Storied History

Marilyn Nelson has the gift of sight. I don’t mean clairvoyance. I mean Nelson has a gift for seeing poems in ways other poets might not. I mean Nelson has a gift for seeing the mere merit of masterworks. She insists, “I don’t know a better way to deepen a relationship with the ‘traditional’ canon than by reading the work deeply and with one ear pressed to the history in which it was written.” I mean through her masterful works, we reap the benefits of her seeing. She accesses a literary history before and beyond herself, enlivened by her every attempt to articulate the terror and beauty we all experience.

Nelson is the author or translator of more than 20 books for children and adults, including Carver: A Life in Poems (1995), The Fields of Praise (1997), The Cachoeira Tales (2005), and A Wreath for Emmett Till (2005). She is a three-time finalist for the National Book Award, a winner of the Robert Frost Medal, and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other honors. She also served as Connecticut’s poet laureate from 2001 to 2006. She is the recipient of the 2019 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

In the critical essay “Owning the Masters,” you write, “For [Black people and women] the labor is twofold: there is the labor of studying the literature, then there is the additional labor of rising above its time-bound limitations.” How have you managed this labor?

I wrote that essay 25 years ago; I wasn’t even 50 yet. I was living under the weight of my German husband’s name. Being a student of literature—you young whippersnappers don’t know what it was like to be an English major in the 1960s—learning to appreciate, to love, the masterworks of the great, mostly white, mostly male Western Canon requires labor for Black people and women. More labor now, I suspect, than in the past. Have I managed this labor? I don’t know.

One of my books is an African American “take” on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. One of the works I’m proudest of is a rendition of Euripides’s Hecuba. On the other hand, another of my books retells one of the two earliest American slave narratives. I guess I’m trying to be true to the diverse canon of writers and works I love.

What was it like being an English major in the sixties?

In 1964, I enrolled as a freshman at the University of California at Davis (UCD). I don’t know the exact size of the student body at that time—probably something like 14,000, of whom five or six of us were African American (or, in the language of the time, Negro). I was “the only one” in my classes, reading what were then considered the essential authors and works in the canon, getting A’s for my papers and exams, and treated with what I still believe was respect and affection by most of my professors. I don’t remember reading any work by a non-white author in any course and few by women. Maybe there was a nod to Frederick Douglass in an American literature survey, but I’m not sure. Classes were lectures presented by white male professors; students asked questions. The desks-in-a-circle discussion model didn’t come to UCD until about 1967, and there was no Black literature course taught there until after I graduated. 

We students started an “experimental college” in 1967 in which students taught courses we ourselves wanted to take. I taught the Black literature course. My first introduction to Black literature was as a teacher, not a student. In fact, the only course in which I remember reading a work by a Black author was a contemporary drama course. Near the end of the semester, the professor walked up and down the aisles carrying a hat with slips of paper on which were written titles of plays. Each student was to take a slip from the hat and write a paper about that play. When he came to me, he took a slip of paper from his pocket: A Raisin in the Sun. I’m sure he meant well, but I was furious. Why hadn’t he put that title with the others, so a white student might have written about it? My final paper was a savage attack on the play. I don’t remember what I wrote, but I wrote it to shock him.

And the not-so-well-meaning professors?

There was one.

I was fascinated by medieval literature [and] took every course taught by the department’s medievalist as well as a couple of medieval history courses. (I suppose I was motivated by an interest in romance and fantasy, similar to what makes people fans of Game of Thrones.) Unfortunately—or fortunately—the professor who taught medieval literature was the one professor in the department with whom I did not have a warm relationship, though I took every undergraduate course he taught. I quickly learned that if I wanted to talk to him in his office, I had to ask a white male friend to go with me. My friend Paul, who had no interest in medieval literature and never took a course from this professor, would sit beside me in the professor’s office. I asked my questions, and the professor addressed his responses to Paul.

My senior year, Paul and I went together to ask this man to write a letter of recommendation for me to a graduate program in medieval studies. “Have you taken Latin?” the professor asked. Of course I hadn’t—no one had suggested I do so. The medievalist, who must have grudgingly noticed there was a Black girl acing his exams, hadn’t considered offering this piece of advice.

Medieval studies. American slave narratives. Biographical poems. To whom do you owe your obsession with history?

I trace my interest in history to my mother and the Atwood family of Hickman, Kentucky. My mother’s family was interested in its history. They held on to stories and passed them down, and a couple of Mama’s aunts tried to write family histories. My great-uncle Rufus B. Atwood, who was for many years the president of Kentucky State College, published his memoir, which may apparently soon be reissued by the University of Kentucky Press. Living history doesn’t necessarily make you obsessed with history. The obsession comes from wanting to record what you’re living.

