Throughout his life, Reuben Jackson listened to the music he loved—jazz, of course, but also Jimi Hendrix, Prince, John Prine, and Claude Debussy. As a jazz scholar, Jackson’s understanding of music was profound, and his knowledge vast. As a poet, he listened closely to the people around him, savoring each word’s timbre, musicality, and resonance. Jackson’s gifts as a poet were immense, but poetry was only one aspect of his creativity and contributions. A well-loved teacher, radio host, music critic, curator, and archivist, Jackson effortlessly moved through multiple cultural spheres. To each, he brought his tremendous intellect as well as abiding empathy and love.

When Jackson, 67, died on Feb. 16 due to complications following a stroke, he left behind a legion of friends, admirers, students, and poets who he had mentored and supported. Having lived in the District for much of his life with the exception of two periods he spent in Vermont, Jackson developed close relationships within the arts community. Countless listeners were sustained by his presence as the alternate week host of WPFW’s Sound of Surprise, which airs Sunday afternoons. 

“Gil Scott–Heron talked about pieces of a man. There’s so many pieces to Reuben Jackson, the jazz, the poetry, the curator—that’s the breadth of his life. Now that he’s gone, we see how many people held him dearly and loved him,” says writer and literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller. “There are people who gravitate to the center of things …Reuben had a really beautiful voice on the radio, and having that voice, that’s very important, because he’s taking that knowledge and sharing it with the community. He becomes the voice of the community.”

Jackson’s various roles complemented each other while serving to deepen the impact of his work. His profound musical knowledge, for example, enhanced both his poetry and his radio programming. “Reuben having that knowledge, then you become very important to your community because you are the keeper of what might be the essence of Blackness if you know jazz music, if you know the blues,” says Miller.

Over the course of his multifaceted career, Jackson served as an archivist and curator for the Smithsonian Institution’s Duke Ellington Collection, and for the last six years before his death, he archived for the Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives at the University of the District of Columbia. He read poems all over the city at venues large and small including d.c. space, the Institute for Policy Studies, the Writer’s Center, Folger Shakespeare Library, Planet Word, 8Rock, and Busboys and Poets. Jackson wrote music reviews for City Paper from the late ’80s to the mid-’90s (and occasionally into the early aughts), as well as for the Unicorn Times, the Washington Post, and Jazz Times. He was also a beloved radio host on both Vermont Public Radio’s Friday Night Jazz show, from 2012 until 2018, and locally on WPFW, where he began reading poems on the air during the early 1980s. Jackson published two poetry collections, Fingering the Keys, published by the Maryland-based Gut Punch Press in 1990, and 2019’s Scattered Clouds (Maryland’s Alan Squire Publishing). Additionally, his poems have been featured in more than 50 anthologies, including, most recently, This Is the Honey, edited by bestselling author Kwame Alexander.  

In 1991, Alexander had just moved to the District and was trying to find his voice as a writer when he attended a poetry reading by Jackson. “He sounded like jazz. The melody, the vibrato, the kind, gentle power in his voice,” Alexander tells City Paper via voice message. Alexander bought Fingering the Keys and marveled at Jackson’s economy of style. “He had 30 words on one page, or 10 on the next, or 20 on the next, and he said so much. He packed so much; he packed an opera, a symphony, just a beautiful sort of snapshot of jazz, and I knew I could do something like that,” he continues. “And so he became my teacher, even though I didn’t know him … over the years, I would get to know him and discover that he was as kind and gentle and as rhythmic and improvisational. You know, he was jazz.”

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Born in Augusta, Georgia, in 1956, Jackson was still a toddler when his family relocated to the District, where his mother taught school. In his poetry and recollections of his childhood, Jackson described himself as the awkward and introspective son of Pierce and Mary Jackson, who never quite fit in around his Brightwood neighborhood due to his unabashed love for classical music and Emily Dickinson. He earned a bachelor’s in English literature at Goddard College in Vermont. There, he began his work in radio with a show combining music and talk on the college’s WGDR station. He maintained close ties with both radio and Vermont throughout his life.

