AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

The Poetry Magazine Podcast: The Life and Poetry of Carolyn Marie Rodgers, with Nina Rodgers Gordon, Andrew Peart, and Srikanth Reddy

(If you notice a mistake in the transcript, please let us know by emailing [email protected])

(MUSIC PLAYING)

(AUDIO CLIP PLAYS from 1970s TV show, Soul!)

Carolyn Marie Rodgers:

(READS EXCERPT FROM “As I Am”)

The air should roll back and bow when I pass. My footsteps should cause the earth to rumble.

Srikanth Reddy: Welcome to the Poetry Magazine Podcast. I’m Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy. This week, we’re delving into the life and poetry of the late Carolyn Rodgers. Born in 1940 in Bronzeville, Rodgers was one of the chief architects of the Black Arts Movement in Chicago. She cofounded Third World Press, which remains the largest independent Black-owned press in the United States. And though her poetry is widely anthologized, many people are not very familiar with her work. In 1976, her book, How I Got Ovah: New and Selected Poems, was a finalist for the National Book Award. And today, we have the great honor of hearing her poetry read by her sister, Nina Rodgers Gordon, who joins me in the studio, along with Andrew Peart, a Chicago-based writer and editor has worked with Nina for several years to organize the papers of Carolyn Rodgers. Nina and Andrew, welcome to the podcast.

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Thank you so much for having me.

Andrew Peart: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Srikanth Reddy: Thanks for coming. So, let’s start with a question about where we’re at right now. We all three are coming from Hyde Park on the Southside of Chicago. Nina, you and Carolyn grew up not far from there, in the famous Bronzeville neighborhood, on 46th Street and Evans Avenue, where writers like Gwendolyn Brooks wrote poems. What was life in that community like for you and Carolyn, as you grew up?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Wow, that was, that was a wonderful time in our life. We lived on a block where everybody knew everybody. Everybody would sit on their front porch and greet each other every evening. We played ball, we played rope. We played in the street. It was a small, like a small village.

Srikanth Reddy: How many were you, growing up in your family?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: There were four of us. There were three girls and one boy. And Carolyn was the baby, who was born here in Chicago.

Srikanth Reddy: Oh, so you, so your family is not from Chicago originally?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: No. We migrated from Little Rock, Arkansas. And Carolyn was the one who was born here, as you said, in 1940.

Srikanth Reddy: How far apart were you in age?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: We were about four years apart. But she always followed me around as the big sister and I loved it.

Srikanth Reddy: Were you close?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Yes, we were close. Even until she passed. She lived with me here in Hyde Park.

Srikanth Reddy: And what kind of a kid was she growing up?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: She was kind of, what kind of kid was she? Carolyn was like everybody else. She was regular. There was nothing special that would let us know that she would leave a legacy that she has done so today. When she was in elementary school, she wrote a poem about Mother. And she won a prize. And she was excited about that. We all, of course, we all were, because in our family, Mother had required that we learned the 23rd Psalm, “The Children’s Hour” and, and learn a Bible verse for dinner. Those three things were required.

Srikanth Reddy: Oh, so there was a poem in the mix.

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Yes, there was.

Srikanth Reddy: “The Children’s Hour” is a poem by

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Longfellow, I think.

Srikanth Reddy: Longfellow.

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Yes, I believe it’s by Longfellow. And we learned that early on.

Srikanth Reddy: So do you, do you still remember “The Children’s Hour” by Longfellow?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: I remember, it’s a lot to remember “The Children’s Hour” by Longfellow. I don’t remember all of the poem. I remember parts of it.

Srikanth Reddy: What do you remember about it?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: I remember how much fun it was to learn it and to say it for her more than I remember the words.

Srikanth Reddy: Yeah. Was that a poem that seemed important to Carolyn?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: It was important to my mother. Carolyn and my mother had a special bond. I think me being the oldest child, my mother and I had a more, oh, what shall I say? Carolyn and my mother were more friendly. And I think me being the oldest girl, I had more responsibility than Carolyn had. And that bond was a little different.