There’s so much history from which to choose. How do you come to projects like Carver: A Life in Poems?

After writing a sequence of poems about radical evil and becoming convinced that there is no end to the human capacity for evil, I started to wonder whether there’s a limit to our capacity for good. That led me to decide to write a hagiography: a serious, detailed biography of a saint. I discussed this prospect with friends, and a couple suggested I write about Hildegard of Bingen. I started reading about her, received a research grant to go to Germany, visited every place she lived, bought books about her and CDs of her musical compositions (she was the first female composer in the West), and prepared to start writing.

The first day I sat at my desk to write, I received a call from one of my father’s old Air Force buddies (my father was a Tuskegee Airman), whom I hadn’t heard from—or thought of—for some 35 years. He said he was driving through my state on a trip to visit his daughter and asked if he could stop by for a glass of iced tea. I said yes. I remembered how cool he had been, back when I was 12, a handsome bachelor jet pilot who drove a Cadillac. After our chat over iced tea, he said he had to get going. I walked him to his car (I don’t remember what it was, not a Caddy but snazzy). He opened the trunk because he wanted to give me one of the copies of Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance,” which he always carried around to give to people. As he took the essay out of a box, he said he thought I would also be interested in a brochure he had picked up at the Carver museum he’d visited a few days earlier. Handing me the brochure, he said I should write a book about George Washington Carver.

Watching him drive away, I remembered how much I had loved Carver as a child, and I had one of those forehead-slapping moments of realization: Carver was the saint I should write about! I dropped Hildegard and started a years-long immersion in Carver’s fascinating, inspiring, and humbling life.

A Wreath for Emmet Till. What brought you to that?

Andrea Pinckney, editor and award-winning author, contacted my agent to tell her an idea for a book, which she thought only I could write. But she wouldn’t say what it was until we were together. We made an appointment. There was to be an ice storm in Connecticut the day of our meeting, so I drove down from my home in the boondocks and spent the night in New Haven to be sure I could get to the train. Got to New York and met up with my agent at the publishing company, where we were ushered into Andrea’s office. Andrea said she’d always wanted to publish a book for children about lynching. After I got up from the floor (figuratively speaking but also true), we discussed some possible approaches, and I agreed to give it a try. Some days later, after doing some preliminary research into horrors, I saw that it would make sense to write for children about a child who was lynched, about Emmett Till.  

And The Cachoeira Tales, your Black “take” on The Canterbury Tales?

I really was fascinated with medieval literature and loved Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as an undergrad. On a whim, I applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship to write an African American riff on Chaucer’s great work. When I received the fellowship, my son was on a study abroad program in Bahia. I was able to use the fellowship to make a deal with my sister and brother: I would pay their way to Bahia if they would let me write about them as characters in my poem. (It wasn’t a hard bargain.)

About the composition of the poem: for some reason, it seemed right to write in what I thought of as a bouncy, uneven meter—not smooth. I’m not sure why. And I got so sick of rhyming! I’ll never again write in rhymed couplets. Can’t imagine how Chaucer did that. I was so relieved to reach the end of that poem!

Speaking of meter and form, you studied with Etheridge Knight, a poet not known for his engagement with either. What are some takeaways from your time as his student?

Etheridge was a very good teacher. He offered a private workshop called “The Free People’s Poetry Workshop.”

He insisted that calling a poem “Untitled” is a cop-out, that composing a title is an important part of writing a poem. He taught me to want my poems to be accessible to a wide audience. Perhaps most important for me was his taking us out of the workshop setting and into the community to present—unannounced—public readings. “OK, y’all,” Etheridge would say, “meet me at 7:15 PM at the Burger King on the corner of X and Y.” We’d meet in a crowded fast food restaurant or a café or in a bar; Etheridge would set up his little PA system and say, “OK, y’all, we gon’ read you some poems.” And we would read our poems. No one heckled us or walked out; people slowed down, people listened. They applauded. They acted as though they had been waiting for poetry.

I’ve often told the story of the time we were reading in a bar in Saint Paul. A bedraggled man staggered up to Mary Karr, who was also in the workshop, as she read. He pulled a paper from his pocket and, reeling dizzily, asked Mary to read it. Mary said she would as soon as she had finished reading her poem. When she finished, she took this man’s paper and read it. It was a letter from his wife, asking him to come back to her, telling him she loved him, the children missed him. By the time Mary finished reading the letter, people were wiping their eyes. What I took away from that was that this man realized, after hearing us read our poems, that he had a poem in his pocket that should be shared. That makes me feel humble about my own poems and about the work poems can and should do.

What is the work that poems can and should do?

Saving the world.