READING: POEM

How I Discovered Poetry

MARILYN NELSON

Marilyn Nelson (b. 1946) is an American poet and translator and the author of books for young adults. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including The Homeplace (1990), The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems (1997), in which this poem appeared, and The Cachoiera Tales and Other Poems (2005), which won the L. E. Phillabaum Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Award for poetry. Her most recent work is How I Discovered Poetry (2014), a memoir in verse form. In 2012 Nelson was awarded the Frost Medal by the Poetry Society of America, and in 2013 she was elected to the board of chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. Respond to the poem as you read it by making notes in the margin.

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

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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,

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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.