94 A Profile of Marilyn Nelson, Poet Extraordinaire 94 Language Arts, Volume 95, Number 2, November...

Language Arts, Volume 95, Number 2, November 2017

Lisa Patrick and Patricia E. Bandré

A Profile of Marilyn Nelson, Poet Extraordinaire

This article features an interview with Marilyn Nelson, the 2017 recipient of the NCTE Excellence in Poetry for

Children Award.

Marilyn Nelson has beennamed the 2017 recipient of the NCTE Excellence in Poetry for Children Award. Established in 1977, the award honors the collec-tive work of a living American poet whose audience is children ages 3– 13. Nelson has won a number of other awards for her exemplary contributions to the field of poetry, including the 2017 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature and a Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. Many of Nelson’s books for children have received accolades, such as the Coretta Scott King Author Honor Award, the Newbery Honor Award, and the Michael L. Printz Honor Award. Recently, we were delighted to visit with Marilyn Nelson to congrat-ulate her on receiving the NCTE Excellence in Poetry for Children Award, discuss certain aspects of her work, talk about some of her recent projects, and glean her advice for sharing poetry.

Marilyn Nelson: Her Work as a PoetWe began our conversation with Nelson by discuss-ing aspects of her writing. To start, we wondered about her decision to write poetry rather than prose. “I’ve always identified as a poet, not a prose writer, and I find writing prose very difficult— tedious, because I try to be as much of a perfectionist on the word- by- word level as I am in a poem, and it takes forever to write a paragraph.”

Prose does, however, contribute to one of her books. In My Seneca Village (2015), Nelson included a short paragraph on the left- hand side of each double- page spread accom-panied by a poem on the right- hand side. The lines read almost like stage directions, setting the scene for the poem that follows. In the collection, Nelson penned the imagined lives of the residents of Seneca Village, a community of African Ameri-

cans and people from other ethnic groups that existed from 1825 to 1857 in the Upper West Side of New York City. Razed under the guise of eminent domain, the land became what is currently Central Park. Ini-tially, Nelson explained, she wrote the prose passages to help a potential illustrator visualize the scene: “I was trying to describe that they were the same people appearing over the course of the poem.” After show-ing it to her publisher, a decision was made to pub-lish the passages alongside the poems, rather than to include illustrations. The passages “were not written to be beautiful. They were written to be clues about what I was seeing. One of the many good points about doing this is that you get to imagine these people. You have to create them in your mind; whereas, if it had been illustrated by a painter, you would only be able to see that painter’s vision. It gives you a lot more room to imagine.” The idea to publish the passages, Nelson says, “was a stroke of genius.”

Although Nelson has written many types of poems incorporating a variety of poetic forms, she

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Lisa Patrick and Patricia E. Bandré | a ProfilE of MarilyN NElSoN, PoET ExTraorDiNairE

considers some more challenging than others. While writing A Wreath for Emmett Till (2005), Nelson explains, “The form almost killed me.” Writing the book was an amazing experience, but the sheer num-ber of rhymes prompted her to vow “never to do any-thing like that again.” The book is written in a heroic crown of sonnets, a form in which the last line of one sonnet becomes the first line of the next sonnet. The final sonnet is composed of the first lines from the preceding fourteen sonnets. According to Nel-son: “The strict form became a kind of insulation, a way of protecting myself from the intense pain of the subject matter” (Engberg, 2005, p. 970), that of a 14- year- old African American boy who was lynchedin 1955 for allegedly whistling at a White woman.

