How I Discovered Poetry by Marilyn Nelson

With the blessing of his foster parents, Moses and Susan Carver, George moves to Neosho, MO, about eight miles from his home in Diamond Grove, to attend the closest school for Negro children.

Note how well death softens the human skin,įitted perfectly in their shelter of bones,Ī portrait in poems of the life of George Washington Carver, botanist, inventor, painter, musician, and teacher.Ĭupped hands warmed so it wriggled and set Which served him who served me throughout his life, Have practiced the bone-setter’s healing touch,Ĭracked necks, and set my neighbors back to work.Īnd closed the lightless eyes of the new dead. Fortune’s bones now reside in the Mattituck Museum in Waterbury CT. Preserved Porter, rendered the bones of his former slave so he could use the skeleton as a teaching tool.

In 1798, a slave named Fortune died at about the age of sixty. “Bivouac in a Storm” tells the story of a group of young soldiers, later known as the Tuskegee Airmen, as they trained near Biloxi, Mississippi, “marching in summer heat / thick as blackstrap molasses, under trees / haunted by whippings.” Later pieces range from the poet’s travels in Africa, Europe, and Polynesia, to poems written in collaboration with Father Jacques de Foiard Brown, a former Benedictine monk and the subject of Nelson’s playful fictional fantasy sequence, “Adventure-Monk!” Both personal and historical, these poems remain grounded in everyday details but reach toward spiritual and moral truths.įrom Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem

Poems include the stories of historical figures like Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old boy lynched in 1955, and the inhabitants of Seneca Village, an African American community razed in 1857 for the creation of Central Park. This volume contains a selection of Marilyn Nelson’s new and uncollected poems as well as work from each of her lyric histories of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century African American individuals and communities. Thank you! ~Peggy Shumaker, Poetry EditorĬonjuring voices and characters across oceans and centuries, Faster Than Light explores widely disparate experiences through the lens of traditional poetic forms. The poems in this feature come from Marilyn Nelson’s book Faster Than Light, and are used with the generous permission of Louisiana State University Press and the poet.

How I Discovered Poetry by Marilyn Nelson