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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT
The Poetry Magazine Podcast

Nelson: Writing in form is a wonderful way of discovering something that you don't know. 

[music]

Amos: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m Holly Amos. 

This week... form. Thoughts on form from two of the most celebrated authors writing for young readers today: Nikki Grimes and Marilyn Nelson. 

Their work spans generations, geographies, and reaches readers of all ages. The impact Nelson and Grimes have had on the field of writing for younger audiences is profound. And both are featured in this month’s special issue of Poetry dedicated to poems for young people.

Both Nelson and Grimes agree that, for young writers, playing with poetic constraints can create an expansive world to write within. Today, we hear about two of their favourite poetic forms as well as excerpts from both of their memoirs in verse.  

Here’s Marilyn Nelson and then Nikki Grimes:

Nelson: A lot of young poets start a poem knowing what they want to say. And I say, you know, what you need to do is add some kind of form that allows you to be surprised because you don't want to know where the poem is going. 

Grimes: Having those structures and limitations creates a wonderful creative freedom.

Amos: One of Grimes’ favorite poetic forms is called the Golden Shovel. It was created by the poet Terrance Hayes in homage to Gwendolyn Brooks. In a Golden Shovel poem, the last words of each line are borrowed from an existing poem – and the borrowed language is usually a complete phrase – or even a complete poem. In the case of the original Golden Shovel poem, Hayes ended each line with a word from Brooks’ seminal “We Real Cool”.   

[POEM: Brooks reading We Real Cool] 

This poem was first published in 1959. Almost 60 years later, The Golden Shovel Anthology came out, featuring hundreds of poems honoring Brooks and experimenting with the form Hayes had created. When Grimes was asked to contribute a poem to the anthology, it was the first time she tried writing in the golden shovel form.

Grimes: Oh my god I was obsessed. It felt very sculptural to me. The way a sculptor has a block of wood or clay and he’s whittling away and you’re trying to find the piece that is inside of that. And so there’s always this wonderful surprise because I have no idea what this piece is going to look like. 

Amos: One of Grimes’ most recent works is solely written in the golden shovel form. It’s a book called Legacy, which introduces young readers to the women poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Harlem herself, she has always felt connected to that lineage of poets. But reading their work, she started to wonder...

Grimes: Where are the women? There just were three or four and I knew there had to be more than that. And I thought, where are they? I didn’t find 10 or 20, I found more like 70. 

Amos: One of the poems Grimes drew from was Esther Popel’s 1934 "Flag Salute," about the lynching of George Armwood in Princess Anne, Maryland. The first line of "Flag Salute" also uses borrowed language, this time from the pledge of allegiance. 

Grimes: The line I borrowed is I pledge allegiance to the flag. And she’s talking about you know what, we have this great pledge. But, you know, how much are we living up to it? And so with that one line, I pledge allegiance to the flag. I wrote “A Mother's Lament”.

Amos: Here’s the poem... 

[Poem: A Mother’s Lament]

Amos: Here’s one more in the Golden Shovel form... then we’ll move on to explore one of Marilyn Nelson’s favorite forms.       

Grimes: I wanted to write something about the state of the earth and climate change and what’s going on in that realm. 

Amos: Grimes found a line in Angelina Weld Grimké’s poem “At the Spring Dawn,” which gave her a place to begin.  

Grimes: And the line was “and the red sun shouldered his way up” and i think it was red sun that sparked something in me and so i wrote a poem called “faithful”.

[POEM Grimes’ Faithful] 

[Music]

Nelson: What I've been experimenting with in the last few years has been pushing rhyme beyond its limits.

Amos: Here’s Marilyn Nelson. 

Nelson: So instead of having words that rhyme to the ear or to the eye, I've been rhyming words that are linked conceptually.

Amos: In Nelson’s book My Seneca Village, she delves into the history of a 19th-century settlement of mostly African American landowners on the island of Manhattan that was decimated, in part, by the creation of Central Park. 

Amos: Not only did she pour over census records and written accounts to imagine the lives of the residents - a reverend, a music teacher, tub-men hauling sewage to the river, an abolitionist and activist –  she also wrote poems from the perspective of these residents using a complex approach to rhyming. We won’t hear an entire poem today, but here’s a sense of the form...

Nelson: What I was working with is a poem in which there are two kinds of lines of rhymes. There is the normal rhyme of words that sound alike like down and town are normal rhymes. But then I also experimented with conceptual rhymes.

Amos: The conceptual rhymes change. In one example, Nelson combines sonic rhyming with opposites. 

Nelson: So in that same stanza. One of the words is day and the other one is night. So the rhymes are day down, night town. 

It would be really difficult for a reader to decipher that quickly. 

Nelson: In the third stanza, the rhymes are poor and rich. And house and washed. In the fourth stanza, Nuns and tart's. And ear and career. 