Sweethearts of Rhythm (2009), illustrated by Jerry Pinkney, challenged Nelson in a different way. For their story of the greatest all- girl swing band in the world, she and Pinkney agreed to do something that neither had ever done before. For Pinkney, it was adding collage to his repertoire of illustration media. For Nelson, it was writing poems in what she calls “triple meter.” Writing in iambic pentameter, which Nelson describes as “double meter,” comes easily for

her; it is her natural internal rhythm. But in Sweet-hearts of Rhythm, each poem utilizes triple meter to some extent— a meter with three syllable feet that is much harder to write. In this form, an accented syl-lable follows two unaccented syllables. In “Jump, Jump, Jump,” the rhythmic pattern is evident in the first line: “From ballroom to ballroom the unsleep-ing eye of Jim Crow” (n.p.). Nelson explains that the English language tends to be iambic in nature, so forcing it into a triple meter is “hard work.” She found a role model in the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, a 19th- century African American poet whose triple meter poems Nelson described as wonderfully natu-ral sounding. When asked how it felt to return to writ-ing in double meter after the challenge of writing in triple, Nelson offered an illuminating analogy: “Have you ever been on vacation in a country which speaks

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the language you studied in high school? It’s like that.” Nelson shared that she, along with her son and his wife, vacationed for a week in a Spanish- speaking country. During the day, they spoke Spanish, but in the evening they reverted to speaking English over dinner together. “It was as if in Spanish we were walking around with weights tied to us. And speaking in English again, you know we could fly.”

In addition to writing her own pieces, Nelson translates texts, which she says she loves to do. Many years ago, she lived in Denmark for a year and learned enough Danish to translate the poetry of Halfdan Rasmussen (1982, 2006, 2011), one of the greatest Danish poets. Nelson collaborated with her friend, Pamela Espeland, on translating some of Rasmus-sen’s nonsense verse for children. She also worked on a project with a friend she met in Denmark, Inge Pedersen. Nelson translated Pedersen’s (2005) poems into English, and Pedersen translated Nelson’s poems into Danish. Nelson described the project as “a joy.”

A third project involved translating Hecuba, a play by Euripides (Slavitt & Bovie, 1998). Although Nelson did not know any Greek, she was able to use a number of earlier translations of the play to aid her in the process. In essence, she translated line- by- line from these translations, trying to capture what the translators had seen in the original, all the while trying to avoid using their exact language. Nelson described the project as challenging and compared it to a puzzle. For each line, she would examine the different ver-sions of that line and try to figure out what was behind each. “It was kind of like steering a ship between boul-ders, so you don’t run aground.” Nelson felt that her knowledge and experience as a poet gave her a unique perspective with regard to visualizing and interpreting metaphors. The project allowed her “to confront the genius” of Euripides. Nelson likens her experience of working with Hecuba to that of standing in front of “a towering volcano.” This volcano had a deeply emotional impact on Nelson. She wept through the entire writing of her translation. She would come home from teaching, sit at her desk at night, open up the various translations, and start working line by line, “weeping because the poetry is so beautiful and the pain described is so palpable. I knew that I was serv-ing a writer who was a true genius.”

Recent ProjectsNext, we asked about Nelson’s recent projects. First, she mentioned The Meeting House, a col-lection of poems published in September of 2016 by Antrim House. Nelson researched and wrote poems about the history of the First Congregational Church in Old Lyme, Connecticut, a project she described as “a real pleasure.” The town is located on the shoreline, so its economy was closely tied to shipping. Thus, many sea captains lived in the town, and the community was involved with the Trian-gle Trade during the first 150 years of the church’s history. According to the book’s description on the publisher’s website, Nelson’s poems focus on “slav-ery and bigotry in a presumably enlightened part of the Union. Her dismay is leavened by generosity of spirit” (Antrim House, n.d., para. 1).

The other project she discussed is an anthology, Mrs. Nelson’s Class, which was published in Janu-ary of 2017 by World Enough Writers. Growing up, Nelson’s father, Melvin M. Nelson, was a lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force, and her mother was a teacher. An 8"×10" photograph that belonged to Marilyn’s mother, Johnnie Mitchell Nelson, sparked the book. In this photograph, Mrs. Nelson sits at a teacher’s desk surrounded by 20 White children. It was the 1954– 55 school year, less than one year after the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, civil rights ruling. At the time, Nelson and her family lived near Salina, Kansas, where her father was stationed at Smoky Hill Air Force Base. Her mother taught second grade at the base school. “I’ve always thought this was history,” Nelson said, “the fact that somewhere in Salina that very same year there was a class of 20 White children taught by a Black teacher. There were no Black students.”