Srikanth Reddy: Do you feel like you mothered Carolyn a little bit, too?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: No, I really feel as though Carolyn and I were friends. We had lots of fun, because Carolyn considered me one of her patrons. (LAUGHS)

Srikanth Reddy: Would she read poems to you? And write poems and read them to you?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Well, we liked words. We had fun with words. For example, today, if we would have heard the word “frenemy,” we would have giggled and laughed, because it’s a new word. And we’d like to play with words. Early on, Mother had said to us that books was talk written down, so that we liked talk written down. We liked books, and words.

Srikanth Reddy: That makes me think of long African American tradition of the talking book.

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Yes. Correct.

Srikanth Reddy: What is a talking book for you?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: I have a book at home that’s called Talk, Talk, Talk. It’s about the African tradition of carrying on the traditions of talking, of ancestors passing on.

Srikanth Reddy: Kind of like we’re doing right now.

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Yes, yes, yes.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Andrew Peart: So we have a clip of Carolyn reading. And this is actually from early in her career, in the early seventies. And she’s reading from her first two collections of poems, Paper Soul and Songs of a Blackbird on the New York City public television show Soul!.

(TV AUDIO CLIP PLAYS from Soul!)

Ellis B. Haizlip: Good evening, and welcome back to club Soul. I’d like to call your attention to our Poet’s Corner and listen to the works of two really fine poets, one a brother from Cleveland, Ohio, brother Norman Jordan, and the other a sister from Chicago, Carolyn Rodgers.

Carolyn Rodgers:

(READS EXCERPT from “As I Am” – note: the transcript for this poem may be incorrect as we didn’t have a copy of the poem to check it against)

“As I Am”

I should be able to balance water jugs on my head and move the wind to shame. The air should roll back and bow when I pass. My footsteps should cause the earth to rumble. But as I am, as we are, I have lost heat, have been too far too long from the sun’s beat. The vibrations of my Black bones are unstrung, do not feel their universal unifiedment anymore. As I am, as we are, and it is a rhythm to some, I can only boogaloo and bop.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUSE)

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Mm. Mm. I didn’t know I would hear her voice. It’s awesome. And really, thank—I appreciate you playing her voice.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Srikanth Reddy: Were you surprised when Carolyn became a poet? Or did it just kind of creep up on you all? Or how did you see her kind of come into her own identity as a poet and how was that for your family? Were your parents annoyed? Did they want her to become a doctor.

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. They were proud of Carolyn. And I am proud of her, and still am. Carolyn found out she was a writer when she was maybe 20. She wrote for Negro Digest. And Randall Johnson said to her, “You know, you could be a writer.” And what she said was, she danced up the street, saying, “I am a writer, I’m going to be a writer.” That was it. That was the beginning of what we have today. It’s awesome to be able to read her works, and to have had her with me as long as I did. And to have taken good care of her.

Srikanth Reddy: This time when you were growing up with Carolyn in the Southside of Chicago was a time of a lot of change in American culture, civil rights movement and Black activism that proved to be really central to Carolyn’s life and work, and I think yours as well in some ways. I’m wondering if you could read a poem that speaks to this time in your lives and in the nation’s life called “History Lesson/1960s.”

Nina Rodgers Gordon: All right, yes, I can. It goes like this.

(READS POEM)

“History Lesson/1960s”

what we
tried
to do

with our dreams,
we hoped to erase all time
errors,
smash with raised strong
clenched fists
all the remaining walls
and bully, bribe, or captivate
any unfavorable gods
against our cause.

so like banners
and flags, our dreams unfurled
before all the world,
we marched
our words we sent forth
as our warriors.

oh how sweet the
censers of victory and freedom
were going to be.
and we wanted never to
dream again,
awake or asleep,
if we could not change the signature
of the world.

Srikanth Reddy: Thank you, Nina. That was beautiful. I could feel the lines of Carolyn’s work when you read the poem. I wanted to ask you, Andrew, you’ve done so much work to bring Carolyn Rodgers’s work to contemporary audiences. And you’ve worked with Nina to do this over the last few years. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you came to Carolyn Rodgers’s poetry and, and then maybe say a little something about this poem and what it means for, you know, history in the 1960s, is it a history lesson for us today?

