About Marilyn Nelson

Back in 1770, Phillis Wheatley, the first African-American woman to publish a book of poetry, penned her longest work, an adaptation of one episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. It was the story of Theban Queen Niobe, one of the cruelest tales from mythology. Until very recently, this work of Wheatley’s was scorned by most critics as Wheatley’s walking in the footsteps of her white captors, a useless exercise in “white” neoclassical poetry. Yet the story Wheatley told included her own story in a subtle way. Niobe, a great queen, loses all fourteen of her children to the bows and arrows of the rogue gods Apollo and Diana. Wheatley had been torn from her mother in Africa by slave traders, the agents of rogue nations answerable to no moral law. Wheatley found in classical Greece the cry of the African mother.


Like Wheatley, Marilyn Nelson claims all myth, all stories, all nations as her own. She knows she needs no permission to step inside another person’s skin in another place and time. Like all great poets she knows that all poetry is hers, in whatever language. So I was thrilled to see that she has translated Euripides' Hecuba, whose central character is the Queen of Troy, another bereft mother. And I see that she has translated some of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. When I say this, it’s like saying, “She has climbed Mt. Everest.” Rilke is the most rarified and difficult of all poets to grasp and translate, and Marilyn Nelson renders him with stiletto sharpness, retaining her own voice and manner. Do this, and you are flying with the eagles!

I delight in Nelson’s choice of topics. She knows there are great stories to tell about great people, or ordinary people who prove themselves greater in soul than their oppressors. When she writes of her slave and liberated ancestors, she rises above victimhood and depicts them with dignity, power, and agency. Her poems around her homecoming to family history are poignant, and tinged with a curious irony: if those who came before did not do as they did, good or evil, then I would not be here to tell it. I would be someone else, all one color, all one thing, and maybe not even very interesting. To forgive history even while enduring the knowledge of the hand holding a whip takes a large soul.

Nelson’s life of George Washington Carver, the great botanist and artist, should be studied by young poets, who seem so in lack of something to write about beyond their everyday lives and love affairs. History teems with heroes, whose story only a poet can tell. After 9/11, Nelson set out to write a requiem work “to everyone in the world who died on that day,” including the 24,000 people who died of starvation on that day. Making everything out of one life and death, she wrote Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem about a Connecticut slave whose skeleton was extracted for “educational” use by a doctor – a polite way of saying his body was cooked down in a pot until nothing was left but the bones. The central poem in this book, “Not My Bones,” is one of the great poems of our time.

Her poems about her father, one of the heroic Tuskegee airmen of World War II, and the poems about his fellow flyers, her extended family of “uncles,” convey both the heroism of these men, and the horrific prejudice and race violence that still prevailed in America in the 1940s and 1950s. Whether it is the story of the World War I black soldier lynched on returning home in uniform, or the more subtle story of her father in uniform on a train, mistaken by a white woman for a porter, Nelson has the right words, the right giving and holding back, the right way of putting the anger in the events told, not the voice telling. These poems make you gasp, weep, and stagger, hit right between the eyes.

She writes “everyday” poems, too, and makes them extraordinary. I love her “Dinosaur Spring,” and her hilarious “Levitation with Baby” (a Muse poem), and her childhood recollection of “How I Discovered Poetry.” It is no accident, then, that she can sing to the young in sonnets, and her poignant cycle about a lynched 14-year-old boy – a most unlikely topic for a children’s book – is A Wreath for Emmett Till. Nelson’s book is challenging, high-toned, in gorgeous language a young person would take to heart and live with for a lifetime, even while teaching a dark moment in our history. Its presentation and kindly author’s notes are a model for how we might turn a new generation of young people into poetry readers.

Nelson also has the gift of a great narrator: she has a keen understanding of human psychology, as keen as a Dostoyevsky or a Maupassant. She knows we are not all culture but instinct, too. She sees the raw power of desire, anger and lust, the seed impulse coursing inside everything that lives. In “Churchgoing,” in classically formal language, she has finally explained to me, in terms that convince me, why slaves and former slaves could be Christians after being slaves to Christians. She writes:

That Christian, slave-owning hypocrisy
nevertheless was by these slaves ignored
as they pitied the poor body of Christ!
Oh, sometimes it causes me to tremble,
that they believed most, who so much have lost.

