Review: How I Discovered Poetry
A Poetic Memoir by Newbery Honor Winner Marilyn Nelson
April is National Poetry Month, and while I read this collection back in February of this year, while making a concerted effort to expand my knowledge of Black writers and poets, now seems like a good time to share my thoughts on it.
“How I Discovered Poetry, by Newbery Honor winner and National Book Award finalist (as well as Cleveland born, like me) Marilyn Nelson,” is a poetic memoir, covering the years of 1950–196, when the author went from age 4 to 14.
In the author’s note, Nelson notes that she views the narrator in the poems, who is more or less sharing memories from her (Nelson’s) life, as “she” rather than “me.” Nelson also specifies that the poems are all non-rhyming sonnets, written in iambic pentameter. Honestly, despite my love of poetry, I’d be hard pressed to identify specific forms of poetry without great effort these days, aside from Haiku, as it’s been a couple decades since I took a poetry class.
The poems share the young girl’s thoughts covering a variety of topics from the ordinary — sibling rivalry and saying goodbye to friends — to the monumental and intense — racism and the Cold War. The years covered in this early life memoir tell the story of a young Black family; the father has been called up to active duty as one of the only, possibly one of the first, Negro officers in the U.S. Air Force. Nelson and the other members of her family become a lot of white Americans’ “First Negro ‘blank’,” as Nelson’s mother notes in a poem as a point of pride. The first Black student in her class or her school, her mother being the first Black teacher to an all white class, the first Black family on the block, and on it goes.
As her father’s deployments take the family from the far North to the deep South and from sea to shining sea, including exposing young Marilyn to a “bad name she doesn’t like,” her poems reference Ruby Bridges and the Little Rock Nine with the narrator describing a degree of relief that she isn’t where they are even as she takes her own role as other people’s “First Negro” in stride. The works also offer glimpses and insights into the typical life of a military family: being dragged from base-to-base, making and losing friends, finding and giving up dogs, traveling through “Podunk” towns while driving cross-country. Her stories reminiscent of my spouse’s tales of life as an army brat.
This 112-page book (Kindle | Paperback) of fifty poems contains illustrations by Hadley Hooper that perfectly complement the tone of the written words. Despite being in sonnet form (which always sounds more intimidating to readers), the collection is written from the young girl’s perspective making it accessible for a broad range of readers whether or not they consider themselves to be “poetry readers.”
Each work is a memory — a snapshot in time — shared by that coming-of-age girl, and they easily trigger memories and feelings of nostalgia in the reader. Or, at least that’s what I took away from it while also getting to know esteemed poet Marilyn Nelson a bit. And, of course, we learn from her:
How I Discovered Poetry
It was like soul-kissing, the way the words
filled my mouth as Mrs. Purdy read from her desk.
All the other kids zoned an hour ahead to 3:15,
but Mrs. Purdy and I wandered lonely as clouds borne
by a breeze off Mount Parnassus. She must have seen
the darkest eyes in the room brim: The next day
she gave me a poem she’d chosen especially for me
to read to the all except for me white class.
She smiled when she told me to read it, smiled harder,
said oh yes I could. She smiled harder and harder
until I stood and opened my mouth to banjo playing
darkies, pickaninnies, disses and dats. When I finished
my classmates stared at the floor. We walked silent
to the buses, awed by the power of words.
I will likely read this book again to select and save favorites. Perhaps you’ll give this collect a chance as well.
Hear from the poet herself on NPR, speaking on this book and on her collection memorializing Emmett Till.
If you enjoyed this book review, please offer a clap or even a round of applause. Please leave a comment if you choose to read this book after reading my review. I’d love to hear from you!
© 2023 Leigh-Anne Dennison, except for the poem excerpted from Nelson’s work, under the fair use doctrine of the United States copyright statute, when reviewing a literary work.