Andrew Peart: So I first seriously read Carolyn’s work when I first moved to Chicago to start graduate school as an English literature student and lucked into finding a copy of Carolyn’s book, The heart as ever green, which was the last book she published with a major commercial press before she started into independently publishing her own work. And it’s been out of print. So like I said, I was lucky to find it.

Srikanth Reddy: Where did you find it?

Andrew Peart: I found it at the absolutely wonderful Hyde Park Community book sale. And then when I was working at Chicago Review, as an editor, at The University of Chicago, I started working on a special issue about the Black Arts Movement in Chicago and making the argument that Chicago was the hub of the Black Arts Movement as we know it today. And Carolyn was certainly a name on the list of the writers we needed to include. And by that point, I was close with the poet Ed Roberson, who lives here in Chicago. And I was telling Ed Roberson about this project that was in development. And he said, “You know who you have to talk to, you have to talk to Carolyn Rodgers’s sister, Nina.”

Srikanth Reddy: (LAUGHS LIGHTLY)

Andrew Peart: And I remember that first phone call. I think that was the summer of 2016. And you showed me the papers of Carolyn’s that remained, that you were keeping. You know, this legacy that you were keeping in your home there in Hyde Park. And we got to work organizing them, and we discovered some of the small chapbooks that she had published herself under her own Eden Press imprint. And those were kind of magical discoveries, you know, works that I had read about in interviews and in bibliographies, but had never seen evidence of, and here they were kind of materializing before our eyes,

Srikanth Reddy: Did you—Nina, did you have a sense that those papers and books were going to be discovered some day? Or were you just holding onto them for yourself? Or were you surprised when Andrew reached out to you about this?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: I was very surprised. It was awesome. I was holding onto them not knowing what was going to happen.

Srikanth Reddy: Now here they are in Poetry magazine.

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Yeah.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Andrew Peart: My serious interest in Carolyn Rodgers came about because of this focus on the era that we’re talking about, 1960s in Chicago’s civil rights movement, Black power movement. I think that one question that’s on our minds as we look back today at Carolyn’s work is, why she spent so much of her later years kind of underground publishing her own work independently. And I think that spirit of autonomy and independence was there with Carolyn from the beginning. I mean, Negro Digest, Black World were major national publications, but they were also grassroots efforts coming out of the Southside of Chicago. And Third World Press, which Carolyn helped cofound, they were just publishing stuff on mimeograph machines in their basements, you know, and asking their artist friends to do the beautiful covers that are on those early Third World Press chapbooks, like Carolyn Rodgers’s Paper Soul. Yeah, I would imagine that Gwendolyn Brooks’s example was really important to Carolyn and her decision after 1978, and the publication of The heart as ever green with Anchor Doubleday to move back to an independent mode of publication.

Srikanth Reddy: Yeah, we’ve got a clip of a talk that Carolyn Rodgers gave at Northwestern University in 2007 that speaks to that kind of turning point, when she basically stepped away from publishing poetry with a major commercial publisher and decided to go with this kind of anti-establishment, kind of DIY way of getting her poems out in the world.

(CLIP PLAYS from “The Black Arts Movement in the Broader Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement” symposium at Northwestern University in 2007)

Carolyn Marie Rodgers: I was going to look for a publisher, and Gwendolyn Brooks said to me, “Why don’t you publish it yourself?” Well, that was always looked down on, you know, you publish your own work, who does that? You know? But she said, “Do it yourself. It makes a big difference. You call all the shots. You don’t have to worry about an editor, or, looking at it or a publishing house saying, “This is too quote ‘Black,’ this is too militant, people won’t like it. It’s not the popular subject of the time, it’s not quite right. All those things go down the drain when you do your own.” And she went over the manuscript with me, and wrote notes on each poem. And I published it. And I was amazed at what can happen when you do that. What did happen was that white people accepted the work as a published work. I actually got reviewed in magazines like Chicago Magazine. Amazing things happen when you take the responsibility of your own life.

