Gary Jackson

Consider how it recalls the simplest movements.
How it always shoots the right foot first.
It never forgets where to hold tight the apex

of a cursive G before rounding her sloping curve.
The body never betrays.
But how many times have you

confused anticipate with expect,
forgotten the names of novels
you read, left your keys

in the door, lost your father's
birthday, your best friend's last name?
Memories flake like dead skin,

carpet the hardwood floors.
Your last birthday settling
over your first fight in sixth grade.

No, the body doesn't betray. Years of use
never dulls memory's blade. Every action
embedded through muscle into bone.

It's still able to unlock every act,
even if you've forgotten how.
from the book ORIGIN STORY / University of New Mexico Press
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This poem started as an ode to growing older and my terrible memory. I forget books immediately after reading them, random facts, various skills, people I just met, a startingly amount of my own life. It's bad. So bad in fact, that I can't remember much else about writing this poem.

Gary Jackson on "The Body You Remember"
Latino Youth Use Poetry to Capture Denver's Gentrifying Northside

"Hernández assigned the 30 students in his 'Latinx Leadership' class to walk their Northside neighborhood, photograph what spoke to them and write a poem to accompany their favorite picture. Hernández and his students compiled the images and poems into a book—pages created in Google Slides and stapled together—called 'Our Sacred Community.'"

via THE DENVER POST
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What Sparks Poetry: 
Aaron Anstett on James Wright's "Eisenhower’s Visit to Franco, 1959"


"This poem, at once narrative, lyrical, and political, led me to more James Wright poems and to Spanish poets beyond Machado, particularly in the bilingual anthology Roots and Wings, which I discovered in my high school library along with the still-powerful Hayden Carruth anthology, The Voice That Is Great Within Us. From there followed a continuing lifetime of delight, bafflement, and discovery in poems."
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