Background
Major Jackson was born on September 9, 1968, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. He is the son of Levorn Gregory Spann and Gloria Ann Matthews. While growing up, he lived with his grandparents.
2011
Major Jackson with Kevin Young and Cyrus Cassells
2013
Major Jackson with Thomas Sayers Ellis
2014
35 Professors Row, Medford, MA 02155, United States
Major Jackson in Tisch Library of Tufts University
2016
Major Jackson
Major Jackson at the 38th NAACP Image Award Pre-Show Gala at Boulevard 3 on March 1, 2007, in Los Angeles, California. Photo by Charley Gallay.
Major Jackson with his Vermont Award which he received in 2016.
Major Jackson at the Harris House on October 25, 2018.
525 S State St, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, United States
Major Jackson at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in February 2019. Photo by Alec Cohen.
Major Jackson with Peter Schjeldahl in 2019. Photo by Jackie Roman.
115 Church St, Burlington, VT 05401, United States
Major Jackson at Leunig's Bistro in September 2019.
1585 E 13th Ave, Eugene, OR 97403, United States
The University of Oregon where Major Jackson received his Master of Fine Arts degree.
1801 N Broad St, Philadelphia, PA 19122, United States
Temple University where Major Jackson received his Bachelor of Science degree.
1700 W Olney Ave, Philadelphia, PA 19141, United States
Central High School where Major Jackson studied.
Major Jackson
Major Jackson
Major Jackson. Photo by Erin Patrice O'Brien.
Major Jackson
Major Jackson with Tom Sleigh
Major Jackson
Major Jackson with Wanda Grant
Major Jackson with Sam Bulpin and Vera Escaja-Heiss
Major Jackson with Vicki Zubovic and Tree Swenson
Major Jackson on PBS NewsHour
Major Jackson with his wife Didi Jackson and Jeff Peters.
Major Jackson at the Lowell Institute.
(Leaving Saturn is an ambitious and honest collection. Maj...)
Leaving Saturn is an ambitious and honest collection. Major Jackson, through both formal and free verse poems, renders visible the spirit of resilience, courage, and creativity he witnessed among his family, neighbors, and friends while growing up in Philadelphia. His poems hauntingly reflect urban decay and violence, yet at the same time, they rejoice in the sustaining power of music and the potency of community.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/082032342X/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i7
2002
(In Hoops, Major Jackson continues to mine the solemn marv...)
In Hoops, Major Jackson continues to mine the solemn marvels of ordinary lives: a grandfather gardens in a tenement backyard; a teacher unconsciously renames her black students after French painters. The substance of Jackson's art is the representation of American citizens whose heroic endurance makes them remarkable and transcendent.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393059375/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i4
2006
(In these poems of broken unions and acute longing, Major ...)
In these poems of broken unions and acute longing, Major Jackson explores art, literature, and music as seductive forces in our lives.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07W4J9CPQ/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i5
2010
(Rhythmic, formally rigorous, Major Jackson's poems in The...)
Rhythmic, formally rigorous, Major Jackson's poems in The Sweet Hurried Trip Under an Overcast Sky chart territories from Greece to Spain to Florida, especially the sections of a long poem "Urban Renewal."
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00H0NQAYU/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i6
2013
(In the fourth collection, a breakthrough volume, Major Ja...)
In the fourth collection, a breakthrough volume, Major Jackson appropriates the vernacular notion of "rolling deep" to capture the spirit of aesthetic travel that defines these forceful new poems and brazenly announces his steady accretion of literary and artistic influences, both formal and experimental - his "crew." The confident and radiant poems in Roll Deep address a range of topics, most prominently human intimacy and war. And like his best work to date, these poems create new experiences with language owed to Jackson’s willingness to once again seek a rhythmic sound that expresses the unique realities of the twenty-first century with humor and understanding. Whether set in Nairobi, Madrid, or Greece, the poems are sensuously evocative and unapologetically with-it, in their effort to build community across borders of language and style.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OD8Z1H2/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i3
2015
(In this knock-out collection, Major Jackson savors the co...)
In this knock-out collection, Major Jackson savors the complexity between perception and reality, the body and desire, accountability and judgment. Inspired by Albert Camus’s seminal Myth of Sisyphus, Major Jackson’s fifth volume subtly configures the poet as “absurd hero” and plunges headfirst into a search for stable ground in an unstable world. We follow Jackson’s restless, vulnerable speaker as he ponders creation in the face of meaninglessness, chronicles an increasingly technological world and the difficulty of social and political unity, probes a failed marriage, and grieves his lost mother with stunning, lucid lyricism. The arc of a man emerges; he bravely confronts his past, including his betrayals and his mistakes, and questions who he is as a father, as a husband, as a son, and as a poet. With intense musicality and verve, The Absurd Man also faces outward, 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.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/132400455X/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i1
2020
Major Jackson was born on September 9, 1968, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. He is the son of Levorn Gregory Spann and Gloria Ann Matthews. While growing up, he lived with his grandparents.
