Reuben Jackson, who fused words and music in a multifaceted career as a Washington-based poet, jazz scholar, critic and radio host, died Feb. 16 at a hospital in the District. He was 67.
His fiancée, Jenae Michelle, said the cause was a stroke he suffered about two weeks earlier, shortly after he finished hosting a three-hour jazz show for WPFW (89.3 FM). The night before, he had performed at a poetry reading at Washington’s Planet Word museum, as part of a group of D.C. poets who were featured in “This Is the Honey,” a newly published anthology of Black poetry edited by Kwame Alexander.
“Often, he could be fairly self-critical. And he was just on top of the world” before falling ill, Michelle said.
A self-described “introvert who likes to talk a lot,” Mr. Jackson was a prominent but paradoxical figure in the District’s arts scene, with a shy, soft-spoken demeanor that he would cast off like a cloak, revealing an easygoing charm in his interactions with audiences in poetry readings and with students he taught in workshops at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda and in music lectures at Politics and Prose.
“Every word out of his mouth was precise and measured and kind,” Alexander said in a statement to The Washington Post. He added that Mr. Jackson wrote in the same way he spoke, honing a precise and rhythmic style in short poems about childhood and family; Black life and culture; and the wooded landscapes of Vermont, where he went to college and once worked as a teacher and radio host.
Mr. Jackson published two poetry collections, “Fingering the Keys” (1990) — two of its sections were named for songs by Jimi Hendrix and the Bee Gees, while individual poems referenced musicians including John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk — and “Scattered Clouds” (2019). Many of his poems ended with a jolt of sly humor or an unexpected twist, as in the seven-line piece “sunday brunch,” which wryly evoked the class divisions he encountered in college and beyond:
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and where
do your parents
summer?
she asked
him.
the front porch,
he replied.
Perhaps his best-known poem, “For Trayvon Martin,” was a tribute to the Black teenager whose 2012 killing sparked a national reckoning with civil rights and racial profiling. The piece imagined Mr. Jackson in the role of friend and protector, accompanying Martin from a Central Florida convenience store, where the teenager stopped for a snack, to the home of his father’s fiancée, where Martin was headed before being fatally shot by a neighborhood watch volunteer.
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.
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An unloaded gun.
The poem was widely anthologized, although Mr. Jackson had mixed feelings about its success. “As a writer you want to be read,” he told an interviewer, “but this is a poem you wish you hadn’t written. How many times in my life did I go to a convenience store and just make it home?”
Growing up in the Brightwood neighborhood of Northwest Washington, Mr. Jackson played the clarinet and tenor saxophone (he later taught himself guitar) and discovered jazz through his father’s record collection. Music served as a gateway to poetry: As he told it, his literary influences included not only William Carlos Williams and Dylan Thomas but jazz musicians such as Miles Davis, who served as a model through “his use of space and his lyricism.”
“I look at it this way,” Mr. Jackson once told the Washington Times. “Whether it’s a fugue or a sonnet, it’s all composition.”
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Mr. Jackson contributed occasional concert and album reviews to The Washington Post, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” JazzTimes and Washington City Paper, assessing the work of jazz musicians including violinist Regina Carter. “Her tone and phrasing are measured and thoughtful, as if carefully traversing wintery terrain,” he declared in an NPR review.
For two decades, Mr. Jackson also worked as an archivist and curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where he helped organize and safeguard the Duke Ellington Collection, a treasure trove of sheet music, stage costumes, studio tapes, Grammy Awards, music stands and other artifacts connected to the Washington-born jazz pianist, composer and orchestra leader.
Mr. Jackson joined the museum in 1989, shortly after it acquired the bulk of the archive from Ellington’s son, Mercer, for $800,000. Two years later, the museum acquired additional manuscripts and memorabilia from the composer’s sister, Ruth Ellington Boatwright.
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“I consider it a national treasure and one of the jewels in the Smithsonian’s crown,” John Edward Hasse, the museum’s longtime curator of American music, said in an email. Another former museum official, chief archivist John Fleckner, described Mr. Jackson as “an integral part” of the small team that processed the archive, cataloguing and organizing hundreds of thousands of pages and objects that are now accessible to researchers.
In recent years, Mr. Jackson brought his vast knowledge of jazz and popular music to “The Sound of Surprise,” a jazz show on listener-supported WPFW, which he hosted on alternating Sundays with program creator Larry Appelbaum.
“His selections, wrapped in engaging stories, were delightful,” Appelbaum said in an email, recalling how Mr. Jackson “would slip in some surprises like Earth, Wind & Fire or Jimi Hendrix” while bouncing between favorites like Miles Davis, Gil Evans and Frank Sinatra. “He was the best partner I could have imagined.”
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The younger of two sons, Reuben Meredith Jackson was born in Augusta, Ga., on Oct. 1, 1956, and grew up in Washington. His mother was an elementary school teacher, his father an engineer for the electric company Pepco.
Interviewed by poet and radio host Grace Cavalieri, Mr. Jackson said he was the sort of kid who would exasperate classmates by listening to records in his basem*nt, saying things like, “Listen to what the cello’s doing in the fifth bar.”
“And my friends would say, ‘Oh, Reuben, let’s go play ball.’ ”
Mr. Jackson began writing poetry as a sophom*ore at Western High School, now the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. He went on to study writing at Goddard College, a small experimental school in Plainfield, Vt., which he said he learned about through a blurb in the Saturday Evening Post, while flipping through the magazine to stave off boredom at a party.
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After graduating in 1978, he received a master’s degree in library science from the University of the District of Columbia and worked his way up at the Smithsonian, starting from a job in the gift shop of the National Air and Space Museum.
Mr. Jackson retired from the National Museum of American History in 2009. For a few years he moved back to Vermont, leading poetry workshops at Goddard, teaching high school English in Burlington and hosting a Friday night jazz show for Vermont Public Radio. He returned to Washington to work as a jazz archivist at the University of the District of Columbia.
About two years ago, he met his partner Michelle, his only immediate survivor, an artist who makes handbags from recycled and vintage textiles. The couple lived in Brookland, in Northeast Washington, and planned to marry later this year.
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Mr. Jackson was previously married and divorced three times, to Jackie Hunter, Theresa Esterlund and Karen Conner.
Early in his career, he said he had trouble finding outlets for his writing, especially poems that featured Black themes or imagery. “If I write something about a waterfall, they say, ‘Okay, Reuben, but lay off that dreadlock stuff,’ ” he told The Post in 1987.
But he found support from older, more established Black poets — including Washington’s E. Ethelbert Miller — and turned his disappointment into verse. One of those pieces, filled with musical references and titled “At the Negotiating Table of the Muse,” ran in part in The Post and announced his ambition:
I’m so tired of pink slips, poetry competitions whose crowning glory is
bus fare,
audiences too literary to feel.
give me b flats for adjectives,
a 25 piece band,
And I'll revive the two-step single-handedly;
criminals will put down their handguns
and do wop under the streetlights again
I’ll wine and dine you like no pulitzer winner ever could
