Marrying History and Poetry: An Interview With Marilyn Nelson
Marilyn Nelson marries history and poetry to restore forgotten lives. Her many awards include Newbury and Coretta Scott King Honors, three times a National Book Award finalist, the Boston Globe/Hornbook and Flora Stieglitz Strauss Awards, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature. In 2022, Marilyn was honored with the Wallace Stevens Award “for outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.” She is the first and only winner to have devoted a substantial part of her writing to young readers. Marilyn was Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut, a poetry partner in The Witness Stones Project, which honors and commemorates the lives of individuals enslaved in Connecticut, Poet-in-Residence at the Episcopal Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, and founder of Soul Mountain retreat, where part of a generation of African American, Native American, Arab-American, and Asian American poets were nurtured with her generous hospitality. Marilyn was interviewed by Nadine Pinede, who was her mentee as part of the Glen Fellowship program. This interview was edited for length and clarity.
“For decades Marilyn Nelson has written a poetry that is insightful, moving, and clear, brimming with history but aimed at the future. That she has often done so for younger readers with all of the same sophistication and seriousness that marks her other verse only makes her achievement all the more remarkable. She has also embodied a tradition of welcoming, gathering, and mentoring other poets, opening up her practice and her spaces, such as Soul Mountain, to support their work. The Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets is the culmination of a career that has garnered praise and prizes from many quarters, and for poetry of all kinds. Whether writing of her father’s generation of Tuskegee Airmen, in the voices of the enslaved speaking of freedom, or about the woman in the mirror, Nelson’s work is necessary and humane, and has led the way on the page and in the world.”
Kevin Young, Academy of American Poets Chancellor
and poetry editor of The New Yorker
Nadine Pinede
In Kevin Young’s lovely tribute at your Wallace Stevens Award ceremony, he mentioned how your work explores the past, but focuses on the future, inspiring young readers who will inherit the world. What are your feelings in receiving this honor? Does it make a difference in your everyday life?
Marilyn Nelson
Well, unfortunately it didn’t come with a crown! I could have worn it around the house all day. I think I might want to suggest that. It’s a great honor to know that your name is in the mental rolodex of your peers. But a lifetime achievement award also reminds you that you’re getting old, and know of people who probably would have been candidates for the award if they were still alive. I try to keep that in mind so receiving it doesn’t go to my head.
NP
You are the first poet with a substantial body of work for younger readers to win this award. Can you say a little bit more about that?
MN
I’m grateful to the powers that be for the great blessing of my friendship with Stephen Roxburgh, who was a children’s editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. We met over a publishing controversy in which a book was banned, and became friends.
I sent him everything I‘d written for children, and he rejected it. Most of it he’d seen, and still didn’t like. I finally told him the only other thing I had was the book I was working on, but it wasn’t for children. It was a serious book of poems, a research-based biography of George Washington Carver. He said, “Let me see it.” I sent it to him and he said, “This is the one I would like.”
NP
That was Carver: A Life in Poems.
MN
Yes. I thought, “Oh, God, it’s going to ruin my book. Nobody’ll ever read it, because it’ll be stuck over there in the little children’s book ghetto that nobody who's serious about the craft of poetry ever reads.”
But Stephen's offer changed my life. Publishers of young adult books noticed me, and I’m grateful for my new home in the publishing world.
Remember: I wasn't writing for young adults: that decision was made pretty much in retrospect. But I thought I was doing something not then being done in poetry: a serious biography. I spent several years researching, and inventing away, with no inkling for the first half of the book, that Stephen would decide it could find its way as a children’s book. I was just writing these exciting new poems.
And then Stephen offered me an advance for the half-finished book! An advance for a book of poems? Poets don’t get advances! That’s what really convinced me. From that point on, I wrote thinking of young adults. I’ve often wondered if anybody sees a difference between the poems in the first half of the book and the second half, because of that.
I don’t, except that, as I wrote the first poems, I was getting to know Carver and afraid to try to write in his voice, because I couldn’t imagine taking on his genius. So, most of those poems are written in voices of people who would have known and been able to tell the story, except the one in the voice of a field of flowers, because he was alone witnessing a lynching, I invented this weird voice, because I couldn't imagine a different voice. Louise Gluck's recently published book helped a lot! As I got to know him better, I felt more comfortable writing in his voice.
NP
When you research, do you gather all sorts of facts like a magpie, or search like a hawk for something very specific? What is your process like?
MN
That depends on the information you’re seeking. For example, I was driven to find a night-blooming flower Carver might have seen in Alabama. That took me off on a major chase, and this was before the Internet, so I used the library, and a research assistant, one of my students at the University of Connecticut. She started the groundwork of Carver by making an annotated bibliography for me to work from.
