In honor of National Poetry Month, supported by the Academy of American Poets, we're closing April with the morning playlist of poet Major Jackson. Submit your playlist in the comments section below so that we can put together a crowdsourced map of the MTA using your songs!

Major Jackson is the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review and the author of two collections of poetry, Hoops and Leaving Saturn. A professor at the University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars, the award-winning poet flies to New York weekly to teach at Baruch College as the Sidney Harman Writer in Residence.

His town-and-country playlist, a mix of poetry and jams, isn’t surprising given his music-enmeshed work, in which he references the jazz composer and bandleader Sun Ra as deftly as he does the urban block party—“Woofers stacked to pillars”—in his hometown of Philadelphia.

Plug in to his commute, below, stop by his upcoming reading in New York, at the Chin Music Reading Series on May 6, and keep an eye out for his forthcoming book, Holding Company.

Start: Utica Avenue (Brooklyn) 

Transfer: Fulton Street/Broadway - Nassau Street 

Transfer: 14th Street - Union Square

Stop: 23rd Street

Poetry Jam: Tim Seibles - "What you Really Want"

Jam #1: Bobby Hutcherson - "Little B's Poem"


Jam #2: Zap Mama & Erykah Badu - "Bandy Bandy"


Jam #3: Virginia Rodrigues - "Canto de Xangô"


Jam #4: Darryl D'Bonneau - "Revenge (Scott Wozniak club mix)"

Jam #5: Kronos Quartet - "Kutambarara (Spreading)"