Srikanth Reddy: Nina, that clip makes me think about Carolyn’s relationship to activism and militancy, but maybe more like activism in the civil rights era. She made an activist decision about her own publishing as a poet, but she was also really actively involved in the civil rights struggle of the time. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your perceptions of her involvement with the civil rights movement, and how your family, were they supportive of that? Were they worried for her? Were they involved themselves?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Well, our involvement had to do with me. I did go to Mississippi, because my mother said no to Carolyn going, because she was the baby of the family. Carolyn was kind of like the leader for me even, with that. But my parents were the ones who made the decision. And the decision was no, that she would not be going, but that if I wanted to go that I would go in her place. And so I did ride to Mississippi. And my photo was captured in Negro Digest, I think it is. My dad got a copy of it and saved it. But that was the beginning and the ending of it. My parents were not very political in that sense. But Carolyn and I both were.

Srikanth Reddy: That’s so interesting that they supported

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Me going

Srikanth Reddy: you going,

Nina Rodgers Gordon: and not, Carolyn not going. I think at that time, that was in the sixties, that was in the sixties, they weren’t willing to allow their youngest to go.

Srikanth Reddy: Did you feel like you were going for her in some way?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Mm, how did I feel about that? Well, for a very long time, I was Carolyn’s big sister. And I was the leader of the (LAUGHS) and so, for a change, she got to be the leader. And so then I went instead in her place. And I felt good about that.

Srikanth Reddy: She must have been dying to hear all about it when you got back.

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Yeah, she was. Yeah, she was, she was. There was a lot of fear at that time about Mississippi and being part of the group that went there on a bus. And when I got back, we did a lot of talk. Carolyn and I did a lot of talk. Over all the years we were together, I think, what, what we did do was talk. I don’t know how much of the talk she did write down. Because I can’t go back now. Much of her work is at Rose.

Srikanth Reddy: The Rose Library at Emory?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But now that I can think back on to it, the talk is what was important, just the affect of it all.

Srikanth Reddy: She must—was she mad that she didn’t get to go and you did?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: No, no, she just continued to write.

Srikanth Reddy: And what was happening in Mississippi at the time? What did you find there, and what did you do?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Oh, the counters, going to the counters sitting, being turned away, being turned away and a lot of unrest. But I didn’t stay long. I was on a bus of people that went and was bused back almost immediately. And that was the only trip that I took South.

(READS EXCERPT FROM “Poem No. 2: My Kind of Feminism” by Carolyn Marie Rodgers)

I woke up in life to find
parts missing. Parts of the spirit,
introverted body members,
aspects in the soul.
And yokes.
Management was altogether important,
obviously,
not only stopping ...

(FADES OUT)

Nina Rodgers Gordon: What happened was Carolyn’s illness became a part of her, of her. In 2004 or ’05, she found out she had stoma. It’s a stomach cancer. She did not want family to know. So that she worked with the oncologist at the University of Chicago. In the end, it was her wish with him that family not be worried with what was happening with her. So that much of it she went through, she just went through. She would go forth every day, even though she did not feel well, with me, there from the apartment every day she would get up, she would go out. She would get information to write about, go out, come home, go into her room and write. But she was ill. And finally, of course, she passed. We found out afterwards that she had been battling the cancer for quite a while.

Srikanth Reddy: That must have been a painful time, and also painful to—for her not to be sharing with you everything that she was going through.

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Yes, well, it was of course complicated, because at that time, of course, we also were caregiving my mother. My mother lived to be 104. We were taking turns, three girls. And even though Carolyn was handling her own illness, she would take her turn, taking care of Mother. And I think she looked forward to that, because as I said, she and Mother were really very close. But she never stopped writing. And she was, Carolyn was not—she was very angry about the illness. It was not one of the things that she faced well, in the sense that she felt that she had more work to do.

Srikanth Reddy: How did that anger come out to your perception?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: We talked about it. We did talk about it. Yeah.

Andrew Peart: This makes me think of the way human frailty gets into some Carolyn’s later poems, and thinking in particular of the poem called “Poem No. 2: My Kind of Feminism.” The title wouldn’t lead you to think that it touches on this theme, but I think it actually does. Nina, would you read “Poem No. 2: My Kind of Feminism”?

