how i discovered poetry by marilyn nelson

The poems range from the deeply personal to the largely historical, many of them anchored by repeated images - “Making History” and “First Negro,” the speaker’s dark skin juxtaposed against white classmates and friends, misheard or interpreted information, and moving, always moving. And while any kind of othering leaves its mark, she was able to form herself in a vacuum that allowed her to be a poet first, defined by passion at least as much as by skin color.īut it wasn’t a fully sealed vacuum, and the dichotomy between her life and the life outside the base looms large in the collection. She was a novelty to be treasured rather than an other to be scorned for much of her childhood. It seems, from the portrait in her poems, to have been strangely idyllic in many ways despite the strong racial tensions of the decade, army base life’s rarified environment and officer-based pecking order allowed her to come of age standing slightly sideways from some of tensions between blacks and whites in America.

The daughter of one of the first black career officers, she spent her childhood in the 50s moving from base to base, often the only black child other than her own sister. The bare facts: Nelson’s childhood would probably make an excellent novel based on what I gleaned from this text (I could look for corroborating data on Wikipedia or elsewhere, but I’m going to let the book stand on its own). And the most important accuracy, emotional accuracy, rings loud and clear in every poem. The poems are filled with facts of time and place and happening, but more than anything they are about the emotions of the moments collected, a decision made clear in the afterword where Nelson explains that the poems are not entirely memories research and imagination have played a part as well. Nelson neatly sidesteps the risk of sacrificing beauty for truth (despite what Keats claimed, literal truth isn’t always lovely) by supplying only tiny fragments, snapshots in poetry, of a fascinating childhood. Like all nonfiction, the first line of assessment is usually accuracy - and a memoir that is too perfectly literary these days may raise suspicion of creativity, which isn’t always desirable in nonfiction. Memoir is a tricksy genre for a literary award. Marilyn Nelson, author of the 2006 Printz honor book A Wreath for Emmett Till, is responsible for what may be this year’s most unique contender, pairing two genres only occasionally spotted in the YA world - memoir and poetry - to make a whole that is notable and worth recognizing.

How I Discovered Poetry, Marilyn Nelson, illustrated by Hadley Hooper

How i discovered poetry by marilyn nelson