She is the poet Phillis Wheatley would have wanted to be.

The above text was my introduction to Marilyn Nelson when she appeared as judge and reader for the 2009 Philbrick Poetry Prize at the Providence Athenaeum.

eve is a palindrome

for Mary Cappello

eve is a palindrome,
its time-trough center
the intersect
of yesterday/ tomorrow

eve is always
fraught with magic:
budspring bonfires
on every hilltop,
virginal dreams
of future husbands,

witch brooms anointed
and flying,
Nutcracker abductions,
the false clarity
of first champagne;

the eve of wanting
better perhaps
than the day of having;
the eve of counting
the dead who outnumber
our friends still living,
all the more poignant
in its ripe wealth.


eve is a palindrome,
a boy-scratch icon
of two breasts
and a guess hazarded
of what’s “down there.”

eve is a palindrome:
in Milton’s paradise,
self-seen in water,
then ripple, then
double-self, no —
it is Adam. Even
the metre is mirror’d
around eve’s
solipsism.

eve is a palindrome,
semiote of evil, Devil,
evolution’s creation-crack,
Greek snake alarm
of evohe! evohe!
as if to say
“If woman comes,
can snake be far behind?”

“eve is a palindrome”
is in itself an anagram,
ten times varied:
Love me, in despair.
I, opal, seven-armied,
(ever a lapis Domine),
O Spire, leave a mind!
A love inspired me, a
piano, severed mail.
Are divine poems a reel,
a paved line? Is Rome
pined? Lo, I am a verse,
a palindrome. Is Eve?

The above poem is a riff, a word play, inspired by Prof. Mary Cappello's own lingering over the word "eve" in her recent reading from her memoir, Called Back. Mary delights in pursuing metaphors down rabbit holes into unexpected places, and her terrifying intellect burns bright in her searing new book. This poem in no way reflects the gravitas of the "eve" over which she mediates: the eve before receiving a cancer diagnosis, a division of one's life story by a "line down the middle" (Woolf's climactic phrase). Instead this is an improvisation of the sort she enjoys provoking in her students. I hesitated to offer it, but when I said, "Did you know that "eve" is a palindrome?" there was no holding it back. Mary urged me to post the poem, slight as it is. It was fun unfolding ten anagrams of the poem's first line and weaving them together. The "eves" in the early stanzas are May Eve (Walpurgis Night), St. Agnes' Eve, Halloween, Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve. The Milton reference alludes to a kind of metric mirror that Milton creates around the moment when Eve first sees Adam, reflected in water.

Some Quick News

Just a few quick news items:

1) I have a photo blog on Flickr now, so take a peek at some of my eerie and dramatic photos. Most recent postings are from our November 1 outing to the North Burial Ground in Providence. The photo show is at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brettrutherford

2) I just learned that soloists from the Erie Philharmonic performed a chamber work by Pennsylvania composer William Alexander last October, titled, "Suite from Whippoorwill Road." This work, for flute and piano, is based on several poems from my collection, Whippoorwill Road: The Supernatural Poems. Composer Alexander has already written a song cycle, some madrigals, and several symphonic poems based on my work.

3) I just heard from an undergraduate group at Brandeis University, with a request to perform my play about H.P. Lovecraft, Night Gaunts, next spring.

4) My poems, "Pepper and Salt" and "Monday Miss Schreckengost Reads Us Little Black Sambo" will appear in the Rhode Island Writers Circle 2010 Anthology, due out in March. My poem "Fete" has been selected for inclusion in an anthology from Mythos Books titled The Supernatural Poem Since Homer. And, for the third year running, my poem, "Viking," about the Viking lander arriving on Mars, has been licensed for use in state reading exams in North Carolina. This poem also appeared in On the Wing: American Poems of Air and Space Flight (University of Iowa Press, 2005). For those born only lately, a note: Viking I was launched in 1975 and took eleven month to arrive at Mars. The lander ejected from the main ship touched down on July 20, 1976, man's first presence on the Red Planet. For four years, we received data about Mars from this unmanned robot.

I'll share the poem here:

VIKING

I did it.

Who would have thought
that such a hulk
of rivets and scraps
could cross a sea of space?
You named me for voyagers,
for men who ravaged harbor towns,
content with seizing
their women and gold.