Nina Rodgers Gordon:

(READS POEM)

“Poem No. 2: My Kind of Feminism”

Like a car that wouldn’t go, I
woke up in life to find
parts missing. Parts of the spirit,
introverted body members,
aspects in the soul.
And yokes.
Management was altogether important,
obviously,
not only stopping and going.
 

Unlike a car missing parts,
I could do both of these.
But the hours or hows got lost
in a maze of wills and obsessions,
bearings and needs.
Clear paths changed into detours and
wanderings into compass points of
lost and found. Echoes, called memories
became indivisible alpha and omega murmurs
in my soul.
My living, exfoliating,
like a black multifoliate rose.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Andrew Peart: What I find so striking about this poem is what the title seems to announce or what the title might set up as an expectation for the reader and then what the poem itself actually delivers. You hear the title “My Kind of Feminism” and you think this might be some kind of anthem, right, some kind of superwoman anthem. And then what you get is this poem about deep human frailty, about your body failing you, about life not going the way you expected or wanted it to. For me that, there’s something so Carolyn Rodgers about that, that that is her kind of feminism. I wonder if you had any thoughts about that, Nina?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: The cancer was devastating. And my mother’s position was the religious one. That if you think it away, it will go away does not always work. And of course, in her condition, it did not. And so it, so it was. Carolyn had the opportunity to go to the Cancer Foundation. I think it’s the Cancer Center of America is it?

Andrew Peart: Cancer Institute of America?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And she chose not to, because what she said was, if she could not use her brain and write, that she no longer wished to be there. And I understand that. That was, that was her life.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Srikanth Reddy: That makes sense to me, because, you know, we’re talking about the end of her life and the experience of physical suffering and frailty during that period, but she’s also really a poet of incredible exuberance, you know, and power, like bodily power. I wonder if maybe we could read one of those poems too. Maybe like “The Awesome I Am”

Andrew Peart: “The I Am Awesome”?

Srikanth Reddy: “The I Am Awesome,” right, right.

Nina Rodgers Gordon:

(READS POEM)

“The I Am Awesome”

a pigeon festival of bread crumbs.
red berries in the snow.
the scarecrows, the hyacinth.
and God, the Tangential and the Tender.
this awesome
you see an inflection of
which is not clear like words as a way
of spirit speaking
as a way of means speaking a metaphor
as an echo or a hymn, or this—biblical
“a song as in the night.”

the unknown force is the known.
I am confirmed. a common denominator
known as zero or a round circle. a zero
known as space with a circular eternal hold.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Andrew Peart: That poem is amazing, particularly that kind of almost Gnostic image it ends with, right. And it’s a deeply, deeply spiritual poem, even a mystical poem, in some ways. And you know, one of the things that critics talk about in Carolyn’s poetry is this spiritual turn that she made in the 1970s. In the 1960s, she’s writing a lot of so-called revolutionary or militant poems. In the seventies, critics like to say she kind of mellows out a little bit and the poems turned spiritual. This poem doesn’t seem particularly mellow to me. It seems deeply, deeply spiritual, though. Nina, I wonder if you would tell us a little bit about what you saw of Carolyn’s relationship to spirituality and maybe even going back towards the early years in the household you grew up in. What did religion and churchgoing mean? What role did they have in your family home?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Yeah, well, in, when we were young, we had no choice. We went to church regularly. It was three doors from our house. When Carolyn, when she got to college, I think she changed religions and became Catholic.

Andrew Peart: That’s right, because the church near your house, that would have been the AME Church, right, the African Methodist Episcopal, sorry, the African Methodist Episcopal Church?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: You’re right, AME. Yeah. But she became Catholic and she remained Catholic until she passed. She, she was funny, she had, she had about 100 pairs of sunglasses, because she didn’t like to be recognized in public, because people would approach her. And so she didn’t go to the Catholic church in Hyde Park. She went to the Catholic church downtown.

Andrew Peart: She’d get on the bus, and

Nina Rodgers Gordon: That’s right. That’s right.