In the book, Nelson wrote through the voice of her mother, and she recruited other poets, all of whom are White, to write as the students. “Each of them chose one of the children from the photo-graph to be, and then they wrote brief biographical sketches of who they thought these kids were. They gave them names and then they wrote poems in their voices.” Interestingly, few of the poems address race directly, and Nelson finds that pleasing. “For

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some of them, they describe children who just kind of didn’t see the problem and whose parents did.” Nelson described the project as a “labor of love” that could be read and understood by a wide range of ages because the poems “work on different lev-els.” Nelson explained that through this project, the poets “have become a community although they don’t even all know each other.”

Sharing PoetryPoetry can unite people. In our work with class-room teachers, we teach them how important it is to share poetry all year, not just in April during National Poetry Month. Nelson agrees. When asked about using poetry in the classroom, Nelson advises teachers to stop thinking of poetry as only being “written out of inspiration” or only as “descriptions of flowers or trees or something in a landscape.” There are poems that fit those descriptions, but poetry is so much more. Nelson advises: “I would say that what teachers need to do is read [poetry] for the subject matter. Children don’t need to be told the rhyme scheme. They’ll notice stuff like that any-way. Give them the subject matter.” Unfortunately, teachers do not always think of poetry in this way. “They have poetry anxiety the way I have math anx-iety,” Nelson said. “They look at something and it looks like a poem and their brain turns off. . . . they think ‘I’m never going to understand that’ and it’s because they’ve been poorly taught about poetry.” Nelson complimented Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong on their work with the Poetry Friday Anthol-ogy for Science (2012) series: “I’m so impressed with what they’re doing because there is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to introduce a scientific concept via a poem about the concept.”

Poetry plays an important role in the class-room, but its place in society must be recognized and celebrated as well. In her role as Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets, Nelson is able to share poetry in the world at large. According to Nel-son, the chancellors “are part of a large scheme of reaching out on behalf of poetry.” She was elected Chancellor in 2013, and she describes her member-ship in this honorary group of esteemed poets as “a terrific honor.” Nelson is quite humble with regard

to the Board of Chancellors: “I always feel like I’m the lightweight one in the group. I’m there with all of these shining lights, and I feel like my bulb is par-tially out.” However, Fellow Chancellor, Arthur Sze, greeted the news of her election by stating: “Mari-lyn Nelson’s poetry is remarkable for its sheer range of voice and style, for its historical roots, and for its lyrical narratives that, replete with luminous details, unfold with an emotional force that, ultimately, becomes praise. . . . She is a vital ambassador of poetry” (Academy of American Poets, n.d. para. 6).

As we talked, Nelson shared her love for read-ing and reflecting on poetry. When asked if there was a poet whom Nelson liked to revisit, she iden-tified Emily Dickinson. Nelson told us that she had recently pulled out The Life of Emily Dickinson (Sewall, 1974), as well as a collection of the poet’s letters, to read in her free time. She spent several years reading through Dickinson’s collected poems and wrote out those that she found “particularly wonderful” to create her own personal poetry collec-tion. She once attended an Emily Dickinson Society convention that included a memorial tea at the hotel in Washington, DC where Dickinson and her father had tea together. Nelson shared that she could “go on and on and on” about Dickinson and about the com-munity of Dickinson readers and scholars because they form “a loving community well worth getting involved with.” Time spent surrounded by friends while sharing poetry is indeed time well spent.

We have formed our own Marilyn Nelson Soci-ety, and the membership requirements are quite simple. All you have to do is sit back, relax, and enjoy the wealth of poetry Marilyn Nelson has to offer. Read it with your students. Share it with your colleagues. We welcome you in our community devoted to a Poet Extraordinaire.

ReferencesAcademy of American Poets. (n.d.). Poet Marilyn Nelson.

Retrieved from https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet /marilyn- nelson

Antrim House. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://antrimhouse books.com/nelson.html

Engberg, G. (2005). Review of the book A wreath for Emmett Till, by Marilyn A. Nelson. Booklist, 101, 970.