NP
Often when we talk about Black history, it’s hard to find primary documents. You’ve used imagination to enter the characters, and I wonder if not having to rely so much on primary documents has helped in a way. I think that in My Seneca Village, there was space left for you to fill, because you weren’t constrained by documented history.
MN
Yes, that’s true. Each poem is based on census records: a name, address, age, and occupation. I used some of the occupations listed, and invented others from learning about what was going on in New York and the East Coast at that historical time. I always tell people that I used these partially invented characters as puppets—to illustrate that history. I enjoyed not being constrained, and I really liked the characters I invented.
NP
That really comes through in the poems.
MN
I’m glad to know that. I had a hard time. With one young couple, we meet him first, as a pupil at ten. Then in glimpses, we see him grow up, fall in love, and go west for the Gold Rush. Once, when I happened to be in Texas near an old fort of historical interest, I visited and talked with one of the guides. I said, I’ve got this Black character in New York City, during the Gold Rush. With non-Black people, could just join a wagon train and go west. I had a couple of Irish immigrant brothers who did that. So I said to her, “OK, you’re Black, you’re in New York. Could you just hop on a…were there Black wagon trains? What would happen?”
She said the safest way would be to take a ship from New York down the coast, and then go inland, by ship on a river across a narrow part of South America, then take another ship north to San Francisco.
That way you wouldn’t encounter the potential—
NP
Of being attacked on land. It’s such a great detail.
MN
Exactly. While researching that, I learned of an African American couple who ran a hotel on this ship route.
NP
I remember that couple very well, because you shared their love story at a reading. It’s beautiful. This is this is how we can enter history and intrigue readers, instead of putting them off with memorizing dates. What you do is so much more interesting. It’s a gift to teachers.
MN
I learned this from an American history professor I had when I was in college. His reading list was a sequence of popular American literary novels, and his lectures were about the history the novels were embedded in. We read Babbitt, for example, about a white couple in a small Midwest town in the 1950s, and he used it to show us what was going on politically in that period. It was a wonderful course, and that’s where I learned that way of getting into history.
NP
I believe that novels are products of their time, but they also reveal their time, sometimes indirectly. The history you’ve explored sometimes is painful, even traumatic, like A Wreath for Emmett Till. In your book notes, you mention using the “heroic crown” of sonnets. Can you talk about how that form was a vessel for approaching a very painful story? How did you begin to think about that book?
MN
The editor Andrea Davis Pinkney, also a brilliant children’s book writer, said she had an idea for a book she didn’t think anyone else could write. She wanted to tell me and my agent, but not over the phone, so we went to her office. There was an ice storm, but we got there, sat down, and Andrea said, well, “I’ve always wanted to write a children’s book about lynching.”
My agent and I fell over laughing, because who could write a children’s book about lynching? We’d gone through an ice storm, and she gave us this ridiculous, impossible project. Then, she started talking about possibilities, and—something I’m embarrassed to reveal—a possible advance. The second time somebody had offered an advance for the prospect of writing a book.
So I went home and started thinking. How would you do this for children? What could you say that wasn’t horrifying? Well, it has to have a child’s perspective. That’s all I had. I did a little research about lynching, and found that book in the library everybody knows of.
NP
Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America.
MN
I looked at three photograph postcards: that was as much as I could bear. I couldn’t look anymore. Forget it, there was no way for me to do this research, but I could write about the lynching of Emmett Till. I thought I could just describe it and that would be enough, but that would be wrenching and painful for young readers, and I’d be doing what the postcard book does, just giving an unbearable factual history. If all I do is give them the same experience, then it’s not worth doing.
Then I remembered at a residency in Ireland, I had a conversation with this Irish poet about a poem he’d read by a Danish poet, Inger Christensen, written in this extremely intricate rhyme form that blows your mind, where all of the last lines become the first lines, and he said he’d never forget reading it.
Danish is a language I have some acquaintance with, so I got a copy of her book and tried to figure out how she wrote it. I found that I didn’t experience a gut-wrenching response to the facts I was writing in that form, because I was so busy trying to figure out what to rhyme with what. I figured it would be a kind of “asbestos gloves” to offer young readers.
NP
What’s interesting is that for the writer and readers, the experience is deeper, because defenses don’t immediately go up. If I open Without Sanctuary, I last about two seconds. The horror is immediately in my face. In A Wreath for Emmett Till, I was able to enter and not have my defenses block the story. The wonderful movement created by the crown ending is also a catharsis for the reader. For younger readers especially, it’s a vessel that can help them through those stories.
MN
That’s wonderful. You used catharsis, which is from Plato, isn’t it? Talking about the experience of what art does for us, I think of Picasso’s Guernica. How does art transform experience, so that people who see the art understand what the experience of war is?
