Scattered Clouds
Reuben Jackson and the Poetry of the Self, the City, and Change
I met Reuben Jackson when I was 22 or 23, living in Washington, DC, having moved home after college. I had a job at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and planned to pursue a master’s degree in creative writing, but first wanted to work, write poetry, and save money.
This piece is accompanied by a Q&A with Reuben Jackson.
The DNC was a dream for me: I abhorred Ronald Reagan, who had beaten Walter Mondale in a landslide election. I was a secretary for a special policy commission, organized to figure out how and why the Democrats had lost 49 states, and what had to be done to win the White House again. Those unknowns would become major characters, but at the time my friends and I thought of them as neocons: Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Biden, Bill Bradley, Bill Richardson, Ann Richards, and others. They thought the Democrats had become too liberal and too soft and wanted to tell a story that sounded more moderate to attract the voters they’d lost.
Others — like the friends I hung out with at night or writers I heard at readings around the city — thought the Democrats were becoming Republicans, and pushed for a more liberal version of the party.
People today say that America has never been so divided, or in such a perilous state, but my friends and I were certain that Ronald Reagan and his crew would do everything they could to destroy the country and everything and everyone that we valued. Reaganites had no concern for the poor, the vulnerable, or anyone — so far as we could see — but themselves and people like them: rich and white. The defense budget was constantly escalating, the poor remained that way, we were meant to be believe in “trickle-down” economics. Reagan had his crazed “Star Wars” plan, his incessant goading of the Soviet Union, his scandals, and so much more. Others of my generation who were politically active then might recall a different Washington, where people were polite to their opposition, but I recall otherwise. I recall Oliver North and the Sandinistas and deep party divides.
This was the world in which I met Reuben, a poet and librarian who I first encountered at a reading somewhere in the city’s creative scene of the mid to late 1980s. Set against the backdrop of the Hill and the White House, between the parlors of Georgetown and my offices in Southeast, I found plenty of art and literature and people who made, appreciated, and supported all. My poems were not as political as some, but they sought a world in which people noticed what was happening around us. I wrote in the voices of the isolated older women, denizens of apartments on Connecticut who, it turned out, were also writing about life in the city. I sought out readings whenever I could find them, and when there were none in the city, I’d travel to the Montpelier Cultural Arts Center to catch performance art, or to Twins just off Kennedy, a jazz bar owned by Ethiopian twin sisters, or to Sunday afternoons at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda. There was so much work to be heard, and one only had to read the monthly Literary Calendar in the Book World section of Post to find out where to go.
My guess is that we were at d.c. space, which is now a Starbucks across the street from AARP on 7th street but was then a hub for independent art, music, poetry and performance. He was a big man but spoke so quietly that the room had to be silent to hear him. His poetry was witty, angry, dry, emotional — and brief, so brief. With a turn of a phrase Reuben could capture an entire city block or a decade; he could tell you about an evening in his childhood, or a summer driving across the South. If you didn’t listen carefully, you missed it completely.
I admired and envied his ability to say so much so succinctly — and in a way that made entire rooms of people nod their heads. I wanted to know him better. We became friends, and soon we were exchanging poetry, checking out jazz documentaries at the Biograph in Georgetown, attending readings whenever we could. The city was far from its current gentrified state, and my fiancé and I lived in a one-bedroom apartment on Wisconsin Avenue across from the Cathedral. It was $400 per month, utilities included. It was easy for us to meet and bum around. Life was affordable.
Reuben worked as a children’s librarian in Anacostia. It was near the tail-end of the city’s crack cocaine epidemic, with an epidemic of murders tearing through the city’s poorest neighborhoods while Mayor Marion Barry presided over an ineffectual response. Reuben’s days were brutal, as children came to him and talked about the latest drug-related shooting as if it were part of their homework. Some older kids taunted him. Many used the library as anything and everything but a library.
I remember two moments from his days there. One was the time a little girl — anonymous, age 5 — told him a few lines that form an exquisite poem: Mr. Jackson/life and death/they kiss/too much.
The other moment I remember so well came a week after Reuben had chronicled his experiences at the Anacostia library for City Paper. We were eager to read responses to the story. The very first letter to the editor was from Mrs. Mary Jackson, Reuben’s mother, writing to express her outrage over the treatment her son had experienced at the hands of the library system’s management. A year or so later, Reuben left this working life behind to become the archivist and curator of the Duke Ellington Collection at the Smithsonian, a job he would hold for nearly 20 years, until an early retirement and a few years’ detour to Vermont, where he taught high school before becoming Vermont Public Radio’s Friday night jazz DJ.
