATION
For Barry Lopez

Every so often one has to make a sound
of terrible pain as though in boundless woods
among thorns and berries prowling
through bramble and tangled vines
whose presence is a green fog; one has to leave
one's candlelit dinner at Eleven Madison Park
with its white linens sad as milk and silverware
tenderly laid out like an embarrassment of torture,
and one has to gaze into the chambers of a soon
empty heart and return to the kingdom
of creatures and give up the measured silence
of the respectable whose desire and gasping breaths
dangle as though from a string of floss, all squeaky mirth
and nothing more. Every so often one has to
make a sound like a massive season kept in the pocket,
a beaded amulet for when the temperature lowers.
The imagination is a matinee of memories with a side
of parsley like this one: rifle fire complicating
a bed of wild begonia, which is to say, the skies burn indigo
and your breath can be anything possible,
raucous as a church service or the quiet crunch of leaves,
earth's golden confetti held between palms.

MAKING THINGS

Suddenly I had to skewer all my prayers
and slow-roast them in
the open-air kitchen of my imagination.
I had to shovel fire into my laughter
and keep my eyes from blinking.
I had to fuss like a cook simmering storms.
I had to move like a ballet dancer but without
the vanity and self-consciousness of tradition.
I want to be all razzle-dazzle before
the dark-cloaked one arrives for a last game of chess.
My font of feelings is a waterfall and I live
as if no toupees exist on earth or masks that silence
the oppressed or anything that does not applaud
the sycamores' tribute to the red flame like the heat
beneath my grandmother's heart who never raised a ghost
but a storm. So, look at me standing on the porch laughing
at the creek threatening to become a raging river.

IT MUST BE THE SUPERMARKET IN ME

It must be the supermarket in me,
all lit from inside, full of wide aisles
and thoughtful shelf-stocking
where you'll find my feelings and
memories. That's why on the outside
I look so ordered and put together.
My inner supermarket contains
an old-world butcher shop
with no trace of the slaughter.
Shoppers arrive with an unfathomable
hunger which I relieve by
offering freshness, quality, and value.
I offer free samples at stations
Throughout my supermarket so people
will come to know and like me.
...
There is no place
For anger in my supermarket. I keep
It in the backroom with a sign that reads
“No Trespassing: Employees Only.”
It’s a way of being in the world,
A self, full of checkout lines and refrigerators,
Until someone runs through me,
Knocking down my pyramids of canned
Goods, or panic shopping, leaves empty aisles.

INDIAN SONG
after Wayne Shorter

Freddie Hubbard's playing the cassette deck
forty miles outside Hays and I've looked at
this Kansas sunset for three hours now,
bristling as big rigs bounce and grumble
along I-70. At this speed cornfields come
in splotches, murky yellows and greens abutting
the road's shoulder, the flat wealth of the nation whirring by.
It's a kind of ornamentation I've gotten used to,
as in a dream. Espaliered against the sky's blazing,
cloud-luffs cascade lace-like darkening whole fields.
30,000 feet above someone is buttering a muffin.
Someone stares at a Skyphone, and momentarily,
a baby cries in pressurized air. Through double-paned squares,
someone squints, fields cross-hatched by asphalt-strips.
It is said Cézanne looked at a landscape so long he felt
as if his eyes were bleeding. No matter that. I'm heading west.
It's all so redolent, this wailing music, by my side
you fingering fields of light, sunflowers over earth,
miles traveled, a patchwork of goodbyes.

A found poem by me:

Let me begin this time knowing
the drumming in my dreams
is me inheriting the earth, is morning
lighting up the rivers. I have forgotten
my escape routes, the oaks and sequoias,
and live as though sugar were my only
stimulant. But you stood like music with
your breath outstretched

waiting for eternity to enter your arms.
Just let the little grains of your voice blossom
like a crest of pine tops, then eavesdrop on
your blood flowing over sinew and marrow.
Most days I am full of spacious meadows,
golden fields of yarrow and lupine
undulating in a vale among free anarchists.
What if a volume of poems were
required in order to run for presidency?

Some days, I scatter
fistfuls of stars out of words.
Behind my eyes, sun-lit rain showers,
A flickering hologram, The Supremes
Singing "I Hear a Symphony," a stream
Of soft petals drizzling what the country means
To me, an arching tower of rainbow beams.

The mountains are at their theater again,
each ridge practicing an oration of scale and crest,
and the sails, performing glides across the lake.
But listen, at all times the proud rivers mourn
my absence, especially when, like a full moon,
you, reader, hidden behind a spray
of night-blooming, drift in and out of scattered clouds
above lighthouses producing their artificial calm,
just to sweep a chalk of light over distant waters.

Whichever way our shoulders move, there's joy.
Make a soft hollow noise. We've our own hourglass
and no one else to blame. I thought of our lives,
caressing ruins through half-opened windows.
I hear our prayers rising. I sing to you, now,
like scented candles, your ferocious wolf.
I no longer want this weather on my breath
or the many recognizable texts of our celestial holes.

[Emily Shearer · Rating 4 out of 5]

With poems like "Double Major" and references to the constellation, Ursa Major, Major Jackson can, from one page to the next, prove that he's a poet who 1) doesn't take himself too seriously and 2) doesn't shy away from bleeding on the page either. Among my favorites were, "Ode to Everything," Meeting People on Airplanes," and "Lovesick." "Why I Write Poetry" rocks and rolls from memory to self-admonishment to astonishment/ and just listen to this line from "Night Steps": "The crooks of our knees/ ached from all the praying." In my "Ode to Everything" I will include no small devotion to this major American figure, and in my "Why I Write Poetry" you know I will cite, "Because desire like stars in major constellations/ burns indelible and cursive in my original grimoire."

[Charles M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some strong and memorable poems which is all a reader can expect from any selected poem volume Jackson ‘s subject matter is varied geographically and topically . There are many descriptive phrases which are original and captivating . He has a passion for obscure allusions and vocabulary , yet it is usually apt and not forced . Read with ready access to a search engine .

[S꩜phie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finished this on Vanderbilt vs UTK day, that's my attempt at school spirit.

Major Jackson writes with exuberance and intelligence and a command of language I can only hope to gain with practice, but reading 10 years worth of his poetry shows he's basically always had it.

[James J. Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Ferguson" wrecked me. Incredible collection.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A poet's poet. The love of words, their sound and magi and feeling shining through on every line.