Cool were the hands
that made me. Few cheered
when I embarked in flame.
No one expects a golden bounty
at the end of my crossing.
A strange tide carried me
weighted, then weightless,
then tugged to ground again,
devoid of passenger
and pilotless,
not even a goddess
carved on my prow.

Little was left of me
when I touched down in sand.
I did it:
before the alien hordes you dreamt of
could launch their fleet,
I touched this desolate
and long deserted ground.
Well earned, the name
you gave me. I dared
your greatest dream and won.
Salute me, my maker:
I invaded Mars.

Sinkholes

This is a dark, new poem. A few days ago I heard Prof. Jean Walton present a memoir chapter about revisiting her childhood home in Vancouver, B.C. She used topgraphic and geological maps to show the estuary of the rivers around Vancouver as the background for her description of visiting a place where it rained incessantly and where the people were prepared to be driven from their homes at any moment by a flood. I was struck by one of these maps, which showed vast underground waterflows under the land, larger than the rivers above. This reminded me that I had been studying US Geological Survey maps of my native Southwestern Pennsylvania, and I had been struck by how mountainous the terrain was and how everything was covered with old coal mines and iron mines. I had read stories about sink holes opening into old mines or into flooded limestone caverns, and then I remembered two places: "The Swamp," in Edinboro, Pennsylvania, where I attended college for a few years, and a sink hole in Scottdale, Pennsylvania where I spent my childhood. This poem is an improvisation, bringing together these images. 

i

They called it The Swamp,

and although much of the lakeshore

was wetland, weed- and frog-

infested, lily-pad-mosquito-land,

everyone knew, when you said it

with that certain intonation

voicing italics and initial caps,

that you meant The Swamp.

It was a pond, reed-fringed

water a shallow cover for floor

of mud from which noxious vapors

bubbled, and where foxfires glowed

on certain moonless nights.

Beneath the mud, though none could see it

was a water-filled cavern

of unknown depth. I was shown

the Geological Survey map whose legend

denominated a place with no known bottom.

Locals take that on faith:

for generations it’s been the place

where useless vehicles, scrap iron

and dead refrigerators are dragged,

pushed with some danger to the townsmen

as they go knee-deep in sucking mud

until their offering is far enough in

for whatever it is that wants things

to begin its inexorable pulling.

Within a day an old jalopy

is nothing but two round headlights,

glass frog-eyes, then nothing

as by the next morning the swamp pool

resumes its perfect flatness, its mud

as uniformly flat as a well-made bed.

ii

I remember a field

we were not allowed to play in —

and playing there anyway

my friends and I discovered

the vertical maw into blackness

we learned was an abandoned mine.

One day it had been a cornfield;

the next the shaft had fallen in.

In a town criss-crossed with forgotten

mines, it could happen anywhere:

holes the size of pancakes, holes

just big enough to swallow a bully,

an arrogant preacher, a rival

(if only one could make them appear!)

Soft ground was best, but even

a sidewalk crack, a storm drain opening,

a gymnasium floor or a toilet

could give way into a sinkhole,

a cenote, a sudden burst

of Karst topography. Someone you really

didn’t like could be swept away

into an underground river or fall,

fall, fall beyond the length of rope

to a dull thud at the hard place

between the earth’s crust and mantle.

We came back again and again to see it,

to measure how black

its blackness could be.

Tar, coal, obsidian, ink: nothing we knew

was blacker than this cavern-hole.

We threw soft coal, and chunks

of road gravel, iron slag

and a 16-ounce soda bottle

as hard as we could from a safe overhang.

No echo answered our probing.

So far as we knew, it had no bottom,

as though the mine below

had been mined from below

by subterranean demons.

Although we stopped playing there

and walked a long way 'round

the hillock that humped over it,

in dreams we walked its maw-edge,

lost our bearing, missed one another’s

outreached hand of rescue,

or were pushed —

and worse by far than the nightmare

of falling into it was the dread

of what might come out of it,

if it wanted to, and was hungry enough.