I was sitting at my desk one day when the phone rang. It was Reuben. “You won’t believe this,” he said in a near whisper. “I am wearing Duke Ellington’s hat.”
That job was his nirvana. His poetry, published in his first collection, Fingering the Keys (Gut Punch Press, 1991), and his latest, Scattered Clouds: New & Selected Poems (Alan Squire Publishing, 2019) is full of themes of music, jazz, and musicians. I remember the many trips Reuben made to New York City for his work, which often included trips to the collections of Louis Armstrong and Billie Holliday and then, for reasons I have forgotten, to Electric Lady Studio. He is seldom more joyful than when music is in the air. If his Facebook is to be believed, he can be found on the Metro commuting to his new gig at UDC’s Felix Grant collection, air-conducting sonatas and symphonies while other passengers slowly drift away.
But back to the late 80s. Reuben and I were fast friends. Along with our friends Bob Haynes, Sunil Freeman, Mark Baechtel, and the late Jacklyn Potter, we founded a poetry collective called Lip Service. Together we sponsored readings at d.c. space and published a magazine.
We were in awe of Jacklyn, who lived in a big house on Kennedy Street with her husband, Lucky, and ran the still-ongoing Miller Cabin Reading Series. Jacklyn was a force of nature. One of our most emotional meetings was the day she read us the notes from her oncologist, telling her that she was cancer free. It was a poem of the highest order, but in the end, a heart attack would take her many years to soon. Back in the day, Jacklyn and Lucky had the biggest and silliest Hallowe’en party in town, and all the poets were there, from Pulitzer-Prize winner Henry Taylor to the entire faculty (it seemed) of American University.
So many fantastic writers and poets came to the city, and there were so many places to read, and such unlikely venues: The IMF/World Bank had a great lunch time reading series and local poets could be found there in a lovely auditorium, reading from our works. We read at the Folger, where poet and literary leader Ethelbert Miller managed a long-running series. For years, poets appeared on a Sunday night radio program on WPFW, hosted by Grace Cavalieri, who is now Maryland’s poet laureate. Of course, there were long-running series at dc space, and programs at the National Theater and the Institute for Policy Studies. The MFA program at American University, led at first by Myra Sklarew, who left for a while to run Yaddo, featured visiting writers like Galway Kinnell, Robert Hass, William Stafford, and Linda Pastan. The DC area was home to so many greats: Anthony Hecht, Roland Flint Lucille Clifton, Linda Pastan, Sterling Brown, Essex Hemphill, and more.
One night I read at the Women’s Shelter of the Community for Creative Non-Violence and Mitch Snyder himself sat beside me. I could not believe that such a person would hear me read, but I was more thrilled when the women in the shelter began to chant along with my peom. (Editor’s note: Snyder was a DC advocate for the homeless who founded the Community for Creative Nonviolence, home to the DC Central Kitchen. When launched there was great controversy for Snyder having taken over a vacant federal building; eventually the Reagan Administration leased it to CCNV for $1/year.)
The air around poets was always electric with language. Today, the city still is, in the form of poetry slams and Split this Rock, in Evenings at the Edge at the National Gallery of Art, and in readings at the American Poetry Museum and Busboys and Poets. The Miller Cabin Series thrives, and so does The Words Works, which runs several annual book publication contests. In a city some people view as a swamp of bureaucracy, many know where to find the syllables of social and cultural change.
In those days, we were convinced that poetry would save us, and save each other. When Polish poet and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz read one winter night, the great hall of the Folger overflowed to the outdoors. “What is poetry that does not save people?” he recited. “A connivance with official lies.”
I don’t know that Reuben’s poetry will save us from where we are today, but I do know that he forces us to read and hear and speak the truth. He read poems at my first marriage, a marriage that ended more than 25 years ago. (I am the imaginary sister who got married, and I think I am the girl whose youth died one day.) Wake up, I think he must have wanted to say. What are you thinking, marrying a man who took you to dinner with Ronald Reagan and Roy Cohn (I was marrying a Republican)? Save yourself, he seems to have written.
So many of Reuben’s poems are about saving himself: from isolation and depression. From the past. From racism that is woven so tightly into his experience, this man in his sixth decade, an African-American born in Georgia, raised in Washington, D.C., child of the city, witness to its gentrification, and the dismantling of our selves by the current political system. Wake up, I hear him say in so many poems. Rejoice, I hear. Take care. None of this will last. All of it will. Read Reuben Jackson and begin to see the people who live and have lived here, behind and beneath the explosion of cranes and concrete, and maybe you or we will find new spaces to be present.