Srikanth Reddy: Do you know why she converted? Or why she

Nina Rodgers Gordon: She, well, we didn’t talk too much about the why she preferred the Catholicism. She preferred the, oh, what can I call it?

Andrew Peart: Was it the rituals, the ritual aspect of

Nina Rodgers Gordon: I’m thinking rituals, the spirituality of them. She had outgrown, if I can say that, the AME Church. She moved on.

Srikanth Reddy: What did it mean—I’m really ignorant about this stuff.

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Mm-hmm?

Srikanth Reddy: What did it mean, to be a Black Catholic at the time or, and to change churches and religious communities in that way? Was that a—was race a kind of part of that story, or?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: I don’t think in her case, that was part of it. I don’t think in her case, that was part of it. She would not go to the Catholic church in Hyde Park because people would greet her, come to her, talk to her, ask her questions. want her to see their works.

Andrew Peart: So she went to church for, it sounds like, an experience of private contemplation.

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Exactly.

Andrew Peart: I wonder if that desire had anything to do with switching to Catholicism? Like, I mean, I can imagine if she were part of an AME congregation on the South Side, she wouldn’t be able to avoid talking to people, right? And having a convivial experience. It wouldn’t be so inward. Is that fair to say?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: That’s fair to say. Well, we were, we were AMEs from the time we started church, when we were young, until college, at which point we were allowed (LAUGHS) at that point in the household to choose whether we would continue or not, or change religions.

Andrew Peart: Did you see—those last 12 years of Carolyn’s life when you were living together, did you see signs of her, of any kind of like daily religious practice? You know, did she have a rosary? Did she pray?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Oh, yes. Yes, yes. Yes, yes. Yes, yes. She had her rosary. Yes. And she would go down to downtown to the church regularly. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Andrew Peart: So I just want to look again closely at the closing lines and the closing image of the poem, “The I Am Awesome.”

(READS EXCERPT)

the unknown force is the known.
I am confirmed. a common denominator
known as zero or a round circle. a zero
known as space with a circular eternal hold.

So the image is numerical, right? It’s zero. It’s also visual. It’s a shape, it’s a circle. And the image shifts on us and the poet too, I think, as it’s getting described, which I think of is a feature of Carolyn’s kind of middle and later work. “a common denominator / known as a zero or a round circle. a zero / known as space with a circular eternal hold.” So it’s as a zero known as one, two, three, at least, things, right? The tenor of the metaphors is shifting on us. But it’s also sort of, it’s doing that perhaps because it’s ineffable, right? The circle is infinite and endless. This image seems to be pregnant with meaning, but the meaning is not exactly determinant. It’s an extremely difficult image, and it’s, it has a depth but it also has a sort of—it’s shorn of local or particular detail. And I think that’s a sharp contrast with some of the early poetry Carolyn wrote in the sixties, and that some of her Black Arts Movement peers were writing in the sixties, where there was such a strong emphasis on rooting poems in details, information, pictures from the community, poems written from and of and for the community at street level. That’s something that—that difference, and that turn in Carolyn’s work is something I think she commented on, in later years.

Srikanth Reddy: Yeah, zero as a common denominator is kind of an amazing image. Because you, you can’t divide any number by zero, right? It’s like the image of the infinite. And you can see Carolyn struggling with specific experience and universal experience and mystical experience in that poem. And we’ve got a clip actually, of her talking about those questions of, you know, what’s the common denominator of Black writing? Right, what can be written? And what is a Black poem? And what is, what is just a poem, right? So let’s hear Carolyn Rodgers reflecting back from when she was 66, toward an earlier time in her writing life. This is a clip from a talk, the talk that she gave at Northwestern in 2007.