What if, at night, some shambling Thing

crept into our cellars, filling great sacks

from our coal bins, returning the fuel

to the mountain depths? What if we went,

as we sometimes did, to stoke the furnace

at the stroke of midnight

and came eye to eye with It?

iii

I read of places

where sink holes appear

without warning, some watered

beneath with underground rivers,

but others just chasms, cave vents

or rifts between two angry seams

of geologic tension. Cybele’s

temple was just such a place,

its altar an opening into darkness

that drove women mad, and men

to self-mutilation.

Just such a place

is the entrance to Tartarus,

nine days below Hell.

One falls, not into open space

like Milton’s bad angels

(who enjoyed a feast of starlight

while they plummeted) —

but no, one falls

     into an ever-narrowing funnel

     of cold darkness,

into a place where legs

    and arms are useless

until there is nothing of you

     but a head screaming upwards

towards an ever-dwindling

     pinpoint of light.

Our earth is a shifting island of sea and magma,

Swiss-cheesed with sink holes, cenotes,

Blue Holes at the bottoms of coral seabeds —

Something riddled with Nothing,

orbiting a self- regulated explosion,

sun hurtling around and away from

the Black Hole at the rift of space-time,

Every moment of existence here averts

an infinity of empty, unpeopled stars.

The White Tiger

Each Autumn, I write one or more "seasonal" poems, adding them to an ever-growing cycle called "Anniversarium: The Autumn Poems." This is the 34th in the series. In Chinese art and folklore, the white tiger is a symbol of autumn (white itself is the color of funerals and mourning in China).

ANNIVERSARIUM 34: THE WHITE TIGER

I dreamt — it was no dream! —
for there, on the floor, the melted snow,
the window-lattice broken, night coals
from the brazier scattered everywhere.

I dreamt he was there beside me:
the great white cat, tiger of Siberia,
lord of Manchurian wastelands. He,
my servant comes trembling to tell me,
has taken up residence
at the far end of the north pavilion.

Ah! let him stay! Bring me my sword?
No! my pen and scroll! I must wash
my thoughts with a draught of tea.
Renew the fire. Refill the yi xing
pot with pale white tea leaves.

“He is Death,” my servant tells me.
I shake my head and answer:
“He is Autumn, the world’s Fall,
my autumn, the end of my youth.
Where he treads, frost follows,
his breath the snow that fells the wheat
and makes the maples scream
red murder. Long have I known
he would be our guest one day.”

“Repair the window,” old Chen admonishes.
“We shall light torches to keep him off.”
I see two feline eyes
grow larger in the passageway.
“It is too late. A guest once past the threshold
must be offered food and lodging.
The tiger may come and go as he pleases.”

I point to where the great beast enters.
My servant issues a piercing cry.
Ignoring us, the monster, white
in the whiter moonlight, lies down
on the warm tiles of the coal hearth.
“You see, old Chen, how he reclines.
I do not think he means to harm me.”

Chen bows and backs to the doorway,
and as he closes the double door, calls back,
“Tomorrow brings terror to the countryside.
The tiger will kill the fallow deer,
and, should you venture forth by daylight,
he, pretending not to know you,
will turn on you as well. An old poet
is sweet fruit after a venison banquet.”

’Twixt Venus and Jupiter, one moon
hangs crescent; ’twixt sleep and dawn
the great beast cradles me, and I, him;
sword, fang, and claw forgotten, defying
our double death; a frozen interval,
two hearts abeat, and four lungs breathing.
I dream of being a great beast, rampant;
the tiger dreams of the calligraphy brush,
the tail-flick ink flow that places songs
on paper, words in the ears
of unborn readers and listeners.

I taste the blood in his mouth, the flex
of great legs that can overleap all prey;
he tastes pale tea and delicate sauces,
the savor of rare wine in a heated bowl.

As dawn breaks through,
the Heaven-tree, the willow boughs,
the distant pines sigh, shiver, shrug:
they will fight for a green day,
bird-harboring, leaf-tipped
to the lambent sunbeams.

Somewhere, out there, the tiger
drags Fall behind him as he hunts
life down with a panther frenzy.
Great clouds of birds assemble and flee
before him; cave, den, and warren
pull in their denizens for the long sleep
of winter. He leaves a trail
of antlered skeletons, doe-widows,
trees clawed clean of summer.