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Nelson, M. (2016). The meeting house. Simsbury, CT: Antrim House.

Nelson, M. (Ed.). (2017). Mrs. Nelson’s class. Tillamook, OR: World Enough Writers.

Sewall, R. B, (1974). The life of Emily Dickinson. New York, NY: Farrar Straus & Giroux.

Children’s Literature CitedNelson, M. (2005). A wreath for Emmett Till (P. Lardy,

Illus.). New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin.

Nelson, M. (2009). Sweethearts of rhythm: The story of the greatest all- girl swing band in the world (J. Pinkney, Illus.). New York, NY: Dial.

Nelson, M. (2015). My Seneca village. South Hampton, NH: Namelos.

Vardell, S., & Wong, J. (2012). The poetry Friday anthology: Poems for the school year with connections to the common core. Princeton, NJ: Pomelo.

Translated Books CitedPedersen, I. (2005). The thirteenth month (M. Nelson,

Trans.). Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College Press.

Rasmussen, H. (1982). Hundreds of hens and other poems for children (M. Nelson & P. Espeland, Trans.; D. M. Robinson, Illus.). Minneapolis, MN: Black Willow Press.

Rasmussen, H. (2006). The ladder (M. Nelson, Trans.; P. Pratt, Illus.). Somerville, MA: Candlewick.

Rasmussen, H. (2011). A little bitty man and other poems for the very young (M. Nelson & P. Espeland, Trans.; K. Hawkes, Illus.). Somerville, MA: Candlewick.

Slavitt, D. R., & Bovie, P. (Eds.). (1998). Euripides, 1: Hecuba (M. Nelson, Trans.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

A Sampling of Marilyn Nelson’s Books

Books for Young ChildrenNelson, M. (2009). Beautiful ballerina (S. Kuklin, Illus.).

New York, NY: Scholastic.

Nelson, M. (2010). Snook alone (T. B. Ering, Illus.). Somerville, MA: Candlewick.

Nelson, M. (2012). Ostrich and lark (San Artists of the Kuru Art Project of Botswana, Illus.). Honesdale, PA: Boyds Mills Press.

Books for Young AdultsAlexander, E., & Nelson, M. (2007). Miss Crandall’s school

for young ladies & little misses of color (F. Cooper, Illus.). Honesdale, PA: Wordsong.

Nelson, M. (2001). Carver: A life in poems. Asheville, NC: Front Street.

Nelson, M. (2004). Fortune’s bones: The manumission requiem. Asheville, NC: Front Street.

Nelson, M. (2008). The freedom business: Including a narrative of the life & adventures of Venture, a native of Africa (D. Muirhead, Illus.). Honesdale, PA: Wordsong.

Nelson, M. (2014). How I discovered poetry. New York, NY: Dial Books.

Nelson, M. (2016). American ace. New York, NY: Dial Books.

A Sampling of Marilyn Nelson’s Awards

Book AwardsBoston Globe– Horn Book Award

• 2001 Carver: A Life in Poems (Winner)

• 2005 A Wreath for Emmett Till (Honor)

Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book• 2002 Carver: A Life in Poems

• 2005 Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem

• 2006 A Wreath for Emmett Till

• 2015 How I Discovered Poetry

Flora Stieglitz Straus Award• 2002: Carver: A Life in Poems

Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry

• 2005: Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem

• 2016: My Seneca Village

Michael L. Printz Honor• 2006 A Wreath for Emmett Till

Newbery Honor• 2002: Carver: A Life in Poems

Poetry Awards• 2012 The Poetry Society of America Frost Medal

• 2013 Elected a Chancellor of the Academy ofAmerican Poets

• 2017 NCTE Award for Excellence in Poetry forChildren

• 2017 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature

Lisa Patrick is a literacy collaborative and reading recovery trainer at The Ohio State University and

has been an NCTE member since 2006. She can be contacted at [email protected]. Patricia E.

Bandré, NCTE member since 2005, is the reading instructional specialist for USD 305, Salina Public

Schools in Salina, Kansas. She can be contacted at [email protected].

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