Marilyn Nelson 101

In numerous poetry collections, children’s books, translations, and anthologies, acclaimed writer Marilyn Nelson weds an unusual pair of aesthetic virtues: restlessness and rootedness. In an extensive and extraordinary oeuvre, Nelson rewrites Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, addresses a Benedictine monk, and even chronicles a noisy lark and a silent ostrich. But her work also shows an abiding commitment to representing African American experiences, to passing on under-sung stories and capturing lives that could otherwise fade into obscurity. In what she calls “lyric histories,” Nelson makes music of both triumph and tragedy, focusing on subjects that range from Emmett Till to the Tuskegee Airmen to Seneca Village, New York’s first prominent community of free Black people. Her clear, open-hearted voice allows her to speak to readers of all ages, though even in her writing for kids, she’s an unflinching observer of racism and sexism and a craftsperson of the highest order. Indeed, following Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden, Nelson has forged a formalist poetics that not only lays claim to the full Anglo-American poetic tradition but also expands its toolkit in significant ways. She has an artisan’s feel for structure, a novelist’s ear for character, a researcher’s eye for detail. Arranged chronologically, this brief selection of Nelson’s poetry should give readers a sense of her many talents and the scale of her contribution to American literature.

“Mama’s Promise”
As is typical of her earliest work, this poem from Nelson’s second book is composed in free verse. Rather than counting syllables and stresses, Nelson measures her line by how it contours her crystalline imagery (“the dangerous highway / curves”) or underscores the swerves of her syntax (“the death I’ve given away / is more mine than the one I’ve kept”). Still, much here anticipates her more formal, historically motivated later work. In the poem’s ending, for example, Nelson resolves the central problem (that “it’s not so simple to give a child birth” because “you also have to give it death”) by recalling her own mother’s advice and finding solace in past lives and experiences. 

“The House on Moscow Street”
In The Homeplace, a finalist for the 1991 National Book Award, Nelson begins her career-long investigations of African American history with her own family tree. Its opening sequence traces her lineage back to her great-great-grandmother Diverne, a slave in Mississippi, and tells the stories of her descendants. This poem introduces us to this cast of characters and where they live, describing the “ragged source of memory” that gives both the poem and the collection its name. Like the humble objects she praises—the “catfish,” “turnip greens,” and “musty, much-underlined Bibles”—Nelson’s writing connects her and us to “generations lost,” preserving them in writing “to be found,” again and again, by future readers.

“Lonely Eagles”
The Homeplace also marked Nelson’s turn toward a formalist poetics and an enduring engagement with traditional meter and form. “Daughters 1900,” for example, tells a story within the tight confines of the villanelle. This looser piece blends ode and elegy, paying homage to her father’s “family,” his “old friends” who flew fighter planes during World War II, when there were still “segregated airstrips” and “separate camps.” Though written in free verse, the short, telegraphic lines here are musically rich. The buried end rhyme of “22” and “do” in the first stanza, for instance, subtly emphasizes the extra bind that Black airmen were subject to. The poem’s chilling ending, spoken in an airman’s voice, confronts us with another dilemma of the war: how best to honor the memories and things of those lost in combat.

“Minor Miracle”
Nelson’s light touch as a writer—her folksy humor and utter clarity—belies both her moral seriousness and serious talent. But there’s nothing minor about her work, which often produces poetic miracles, as in this narrative about the devastating everydayness of racism. She expertly controls the tone and pacing here, and her deadpan, end-stopped lines create moments of shared exasperation (“My friend and I looked at each other and shook our heads”) and horrifying anticipation (“The afternoon froze”). But the poem’s most resounding moment comes from its ending, which leaves us in silence, wondering, like the speaker, what just happened. It’s important that Nelson makes little of the white man’s odd apology, deriving no real lesson from it. Instead, she regards its memory as a kind of charm or defense for when, inevitably, the specter of white supremacy again rears its ugly head.

“Green-Thumb Boy”
The persona poem is the defining form of Nelson’s book Carver: A Life in Poems (2001), a George Washington Carver biography in verse that presents many different perspectives to paint a portrait of the scientist and inventor. Like her subject, Nelson is an impressive “collector,” one with a “gift for observation,” at least when it comes to the rhythms and patterns of speech: she’s able to evoke a wide range of characters in just a few words. In “Watkins Laundry and Apothecary,” for instance, she channels the voice of a kindly washerwoman from Missouri. In this later poem, Green-Thumb Boy, she speaks as “Dr. L. H. Pammel,” a colleague of Carver’s. Within the short span of his dramatic monologue, Nelson captures multiple sides of the white scientist, mixing the man’s genuine admiration for Carver with notes of paternalism, showing us how even Carver’s more accepting colleagues glimpsed “the light of [his] genius / through the dusky window of his skin.”

from Miss Crandall’s Boarding School for Young Ladies of Color
Over the course of her career, Nelson has proved herself a virtuosic technician, especially when it comes to the sonnet, a form she has returned to again and again. In her award-winning A Wreath of Her Emmett Till, a heroic crown allows Nelson to reckon with even the most horrifying suffering. In this selection from a book created in collaboration with Elizabeth Alexander, Nelson puts the sonnet to a variety of innovative and surprising uses. “Worth” is a majestic and defiant meditation on the twisted logic of chattel slavery and blood quantum. In “Miss Ann Eliza Hammond,” Nelson brings humor and Black vernacular to the staid form. “The Tao of the Trial” mines the sonnet for narrative and utterly recasts its typical stanzaic patterns. “Open Secret” inverts the typical Petrarchan shape and finds room within a Shakespearean rhyme scheme for both dazzling anaphora and chiasmus.

“The Boley Rodeo”
First published in Poetry in April 2019, this lyric history focuses on the oldest Black rodeo in the United States, which still operates in Boley, Oklahoma, the town in which Nelson’s mother grew up. Each of the sequence’s ten unrhymed sonnets depicts an event from the competition in visceral detail, putting readers down in the ring as “thunder explodes out of the shoot” or atop a saddle, “swinging your loop.” These utterly clear descriptions not only capture the texture and feel of barrel racing and team roping but also pay tribute to a site of Black work, joy, and resilience. At the rodeo, “in brown hands,” she writes, “a rope isn’t always a noose.” Later, she likens African American experience to hanging onto a bucking “bronc called America.” It’s a figure that nicely sums up Nelson’s invaluable work, which ties together the brief “four seconds” on horseback and the long “four hundred years” of Black history in the Americas.