My place is here with lamp and teapot.
I wrote a poem. I rolled and sealed
the rice-paper scroll, wiped clean
the brush and closed the ink-jar.
This is not just any autumn’s beast.
There is some cause for which
he spared me, and was not my Autumn
or the death-breath of my winter.
No, he is the Tiger of Entropy:
he drags tornados, kill-winds
and glaciers behind him.
He would blink out
the world’s great cities if he could;
he would strike down the moon
as his ball-of-string plaything,
leave earth an orphan
in a sunless cosmos.
If I let him.

Tomorrow, while he sleeps,
wherever he sleeps —
and I see the place,
in the shade of the pines
beyond the placid river —
I shall send Chen for my finest mount,
my armor and my banner men.

I shall ride forth,
my flag the three-no poem of summer
defiance: No to death,
No to surrender, No to the idea
that all things must have their autumn.

I have sixty-one years
as I leave the pavilion.
I have fifty-one years as I cross
the great wheat fields.
I have forty-one years
as I track the red-maple forest.
I have thirty-one years
as I ford the river,
horse-neck and saddle
just barely above the water.
I have twenty-one years
as Chen passes me
the great halberd
of my ancestors.

Now, I shall kill the White Tiger.

Mr. Penney's Books

Bay-windowed room in gingerbread Victorian,
bookshelved from floor
to cast-in-shadow ceiling —
my dream of my own retirement-exile, to be
left alone at last amid ten thousand
books, and cabinets whose sliding drawers
concealed vast sheaves of etchings, prints,
treasures way back to incunabula days.

And the room — it was Mr. Penney's­
with its great desk and drawing board
tack-pinned with unfinished blueprints
of a magnetic perpetual motion engine —
was itself a mere anteroom
to corridors and attics, niches
and passageways, book
upon book, a hollowed hive
of unkempt learning.

It was here, as a high-school boy,
I came for my real reading:
Voltaire and Paine and Ingersoll,
the little Blue Books of skeptical thought,
the slim red classics of Everyman's library,
the histories piled high 'mid Verne
and Conrad, Tolstoy and Maupassant.

Each day I'd listen rapt to his tales
of selling Vermont marble
in post-earthquake San Francisco
of his newspaper days,
dragging O'Henry from drunk bar
to his deadline desk, long years
of teaching young men the rigors
of mechanical drawing; of buildings
designed and constructed (he’d built
one of the first automat restaurants);
of patents granted and sold too cheap.

Eight decades had crept upon him; he joked
“I never dreamt I’d live to the day
that I grew tits, and my wife a beard.”
Sons and grandsons tramped the big house,
not one of them a reader. Each week
his son's wife heaped Penney's books
into the curbside trashcan; each week
he was up before dawn-crack to retrieve them.

Hundreds were the volumes he gifted me.
“You'll read them. What's more, you'll pass the gift.”
I nodded, books piled to my chin, tottered home.
I read three a day then,
as though I had come to books from a desert,
or dreaded returning to one. Gone from home,
gone to school, gone to the city, I have
a dim memory of someone mentioning
“Old Mr. Penney died a while back.”

I made one final visit to the hated town,
raked my stepfather'd house of every scrap
of my existence there: old manuscripts,
my few remaining comics, cartons of books
I had left behind for someday-retrieval.
My mother, between beers and cigarettes, said:
“Oh, the Penneys came by one day. They said
he left you all his books. We were
going to write you a letter,
but then I never found a stamp,
and I guess I lost the envelope.”

My mind screamed What?! —
my voice went novocain,
a tiny “Oh,” my only response.

Friend’s car packed up
with all my juvenilia, I asked,
"Let's turn left here. There's a house
I want one last remembrance of.”
We slowed to stop. Three people rose
from their porch chairs, swung wide
the double stained-glass door.
The porch light flickered, failed.
Inside, the door to Mr. Penney's library
was thrust open, then slowly shut
like a drowsy eyelid. An arc
of hall-light swept over the floor,
over and across to the deep bay window.
Bare floors, bare walls, stark corners,
bookless, shelfless, deskless and desolate,
then dark as the door closed. The hall's
lights went black, unlettered Penneys
ascending their crisp, clean, dustless stairs
to sleep. We drove off
without speaking, our car trunk full,
back seat piled high to the tipping point
with all the books I'd ever owned.

Copyright 2009 by Brett Rutherford. All Rights Reserved