NP
That’s a brilliant frame for any person experiencing art that transforms you, because facts alone sometimes can’t. In reading it, I felt that transformation strongly. We’re talking about lives and history, but also the larger question of what you can do with your particular, and magical, art form.
My next question is about your recent biography in poems Augusta Savage: The Shape of a Sculptor’s Life. Can you talk about what drew you to Augusta Savage, and the challenges in writing that kind of book?
MN
Like Emmett Till, it came from agents who asked me, rather than something spun from my imagination. I agreed to embody the book they were imagining. I knew very little about Augusta Savage, so I had to learn as I went along. Unlike with Carver, for which I did years of research with grants, for Augusta Savage, it was, we need this much by this date, and then this much, so it was it was very constrained.
NP
You should have had the chance to walk in her footsteps in France.
MN
Yes, I should have! A couple of years to try to find the work that she did there. It’s all disappeared. I imagine people in villages might have her little figurines and know nothing about her. I read in one brief note that she may have made a portrait of Pushkin based on contemporaneous paintings of him, so I wrote a long poem about that. I saw that it would be easy to spend the rest of your life doing research.
NP
Lots of people have written biographies, but you’ve taken an imaginative leap into her world, that works side-by-side with academic books, as another way of entering history. What did you rely on to get to know her?
MN
I mostly just used histories others had written, but I am also friends with Meredith Bergmann, an important sculptor. Her sculpture “Women’s Rights Pioneers” is a conversation between Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She does large-scale public sculptures, mostly historical women and several African American ones.
I asked her if she would teach me something about sculpting, and she invited me to her studio to show me her work, and sent me home with some research materials. So that was a very useful way of entering the head of a sculptor, one of the most valuable things.
NP
You talked about work that’s disappeared, but one thing that stands out, is that the lack of economic support meant she couldn’t do bronzes, lasting monuments in public places. By having the school, she empowered future generations to do that through her legacy as an educator. You showed all these constraints in her life, her rejection by art schools based on race, and other obstacles, and how she found a way to make something creative from that. It was quite moving.
MN
Yes, it is quite moving, and for me, quite mysterious. How did a child in rural Florida have this idea of creating little clay figures? Where would she ever have seen such sculptures? Was there an art museum she could have gone to? This drove me crazy as I was thinking about her. I can see having the idea of making cups or bowls or plates or something useful, but not figures.
I don’t remember my family ever going to an art museum. We might go to Native American gift shop on a highway in Arizona, but I don’t remember ever seeing a painting or sculpture in a museum as a child.
Part of my interest in trying to write in the voice of an artist is getting at the heart of what drives people to make art. I’ve always found this odd and interesting, but my family really valued art. Everybody in my family had something. They didn’t have the aim of being artists—my dad was a military man, but if you look at his notebooks from lectures and briefings, there are all these little diagrams and the language of the military, and then you turn the page and there’s a sonnet!
NP
I think it’s a way of showing art isn’t a luxury, but a way of being, connecting with important things. You show what drives an artist, even if you’re not naming it. Did that come through when you wrote it?
MN
I think so. The last few poems in that book are actually mine. I included them imagining that’s how she did it: having reached the high point of her career in doing life-size or larger-than-life-size sculptures, at the end of her life, she carved a sculpture small enough to fit on a cookie sheet. It’s still that same impulse to make a mark on the future to survive her.
NP
Yes, that impulse—and the return to childhood, making the little figures of clay—but her small is not really small.
Before we finish, would you like to give advice on how some of the books we’ve discussed could be used in a classroom setting?
MN
I’d like them to recognize that creative work comes at us from a lot of different directions, and that it may be important to look at what feeds the work. In My Seneca Village, each poem is based on invented characters. Teachers could talk about how the stories are used to illustrate that time in the United States.
NP
That’s a great example of how we want to give educators tools to bring diverse new works to life for students, restoring stories that have been erased, and in other cases, showing the difference between idealized versions and the reality many people were living.
MN
Yes. An example of that is the parody of wedding announcements in The New York Times society pages, only these are people descended from slaves. Instead of mentions like his degree from Princeton and his father’s partnership in the XYZ Law Firm, my character is taught by a teacher whose education is based almost entirely on seeing productions of two Shakespeare plays performed by the African Shakespeare Company.
Back then, if you looked at the society page in any city, the weddings would all just be white people. My father used to open the newspaper and say, “Well, let’s see what the white folks are doing.” And that’s changed now in the society pages.
Teachers could explain the relationship between the poem and newspaper announcement, the class differences explored in the comparison.
NP
Thank you, Marilyn. It’s not too late for them to send you a crown!
Related Teaching Resources
On Marilyn Nelson’s My Seneca Village
Teach the Poem “1905” from Carver, a Life in Poems
Photo of the interviewer, Nadine Pinede, taken by Abby Sesselberg in Paris in 2019
