Introduction

Carolyn Marie Rodgers, born in Chicago in 1940, established herself as a major influence on the direction of Black poetry early on in her writing career. Publishing regularly in John H. Johnson’s Negro Digest/Black World in the late 1960s, she quickly became a rising star. By the time she was thirty, Rodgers had won both a Society of Midland Authors Award and the first Conrad Kent Rivers Writing Award, named in posthumous honor of a fellow Chicago poet at the vanguard of the contemporary scene. Her first collections, Paper Soul (1968) and Songs of a Black Bird (1969), both published with the Third World Press imprint she cofounded, emerged as germinal works in the burgeoning Black Arts Movement.

Rodgers came up through a grassroots community of writers on Chicago’s South Side who wanted to forge for Black poetry a literary style and critical vocabulary of its own. As a founding member of the OBAC (Organization of Black American Culture) Writers’ Workshop, she received the mentorship of prominent critic Hoyt W. Fuller. She also developed her chops at the Gwendolyn Brooks Writers’ Workshop, building a lasting bond with another mentor and cementing ties with peers. Alongside her Third World Press cofounders Johari Amini and Haki R. Madhubuti, Rodgers helped make Chicago a hub for the younger Black poets attempting to define the terms of an aesthetic revolution. Rodgers led by example, both in her poetry and her criticism.

In 1975 Rodgers broke through to the national mainstream. That year she released her collection How I Got Ovah: New and Selected Poems with Anchor/Doubleday, a large commercial press. The book would go on to become a National Book Award finalist. To many the collection signaled a new spiritual turn in Rodgers’s work, a shift from the revolutionary impulse of poems like “Black against the Muthafuckas” from her 1969 Third World Press pamphlet 2 Love Raps. Now Rodgers was singing about love in a higher key. “Some Me of Beauty,” a crucial poem in How I Got Ovah, concludes with the following lines:

i felt a spiritual transformation
         a root revival of love
    and i knew that many things
         were over
and some me of—beauty—
                                               was about to begin.

Rodgers’s 1978 collection, The Heart as Ever Green, also with Anchor/Doubleday, proved that she had only just begun to plumb the theme of spiritual transformation. Rodgers wasn’t losing sight of the social urgency that had impelled her as a poet of the civil rights struggle. But she was recasting her idea of liberation in terms of a more universal humanism, for which she found a suitable language in metaphors of protean but perdurable nature. “The Black Heart as Ever Green” describes the poet’s inner core as “green/like a light/in the world, for freedom/for/what is to come/what we must know/what we must be.” With a simple shift into parallel structure in those last lines, Rodgers was kicking things into sermon mode. Her poetry was soaring to new heights.

However, by 1980, Rodgers herself was starting to fly under the radar. That year she made a decisive shift in her career and began publishing her poetry in small handmade chapbooks through her own Eden Press imprint. This independent operation would remain a cornerstone of her publishing activity for the rest of her life, and she’d never release a collection with a major publishing house again.

While her literary celebrity abated, Rodgers pursued an active career as a teaching writer in Chicago. Nevertheless, public perception often had Rodgers in the part of the reclusive and obscure poet. The title of a 2018 essay by Oakland, California–based writer and activist Judy Juanita, Rodgers’s friend, summed up what many readers might have thought about her subject: “Whatever Happened to Carolyn M. Rodgers?”

As Juanita herself was quick to note, Rodgers had kept busy writing for years, confident in her revamped role as “philosopher-poet exploring the human condition.” Rodgers was writing poems well into the final years of the cancer that took her life in 2010, though by that time tragedy had already befallen her legacy-in-the-making. In January 2006 Rodgers reported that flooding in a storage space had destroyed large parts of her personal archive. Along with other papers, several Eden Press titles authored by Rodgers and listed in her bios and bibliographies are now thought to be lost. But what remains of those poetry collections is a consummate—and largely unseen—body of work.

This folio gathers poems from five of Rodgers’s Eden Press chapbooks: Translation (1980), Morning Glory (1989), We’re Only Human (1994), A Train Called Judah (1998), and Affirmation (2005). The selection begins, though, with the final poem of The Heart as Ever Green, a text that foreshadowed the spiritual reaches of Rodgers’s work to come. In this poem, titled “Translation (Thinking of Enoch) for Black People,” Rodgers set the stage for the Eden Press collection Translation, and ended with a pronouncement:

we will continue to be
constant
to flux
into each other
and surmount
the itinerant style of
the incalculable storms.

The poem demonstrates Rodgers’s emerging mix of natural imagery, religious symbolism, and social awareness. Written explicitly “for Black People,” the poem can be read as a statement on Rodgers’s friction and hope for reconciliation with fellow poets of her more militant era; it can also be read as an allegory for the status of intraracial divisions at the end of  the Black Power era.

As this folio attests, Rodgers ventured often into meditations on matters of public concern and portraits of people. Sometimes the distinction between the two was purposefully hazy. Included among this selection of poems is a pointillist elegy for Gwendolyn Brooks, her longtime mentor. (More than thirty years earlier, Rodgers had written and published another honorific poem for a literary guiding light, “For H. W. Fuller.”) The selection ends with two poems Rodgers composed near the end of her life on the 2008 election of  President Barack Obama.

Taken together, the poems in this folio reveal two intertwined facets of the “spiritual transformation” that launched Rodgers into the middle and later phases of her career. First, her spiritual turn is less about an embrace of any religious orthodoxy and more about a reorientation toward the divine character of experience—the poet’s raw material. Rodgers takes up the interior space of poetry and makes it an entryway into visionary experience. Second, Rodgers’s spiritual turn is hardly a turn away from social and political concerns. Rather, spirituality enables a new poetic stance toward social relationships and historical events. The result for Rodgers is a poetry of ethical vision and moral statement.

Take the theme of nationhood that recurs throughout these poems. In “Translation (Thinking of Enoch) for Black People,” nationhood is about agonistic intraracial union—about the sometimes arduous process of bolstering Black unity, and about the healing process needed when it wavers. In “Affirmation: A Monologue Poem,” written a quarter of a century later, nationhood is about “Black Spirit” as a force operating in history, through the actions of Black women in particular, and bending the moral arc of the universe toward justice, ending in a state of apotheosis that echoes Margaret Walker’s “For My People.” In “What a Mighty Long Way,” the theme takes shape in the image of “the nation knot,” which evokes both the shared Black American destiny to which Obama’s electoral victory gave an exclamation point, and the promise of a more perfect union that Obama’s campaign articulated for the country as a whole.

Rodgers aimed for a poetry of public voice equipped to make propositions and declarations on matters of state—matters of the most general import—with all of the resources won from a Black woman’s experience. It’s a voice that deserves an audience as far-ranging as its own aspirations.