After graduating, Jackson became part of a local poetry community—one described by poet Grace Cavalieri as “a great beautiful explosion of voices”—that developed here in D.C. in the early to mid-’80s. By that time, Jackson was reading his poems on WPFW, which served as an important platform for the area’s Black creatives. Cavalieri hosted Jackson’s poetry readings multiple times on the radio station and around the DMV. “Music was his real great love, and it was his companion in his poetry,” says Cavalieri. “He was like the antihero who’s caught listening to music in the basement. Gradually, he became this huge presence in the music world, but for me, he was always the poet.”

When many of Jackson’s peers discuss his poetry, they continually reference its musical influences. “If jazz could exist as literature, it would be Reuben’s poetry,” says writer and longtime District resident Lisa Pegram. “It is musical, it is economic, it has form and abstraction. Reuben’s work is immaculate … it’s so tight, and succinct, distilled. I always find his work … so effective in delivering whatever message it wants to deliver, it will often take my breath away.”

One of so many poets mentored by Jackson, Abdul Ali later wrote the introduction to his second collection, Scattered Clouds. “Reuben was a legend and a literary giant, and he was one of the most unassuming, modest giants I have ever met,” says Ali. “I would situate Reuben as kind of like an Amiri Baraka. He was so attuned to Black music and all kinds of music, and it just spilled over into his literary art, and then into his activism as an archivist. There’s something to be said about saying that this music matters and we need to preserve it. This is our culture, this is American history.”

Jackson’s deep love for music also impacted the way he heard others’ poetry. After one of her mid-’80s poetry readings, Jackson asked Rose Solari, editor and co-founder of Alan Squire Publishing, whether she liked Miles Davis. “I said, ‘Oh, I love Miles Davis. I listen to him often when I’m writing.’ And he said, ‘I can hear it in your writing, in your phrasing.’ And I thought, ‘how did you hear that?’ … I was so flattered and so honored, but also just amazed at the depth of what he could hear,” Solari says. 

Jackson’s poetry is accessible, but also layered and complex. Much of it expresses his deep love for jazz—referencing Duke Ellington, of course, as well as Johnny Hodges, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Thelonious Monk, and many others. 

Poems such as his early 1980s “Sunday Brunch”—which reads in its entirety: 

And where
Do your parents
Summer?
She asked him.

The front porch,
He replied

—referenced the vast differences between the haves and have-nots in a largely stratified city.

Another prevalent theme in his work was the enduring impacts of racism, which defined poems such as “Shankman’s Market,” “Thinking of Emmett Till,” and his wrenching 2015 piece “For Trayvon Martin,” his best-known work.

Instead of sleeping—
I walk with him from the store.
No Skittles, thank you.

We do not talk much—
Sneakers crossing the courtyard.
Humid Southern night.

We shake hands and hug—
Ancient, stoic tenderness.
I nod to the moon.

I’m so old school—
I hang till the latch clicks like.
An unloaded gun.

“There’s a million poems about Trayvon Martin and George Floyd,” says Jackson’s longtime friend, poet Kenny Carroll. “His was a great poem. Period. It’s so fucking amazing, and it’s so fucking simple.” 

Carroll continues, “Reuben’s poetry reminds me of my father’s description of Joe Louis’ six-inch punch: You almost never saw it coming, but the impact was immense,” adds Carroll. “[Reuben] admired all the Black Arts poets, the radical poets, but his style was just different … If the world hadn’t been so terrible, he would have been fine writing poetry about unrequited love and clouds and good music, period.”

As a teacher in more formal settings and as a friend, Jackson both inspired and mentored countless young poets. Joel Dias–Porter, also known as DJ Renegade, recalls chasing Jackson in Union Station during the early ’90s. “I recognized him from his photograph in Fingering the Keys,” says Dias-Porter. “When I ran up on him, I was like, ‘You’re Reuben Jackson … You wrote one of my favorite poems. He was looking at me like I was out of my mind, then I reached into my backpack and pulled out Fingering the Keys. After he signed my book, I just started fanboying in the most cringy manner imaginable.”

For Dias-Porter, the vulnerability and multifaceted, nuanced masculinity of Jackson’s poetry helped him develop his voice as a poet. “I came out of the hip-hop world where it’s bravado, machismo, and the primary poetic mode is braggin’ and shit like that,” he says. “Reuben’s work was very different from that. I feel the same way about Prince. Their willingness to be vulnerable made space for me to do that and allowed me to be my whole self.”

