Last Thursday, November 29, our very own Charles Chu room was graced with incredible talent. For an hour, maybe only a small sliver of the day, roughly sixty Conn students packed into the room, occupying its stiff black leather seats, many even sitting on the floor, to hear Marilyn Nelson speak. The five-year Connecticut state poet laureate gave a truly inspiring performance. Taking our cramped ensemble on a lyrical ride through the African countryside, and then spiraling with her in the cockpit of a Tuskegee airman’s fighter pilot, most of us were not present in New London, but rather accompanied Nelson’s words to wherever in the world they sought to go.
And depart with her we did. In fact, it took less than one poem to recognize the origins of Nelson’s literary fame. The author of close to thirty works, ranging from poetry collections to translations and even children’s books, she is something of a big deal. She is even the founder of her own artist’s colony, Soul Mountain Retreat, in East Haddam, Connecticut. That Thursday afternoon, Nelson debuted one of her most recent collections: Faster than Light (2011).
Her first poem was an imaginative free verse titled “Live Jazz Franklin Park Zoo.” In it, Nelson brought us to a place in her imagination where animals relate to music. The scenario was a hypothetical recreation of a time in 1978 when a jazz band actually did perform in the Boston Zoo. The poem portrayed the scene from behind the limiting enclosures of primates, zebras and lions, whose connection with the live music allowed them to transcend to something greater, “And where there had been, at most, a nest of boughs to receive it, music built a cathedral in their senses.”
Only a few moments later, we were tugged into the front seat of the next poem, “6 Minute Dog Fight,” an intense World War II dogfight harkening to her father, a Tuskegee airman. Resurging from the fiery conflict, the poem could not escape questioning how 1940s America hailed its heroes into the role of second-class citizens.
Nelson’s recital then took a dive into intensity. As an audience, we got familiarized with a theme in her writing: spirituality, or at least its pursuit through poetry. We heard her dialogue with an omniscient but snarky muse, questioning human existence and its context in the scheme of things. Then we followed her to the backseat of a jeep in Africa, churning through a dirt highway. As hitchhikers hopped on and off her car, the poem impressed upon her audience the temporary nature of relationships, worlds which she described as colliding and falling apart. The Zen-like nature of her thought process wove neatly between the two poems, in a manner at least mildly arousing to the poetry junkie in everyone present.
At times I couldn’t help but check how the rest of my fellow audience was doing. I was surprised by how the back end of the Chu room had been getting progressively more crowded. It seems so strange how floor space could all of a sudden become a commodity in a room usually reigned by one or two more studious types.
If there was any way to judge the quality of the reading, it was by our own professors. When I let my eyes wander, it was to the bowed and balding crowns of our own poets and writers, who all seemed to be induced into some sort of literary coma. It was impressive and a little bit hilarious all at once. Most of us were still tangled somewhere in Africa, or lingering in a musky cockpit 10,000 feet too high, when Nelson dismissed us in a very motherly manner, assuring us that by now we must all have been so tired. No one seemed fazed though; Nelson gave a truly memorable performance.