As a kid, Major was quite bookish. He attended Central High School in Philadelphia. Then he studied at Temple University where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in accounting in 1992. Then he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Oregon in 1999.
After receiving a bachelor's degree, in 1992 Major Jackson became the finance director of the Painted Bride Art Center. After a year serving as the Bride's finance director, Jackson moved on to the position of poetry curator, which provided him an opportunity to interact with emerging and established poets. Jackson booked members of the Dark Room Collective, a group of aspiring African American writers, to read their work at the Bride, and Jackson became a member of the organization in 1994. Jackson left the Bride in 1997 to attend graduate school. In 2002, he became an associate professor of English at the University of Vermont, later becoming a professor. That same year he published his first book of poetry, Leaving Saturn.
This four-part collection of poetry draws from his life experiences. The collection begins with the poem "Urban Renewal," which, among other things, examines and illuminates details of his life in Philadelphia. Leaving Saturn is both formal and free verse. The poems touch on adolescent sexuality, urban decay, violence, the power of music and stories of courage and resilience. Music also plays an important role in influencing his work. The title Leaving Saturn honors the jazz legend Sun-Ra. With urban living continuing to influence his work, Jackson's second book, Hoops, was published in 2006 and also deals with subjects of adolescent hardships and inspirational figures.
The final section of the book is composed of "Letter to Brooks," a 15-part poem written in rime royal. Addressed to the late African American Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks, whom Jackson met while working at the Painted Bride, the poem not only honors Brooks and her work, but it also speaks of the world that Brooks left behind after her passing in 2000. Holding Company: Poems (2010), Jackson’s third book, was called his darkest and most personal work, a collection of rigid and mostly 10-line poems highlighting the pop culture and the painful end of a marriage, which he refers to as "a democracy lost to a monarchy." This collection explores art, literature, and music as formidable forces in our lives while invoking figures such as Constantine Cavafy, Pablo Neruda, Anna Akhmatova, and Dante Rossetti.
In 2013, Jackson served as editor for a collection of poems by Countee Cullen, a volume that highlights Countee's life and work. In Roll Deep: Poems (2015), he changed up his style from narrative to prose form. The poems speak of war, human intimacy and online dating. In two years, he served as editor for Renga for Obama which features 267 American poets honoring Barack Obama. He published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Tin House. His work was included in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry 2004, The Pushcart Prize XXIX: Best of the Small Presses (2004), The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation (2010), and other.
As an educator, he is known for his work at the Xavier University of Louisiana, New York University, University of Massachusetts Lowell, and the University of Vermont. Now he serves as poetry editor of The Harvard Review and continuing writing poems. His recent book is The Absurd Man: Poems (2020). In this knock-out collection, Major Jackson savors the complexity between perception and reality, the body and desire, accountability and judgment.
(In the fourth collection, a breakthrough volume, Major Ja...)
2015(Rhythmic, formally rigorous, Major Jackson's poems in The...)
2013(In Hoops, Major Jackson continues to mine the solemn marv...)
2006(In this knock-out collection, Major Jackson savors the co...)
2020(In these poems of broken unions and acute longing, Major ...)
2010(Leaving Saturn is an ambitious and honest collection. Maj...)
2002Major Jackson was greatly influenced by such African-American poets as Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Derek Walcott.
He reminds readers that poets, like novelists, are allowed to experiment, embellish and most important, write poems that are from the viewpoint of someone else, which, he says, encourages compassion and empathy.
Many of Jackson’s poems are location-based, focused specifically on his hometown, Philadelphia. Jackson explained that he finds inspiration in writing about something so deeply personal. He reflected on how his writing aims to reveal a more humanistic side to his home city.
Quotations:
"I’m always honored to give readings and to be welcomed to libraries, community centers, and universities because it’s less an individual ego-centered activity and more of a thank you for inviting me into your community to share my words and to think about how our lives intersect through poetry."
"I’m in the habit of encouraging people to take up writing poetry. It is an opportunity to slow our day down and to be reflective and contemplate our space in the world and how the world affects us. That practice of putting down language in meticulous fashion, as a mode of inquiry, to discover how we feel and how we respond to the world, or even simply language as material - something to kind of tinker with - I believe has a profound psychic, psychological and physiological effect. It’s a way to take care of ourselves."
"Every line that you write is a note you play, and it’s a note you play that has to feel right."
"The words are there, but the shape is not there. That’s a kind of restlessness that I think we all should cultivate inside of us. That restlessness is really dependent on how much you are going to lean in on yourself not to do easy things."
"Each poem is an act of experimenting and discovering."
"Poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social value."
Major Jackson became a fellow of Pew Charitable Trusts in 1995.
Major Jackson is a great cook. Someday he hopes to open a restaurant serving only soup, his specialty.
Major Jackson married Kristen Johanson on May 25, 2002. The marriage produced three children, Langston Thurgood McCullough, Anastasia Nona White, and James Welden Romare Jackson. The couple broke up and Jackson married Didi Jackson.