Over the years, Jackson taught poetry at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, as part of the DC WritersCorps at Shaw’s Garnet-Patterson Middle School, and as a high school English teacher in Burlington, Vermont. “He took so much joy in being around young people,” says Pegram, who served as DC WritersCorps’ poetry director. “He was so proud of his students, he would weep openly when they read their work.”

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After earning a master’s in library and information science at UDC in 1985, Jackson worked several jobs in educational and museum settings before joining the Duke Ellington Collection in 1989. His longtime friend Nancy Seeger described the position as “his dream job.” 

“He could use his love of the music,” she says. “He especially loved sharing it with the public, the scholars and musicians who came to use the collection.” 

In 2012, after retiring from the Smithsonian, Jackson temporarily relocated to Montpelier, Vermont, where he taught school and hosted a popular radio show. He received stacks of fan mail, and a Montpelier restaurant honored him by adding the Jackson surname to its Reuben sandwich. Jackson returned to Washington six years later, and throughout his time here, he was an ever-present and essential part of D.C.’s creative community. “He would be one of the few writers that I would bump into in the street,” says Miller. “You can go back to Langston Hughes walking on your street, you can go back to Sterling Brown at his house or at Howard … that is the tradition that Reuben has upheld.”

Since returning to the District in 2018, Jackson spent almost every Saturday at Brookland’s American Poetry Museum, which he often compared to a Black barbershop for its ability to bring people together. There, in the years following the deaths of his parents and older brother, Jackson found a new family. According to poet and teacher Sami Miranda, who chairs the museum’s board, Jackson quickly became the organization’s top attraction. “This one couple came in, and he talked to them, and then they came in every Saturday and visited with him,” says Miranda. “When they got married, he read a poem at their wedding.”

At poetry readings, Jackson was generous with encouraging amens and hallelujahs, and he effectively used humor when teaching. “He’d tell people, ‘You give me a line that’s really good, I’m gonna come around and jack that line,’” says Miranda. “And he’d put his finger in their back.”

Poet Brandon D. Johnson regularly joined Jackson at the museum. “When I go to the American Poetry Museum, I go hoping to see him,” says Johnson. “The history that was made in D.C. whether it was political, cultural, musical, or literary, he was filled by this place, and this place was filled by him.”

Every other Sunday afternoon was reserved for WPFW, where Jackson put a great deal of thought into the Sound of Surprise show. “His passion, coupled with his vast, musical acumen, made him a superb host. Reuben on and off the mic had a sincerity and a humbleness about him that melted your heart,” says WPFW Program Director Katea Stitt. “He also had a very sly wit, and could have you in stitches.” 

Jackson’s wide-ranging musical tastes were an essential part of his identity as the awkward child grew into an adult who seemed both flattered and bemused by all the adulation. “The whole range of music that he loved filled a lot of empty spaces for kind of an introverted young writer,” says Carroll. “The music provided him comfort and solace. And he felt like it also allowed him to speak to an audience who would accept his eclecticism … I think that Reuben was a person trying to find space for himself and he was open to just experiencing and loving people and letting people love him.”

Carroll continues, “Just as Reuben’s early poetry was informed by his feelings of isolation and estrangement, his poetry of the past decade was also informed by the loss of all the members of his immediate family. He began wryly describing himself as ‘the orphan,’ and his poetry talked of the influence of his parents and brother on the music he came to love and the poetry he came to write.”

At the time of his death, Jackson was working on his next book, a collection of poems for the Vermont-based Rootstock Publishing. On Feb. 1, just a few days before he suffered a stroke, he participated in a gathering of poets celebrating the anthology of Black poets: This Is the Honey. Friends say that he was thrilled to be included in the collection. That night, immersed in a reciprocal exchange of love, he gave his final poetry reading. “He was just a man who was loved, that’s all,” says Miranda. “He was a man who was loved because he gave love all the time.” 

Jackson is survived by his fiancee, Jenae Michelle, who he had met on the Metro on June 1, 2022 (they exchanged phone numbers at Fort Totten). For information on an upcoming tribute to Jackson, follow the American Poetry Museum on Instagram.