(CLIPS PLAYS)

Carolyn Marie Rodgers: People like James Baldwin, Margaret Walker, they would come to town, Conrad Kent Rivers, John O. Killens, of course, Baraka. All these people would come through and they would always end up at Gwendolyn Brooks’s house. It became like a meeting place. And I always felt as if I was accepting a mantle. I was accepting something that was being passed down to me. At first, it was like we were just fraternizing, we were fellowshipping, we were meeting and enjoying these famous people that you read about, like Baldwin, I mean, can you imagine meeting someone like James Baldwin in Gwendolyn Brooks’s home? It was quite overwhelming for young person. But I soon realized that they were giving us something. It was very tangible, it was like breathing, like air, like food, like money. They wanted us to continue a struggle that had already begun. What were the goals? Now these are more important. We wanted to continue the telling of the African American story in the world. We hoped to establish a Black aesthetic. And I don’t yet know what that is. But we worked at it for hours. We spent hours screaming and yelling, and talking about if you write a poem about a tree, is it Black? I mean, the people would come in and they would want to kill white, they’d want to kill us if we didn’t say that the poem that they had written was beautiful, was Black, simply because they had a Black skin. Well, we said a Black aesthetic does not allow that. Then we switched and said, maybe it did, (AUDIENCE LAUGHS) because there was something inherently in the language and in this perspective that was Black. But we never could define exactly what it was, you see? So we talked about it, we talked about it, we wrote about it, I wrote an essay, which talked about how we signify and how some of our poems look like we’re signifying, they do, how we confront each other, how we rap, how we run it down. We have a poem that sort of looks like a gospel hymn, or a blues song. We have all of that, we do have it. But I’m not sure that at the end of all of that, that we have what is a Black aesthetic, but then again, I think that in some instances, you can see something. So, suffice to say that it’s still going on. We’re still working at it.

Andrew Peart: Carolyn sounds pretty animated in there. I mean, was that, was that common? Does that sound like Carolyn? And funny, you know, she’s got a little

Nina Rodgers Gordon: Carolyn, Carolyn was many things. She also felt vulnerable at that, with by her peers. I never quite understood that part of it. But I know that as a Black female writer, she felt vulnerability. She never felt as though her writing was quite good enough. Of course, I always thought it was just, wow. (LAUGHS) It was wonderful. She would go out every morning, up every morning, out, come home, go into her room and write well into the night. She continued that, as I have said.

Srikanth Reddy: We’ve talked about Carolyn’s life and we’ve heard early poems and late poems and work from the middle. And I’m wondering how she might think about the world today in 2022. Nina, you know a lot has changed in those 12 years since her death. And we’ve seen Kamala Harris step into the Vice presidency and a young Black woman like Amanda Gorman reading poems at the inauguration. And I wonder what you think Carolyn, who was watching all of this up to the very end, when she was watching Obama’s presidential campaign and election, you think she would have found that the world today held more space for her as a Black woman poet?

Nina Rodgers Gordon: I think the answer to that would be yes, that her poetic voice would have more space now, that there would be more room for her and that she could continue writing, and that she would enjoy it more. And that the range that she had started to move toward was one where she would have kind of kicked off her shoes, and kind of walked in the grass, and just relaxed and enjoyed it even more than she had before. Because her voice has spanned generations.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Nina Rodgers Gordon:

(READ EXCERPT from “The Children’s Hour” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

Between the dark and the daylight,

      When the night is beginning to lower,

Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,

      That is known as the Children’s Hour.

 

I hear in the chamber above me

      The patter of little feet,

The sound of a door that is opened,

      And voices soft and sweet.

 

From my study I see in the lamplight,

      Descending the broad hall stair.

(FADES OUT)

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Srikanth Reddy: A big thanks to Nina Rodgers Gordon and Andrew Peart. Nina was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and migrated north to Chicago with her family when she was four years old. She spent a career of more than 30 years teaching elementary and high school students in Chicago. She completed work toward a Doctorate of Education at DePaul University, and also worked in youth social services. Andrew is a writer and editor based in Chicago. He began researching the papers of Carolyn Marie Rodgers while a PhD student at the University of Chicago and an editor at Chicago Review. He also helped put together a portfolio of poems by Carolyn Rodgers, which you can read in the October 2022 issue of Poetry, in print, and online. This special issue also includes an essay about Rodgers by the poet Nikky Finney. This show is produced by Rachel James. The music in this episode came from Resavoir, Alabaster DePlume, John McCowen, Rob Mazurek, and Irreversible Entanglements. Okay, that’s it. Until next time, be well, stay safe, and thanks for listening.