Marilyn Nelson on "Called Up," "Your Own," and "Making History"

These three little unrhymed sonnets are part of a sequence of fifty sonnets about my childhood as the daughter of an African American officer in the U.S. Air Force during the 1950s. I’m a Baby Boomer, born in 1946; the sequence begins with my childish understanding of the reasons my dad, who had graduated from air cadet school at Tuskegee Institute toward the end of WWII, been discharged at the end of the war, and was enrolled in law school, was called back to military service during the Korean Conflict. These poems are embedded in the Red Scare and in the first rumblings of the ground-swell Civil Rights Movement. Yet they offer a young child’s limited understanding.

The project began as a desire to imitate a delightful little book I read several years ago, Love, Loss, and What I Wore , by Ilene Beckerman, in which a woman’s wardrobe serves as a time capsule of her life. That book has since been used as the basis for a wildly successful play written by Nora and Delia Ephron. But when I started writing my project, I was still in love with the relation between clothing and memory, and I spent some time researching the project by paging through bound volumes of popular magazines from the Fifties, taking notes about what was happening, and about the clothes worn in the ads.

Another source of these poems is a book by one of my friends, Inge Pedersen, a Danish poet and fiction writer. Inge’s most recent book, Til Amerika, is a collection of short fiction pieces about her girlhood during the years Denmark was occupied by the Nazis. At one point when we were together recently, either in her home or in mine, Inge told me that the stories in this collection work because they are in the voice of a young child; that each of the stories is built around a gap in the child’s understanding. She said they were a joy to write, and suggested I try to do something similar.

One aspect of the world my poems describe is the pervasiveness of the military hierarchy, which extends to the children. None of my childhood friends were the children of non-commissioned personnel. We were all children of officers. This meant that, since so few commissioned officers were African American, almost all of my playmates were white. My mother was a very race-proud woman; she was passionate about Negro history; she came from a very proud family of individuals who knew they were making history. She wanted us to know that pride. That’s in the background of the poem called “Your Own.” A little note about “Making History”: my mother was born and raised in one of the few all-Negro towns in the country, and she was quite proud of the fact that her sister, Miss Charlie Boyd Mitchell, was the first Negro telephone switchboard operator in the country.

This collection, called Blue Footsies, will be illustrated and marketed as a young adult book to be published by Dial Books for Young Readers in 2014.

Douglas Kearney on "Thank You But Don't Buy My Babies Clothes with Monkeys on Them"

MONKEYS! Tried and tried but the monkey got in. On a bib slung over the booster seat where it beep-beeps toward me in a car with a city in the background. The monkey leans out the window, waving, his tail curled like a question mark. Asking me what? Curious George matching cards are scattered, loose tiles on our ceramic floor. Match the monkey to the monkey. No, the monkey doesn’t match the little girl. No, the monkey doesn’t match the little boy.

But the monkey goes with kids, say the clothes and bibs, the high chairs and toys. This marketplace monkey is an adorable almost-person, a hairy little mirror, often brown. As Sianne Ngai says of the aesthetic category “cute”, it performs a harmlessness yet infantilizes itself and the onlooker. Cuh-yoot.

Monkeys go guerrilla though! Martial monkeys. Cuh-yoot? The lady with the pet chimp? Ate her face off! And Caesar? Filthy handed, dirty ape’ded. King Kong? A century of snatching up white women and ruining the city. They wreck everything those irate primates.

The marketplace and martial monkeys intersect to generate the negro as monkey image, the racist representation that rides shotgun in a poem driven by a father worried about his children, their bodies and their selfhoods. Drives a poem called “Thank You But    Don’t Buy My Babies Clothes with Monkeys on Them” from its sonnet like start; through its anxious hear-no/see-no/speak-no; its historically-traumatized perseverations; its overwhelmed terror; to its shell-shocked calm.

Why does it drive to these places? Because in order to enact the fear I have I have to try to present the complex ambivalent cultural (political) components that aid and abet the fear. Beyond presenting them, my desire to work through (as in both via proxy and vain hope to resolve) the staged predicaments requires different coping strategies, disguised here as a poetics. Or is that the other way ‘round? Bananas.

And just to show I ain’t paranoid, that I’m not imagining things, Mary Gustoff, CEO of Brasskey Keepsakes shows up poem-side to hie off “Lil Monkey,” a black doll sold at Costco until those irate protestors wrecked everything. A reverse Elizabeth Eckford moment? Also bananas.

The child(ren) in danger. A particular terror for the parent(s). The black child(ren) in danger? The terror is enhanced by racism’s ability to turn children into adults and adults into children into monkeys into gorillas. There is a moment coming when my toddler twins, cuh-yoot now, will become, to a spectator, monsters. Kongs. Their monstrosity may be argued on TV by GROWN UPS with considerable resources marshaled to confirm it. It has nothing to do with who my children are. Nothing. And NOTHING. It has everything to do with what that nice lady remarking on my daughter’s eyelashes (how they curl!) might feel some Tuesday in twelve years. What some guy with a gun decides about my son. Ask Trayvon’s parents, Emmet’s, Elizabeth’s, Latasha’s. Who cries over a dead monkey? Who listens to a living one? How do you write about your children (personal) when their innocence can be easily rendered immaterial (political) by the culture they live in?

To see the personal in its continuity with the political is to see the infrastructure of our social interaction, the social interactions that lead to the “private” lyrical moment. In other words, it’s to “see.” The introspective is in the mind, in the individual who is in the society. Run! Try! But the poem you write and post on that site, in that journal, in that book is a part of the exchange. The political.

This poem makes no effort to separate the political from the personal. Because hearing no/seeing no/speaking no evil (I know, bananas!) is no charm, no way toward transcending them, just a deafness, blindness, muteness. Why be senseless as the racism? Well, it could make it easier for my wife and me to buy sock monkeys at Costco. “Yoo-hoo-oo. I wanna be like. . . ."