After hearing Major Jackson speak at the Scissortail Festival earlier this year, I picked up, among other things, his book of selected prose, A Beat Beyond. For me, the book proved to be an experience sometimes delightful, often poignant, always honest, and frequently inspiring.

In his essay “A Mystifying Silence: Big and Black,” Jackson dives into the some of the differences for poets, especially for those black and white, writing about race, and how shifts in our culture have shaped those efforts. This sentence by Jackson in particular, grabbed me by the collar, “All this to say, in a country whose professed strength is best observed in its plurality of cultures, what seems odd to me (and this I find most appalling about contemporary American poetry) is the dearth of poems written by white poets that address racial issues, that chronicle our struggle as a democracy to find tranquility and harmony as a nation containing many nations.” I have certainly concerned myself with issues of race and inequality in my poems (and written frequently about unity and connection) but it is clearly a delicate subject that I have explored only very carefully. I now feel challenged to explore these ideas more deeply and with greater vulnerability.

I would also like to speak to this salient message from Jackson’s “Introduction to the Best American Poetry 2019:” “For me, the best poems are those in which the author avoids concealment and obfuscation, and the truth of that person, eccentric, vulnerable, and brilliant, bears itself out in a sound heretofore unheard.” Here as in other places in the book, Jackson conveys this idea that a good poem relates to us a unique perspective, that could only be delivered to us from that one author – but also it is an experience that echoes our own humanity through its specificity. An idea that resonates with a similar theme that I strive to get down often with my own work.

A Beat Beyond is a book that speaks very much of Jackson’s own experiences as a black poet, relating to other poets through the lens of American culture, and also his connection to hip-hop. His description of first discovering the Roots on the street is nothing short of hypnotic.

I can’t recommend this book enough.