When Marcus Jackson steps to the microphone at Streetlight Guild this week, he plans to lean into the moment as an opportunity to celebrate the poetic ancestors who have inspired him along the way, including Pablo Neruda, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Yusef Komunyakaa, among others.
“And I’ll probably pick one or more [works] from each of those writers, because especially over some of my earlier career, I couldn’t have done any of those poems without having immersed myself in their brilliance … and running through the doors that they opened for us,” said Jackson, who will read alongside Mandy Shunnarah on Friday, April 3, as part of “Rhapsody & Refrain” – a two-week poetry blitz featuring 30 Columbus poets performing for free at Streetlight Guild. (The series kicks off with Dorian Ham and Paula Lambert on Wednesday, April 1; click here or see below for a full list of participants.)
Jackson intends to read these influential works alongside some of his newer, unpublished poems, a handful of which are planned for inclusion in an in-progress book centered on a fictional narrator – a first for the writer, who reveled in the opportunity to step outside of his own head in emerging from those more intensely isolated early Covid years.
“It started with writing these tiny, surreal sections right before the pandemic. … And then I was stuck at home, and my son was in kindergarten at the time, so we had a kindergartner on Zoom, and it was like, ‘I gotta expand on this,’” said Jackson, who has begun to flesh this narrator out into a more three-dimensional person, first creating a series of bullet points that tracked impactful life events and then expanding into the character’s more immediate family tree. “And his family background is extremely detailed in my mind, and some of the people from his family pop up in the poems. … But his past is plotted out in my notes, and I’m letting some of that emerge, and I’m filtering some current-day dilemmas into his poetic portrayals of his experiences. And the book is really about finding affordable beauty, affordable glee, in an era of more intense capitalism, more intense name branding, and a more intense pursuit of fame.”
Still in its early stages, this new collection is taking shape alongside a dual photography/poetry book in which Jackson pairs pictures he has taken with a series of verses inspired by images of urban scenes, found objects, and portrait work. “It’s been a good way to celebrate the more unheralded people and places around,” the poet said, going on to trace the joyous throughline present in both works to his experiences as a father. “It’s tough now, because everything is expensive, and from the position of a parent, it’s like you already know how this movie ends. Inflation is never going to stop, and resources are going to continue to dwindle, so how do you teach a child to value what’s around them?”
Jackson said this mindset is reflective of the blue-collar upbringing in Dayton, describing his family as the type that would squeeze the tube of toothpaste until it had run dry and then grab a razor blade to cut it open and scrape the residuals from within. “And those things are so essential to all the species of the world,” he said. “And as a society, we’re shunning that now, and we’re throwing money away on nothing. And it seems to me if I can lift something up in a poem and be like, ‘Look how beautiful this simple thing is, and it’s right here next to you,’ that can make a small difference. Or at least that’s the hope.”
The pull Jackson feels toward simplicity even surfaces in his use of language. As a poet, Jackson said he is naturally drawn toward brevity, with each subsequent draft of a piece serving as a way to scrape more barnacles from the hull, the finished piece transmitting his intended idea in as few syllables as necessary. Not only is this refinement something to which Jackson has always been drawn as a student of the form, but he noted it also reflects his desire to not engage in “the empty political and sales rhetoric” he sees as prevalent within our society.
Tracing this fondness for wordplay back through childhood, Jackson recalled how his parents, both theater actors, used to bring him along for rehearsals and performances, where seated in the audience he absorbed how words could be used to relay an array of emotions and ideas. “And they did mostly 20th century realist dramas, which could sometimes be pretty intense,” Jackson said. “And maybe I didn’t know it at the time, but I was taking in how important language is.”
These realizations continued to expand into high school, where Jackson wrote for the school newspaper, and then later in college, where he took his first poetry workshop under Tim Geiger, currently a professor at the University of Toledo. In the years since, Jackson has taken an approach that straddles these poles, often employing poetic language in service of verses at least partially informed by the headlines of the day.
“Sometimes you’ll be having all this fun with the language,” Jackson said. “But at the end of the day, I do think there’s a responsibility to infuse the poems with a larger subject, and to relate it to … something that affects the greater good of humanity. Even when the poems are a little more aloof or surreal, I still want them to have that investment. … And I think that comes from having artistic parents, and from being lucky enough to grow up in a community that was very culturally truthful, very politically truthful. And where they were telling kids the hardest things about American history from a very young age, not only for protection, but to give us a pathway toward activism, where we could do a bunch of amazing things with that knowledge.”
Rhapsody & Refrain 2026 schedule
Wednesday, April 1: Dorian S. Ham & Paula J. Lambert
Thursday, April 2: Ruth Awad & Christina Merritt-Szuch
Friday, April 3: Marcus Jackson & Mandy Shunnarah
Saturday, April 4: Hanif Abdurraqib & Dr. Sidney Jones Jr.
Sunday, April 5 (5:00 p.m.): Tiffany Mariie & Tiffany Lawson
Monday, April 6: Travis McClerking & Diane Callahan
Tuesday, April 7: Steve Abbott & Nathan McDowell
Wednesday, April 8: Louise Robertson & Darren C. Demaree
Thursday, April 9: Julia Kolchinsky & Amy Turn Sharp
Friday, April 10: Bill Kerwin & Zach Hannah
Saturday, April 11: Schyler Butler & Scott Woods
Sunday, April 12 (5:00 p.m.): Aaron Alsop & Marquita Byars
Monday, April 13: Danny Caine & Chuck Salmons
Tuesday, April 14: Larry Robertson & Karen Scott
Wednesday, April 15: Sayuri Matsuura-Ayers & Sara Abou Rashed
All shows at 8 p.m. except Sundays, which are at 5 p.m. as noted above.
All shows take place at Streetlight Guild.
All shows are free thanks to the generous support of the Johnstone Fund, in memory of Mike Stann.