The mystery of the form, its insistence on adding layers of relation, I think that’s one of its allures. Take this moment Nelson shares, about teaching poetry at West Point, the United States Military Academy. The class was discussing a sonnet by Robert Frost. 

Nelson: And I pointed out the fact that it was rhyming in an unusual way in triplets and one of the cadets sat up and fell out of his chair! Yes, my absolute favorite experiences in the classroom, but that's what you want. You want somebody to see the form and just fall off the chair!

Grimes: Yes, right. I love it. I love it. 

[Music] 

Nelson: I'm not a confessional poet. I mostly write about history. 

Amos: A few years ago, Marilyn took on a very old – but new-to-her – form: the memoir. 

And it was actually by accident in a way. She was writing about the 1950s and sent a few poems to a publisher whose opinion she values to ask what he thought. 

Nelson: And he said nobody's going to be interested in your book about the 50s. If it were about you in the 50s, maybe they would be interested. 

Amos: She took his advice. How I Discovered Poetry is a memoir in verse. It is a book about history, about the United States during the Cold War era, racial tensions, and the first stirrings of second wave feminism, but as Marilyn put it, it is also written in a personal voice that grows older as the book progresses. A voice coming to understand the world more clearly. 

Nelson: Every one of the poems in this book begins with a kind of question. They’re all about things that a child doesn't understand. I was born in 1946. My dad was in the Air Force for all of my childhood. So it's a book about moving around, always being new someplace.

Amos: This poem, called “Bomb Drill”, is about a short time when Nelson lived on an Air Force base in Texas. She was six years old. 

[Poem: Nelson’s Bomb Drill]

Amos: Here’s another poem, set a year later, in the voice of her seven year old self. It’s called “A Snake”, and it’s about driving from the family’s new base in Colorado back to Ohio for a family funeral. 

[Poem: Nelson’s A Snake]

Amos: And finally, a poem written in the voice of Nelson’s thirteen year old self, it talks about what it meant for her to discover, as Nelson puts it, that poetry was what she wanted to do with her life. 

Nelson: It's called “13 year old American Negro girl”. 

[Poem: Nelson’s  13 year old American Negro girl]

Nelson: That was my constant prayer, please give me. Give me something that I can pass on to the world. Please give me some truth. I don't know whether I don't know it sounds like false humility to say this, but I don't know whether I've found it or been given it. But it certainly still is my hope. 

Grimes: Yes. I can answer for you.Yes, you have [laughs]. 

Nelson: Yeah, and that's maybe that's the gift we can give to everyone, is that doorway, that doorway of metaphor, that ability to escape from the trauma of childhood, of adolescence, pick up the book and disappear into it. There is, there is a great gift there. 

Amos: Like Nelson, Grimes also moved many times during her childhood, though for different reasons. 

Grimes: I was in and out of foster care for a number of years. And it was when I was in my last what would be my last foster home that I first began to write. And I first discovered the power of words on paper. I was just desperate to get things off my chest that were burdening me.

Amos: At the age of 6 years old, in the mid 1950s, Grimes began to write. Her 2019 memoir in verse, Ordinary Hazards, chronicles her life up until the late 1960s. 

Grimes: The more you do memory work, the more you realize how tricky and how unreliable memory can be. And it's even trickier if your memory was impacted by trauma. And so some of the key poems in Ordinary Hazard tackle the very subject of memory. 

Amos: Here is the last poem you’ll hear today – about that first moment Grimes’ discovered writing. It’s called “Isolation Station”. 

[Poem: Grimes’ Isolation Station]

[Music]

Grimes: Reading and writing became my survival tools. It was a coping strategy. 

Nelson: I understand. Yeah. 

Grimes: And boy, am I glad I found it. 

Nelson: Everybody’s glad you found it. All of your readers too.

Amos: A big thanks to Nikki Grimes and Marilyn Nelson. 

Grimes is a New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Coretta Scott King Author Award. Her books include Ordinary Hazards, a memoir in verse, and Legacy: Women Poets of the Harlem Renaissance, out January of this year. 

Marilyn Nelson’s recent and forthcoming books are Augusta Savage: The Shape of a Sculptor’s Life, Papa’s Free Day Party, and Lubaya’s Quiet Roar. 

You can read several poems by Grimes and Nelson in the March 2021 issue of Poetry, in print and online.  

We’d love to know what you think of the new season. You can get in touch a number of ways: Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts (which is great because it helps other people find the show)... You can also email us at Podcast at PoetryFoundation dot org. 

The Poetry Magazine Podcast is produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Resavoir, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek and Irreversible Entanglements. All these songs were released by the Chicago-born record label International Anthem.

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Okay, that’s it! Until next time – be well, stay safe, and thanks for listening.

[music fades]