Poets’ Corner

MacNolia

Van Jordan

W.W. Norton: 96 pp., $23.95*

“MacNolia” is a very unusual book. The poems are not, strictly, “persona” poems, although they tell the true story of (and often speak in the “voice” of) MacNolia Cox, a 13-year-old girl from Akron, Ohio, who became (in 1936) the first African American to reach the final round of the National Spelling Bee. MacNolia was a breath away from winning when the Southern judges presented her with a word not on the official list. After she’d prepared with words like “chiaroscuro” and “apoplexy,” she failed to spell “nemesis,” the name of the goddess of vengeance. The loss of this national contest haunted and deeply humiliated MacNolia, whose life ambitions (to continue as a top student, to study medicine) changed radically. She dropped out of school and became a maid in a doctor’s home, her bright, driving hopes set aside.

I spell even when they tell me to sit in the colored section,

even when they don’t give scholarships to colored girls for college.

I spell the names of the dead who come before my name.

... before me, what I do had only been a prayer on a black girl’s tongue.

Van Jordan “documents” MacNolia’s life, her marriage, her lost dreams. Words -- spelling list words and dictionary definitions weave through the book, from polysyllabics to prepositions -- and famous personalities, such as Fats Waller, Orson Welles, Josephine Baker and Richard Pryor, have walk-on parts in the poems. There is experimentation with poetic forms -- blues, ghazals and (less successfully, to my mind) cinematic directions.

What happened to MacNolia is not necessarily argued as cause and effect: The poet is not interested in quantifying this loss; he chooses rather to indicate it -- he addresses that unspoken shock and disappointment (underwritten by the totemic force of racism) capable of changing a life. But MacNolia’s life adds up to more than a cautionary tale about how one wounding experience can scar the psyche forever. The poems are startling, boldly made with their go-for-broke alternative realities and imaginative ferocity. The finest moments in all the envisioning, however, seem to me to be the moments of simple eloquent gravity: “Sometimes you learn words / by living them and sometimes / Words learn you.”

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Blue Venus

Lisa Russ Spaar

Persea Books: 64 pp., $14.95

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The color blue saturates this book of poems the way the color green saturates Federico Garcia Lorca’s famous poem “Sleepwalker’s Ballad” (“Green, I want you green”):

Blue, I love your lapis palace,

your stair of melancholy that burns,

but does not consume my heart.

This is heightened lyricism, swelling music, to be sure -- but there is also a muscular, thrumming undercurrent here reminiscent of Gerard Manley Hopkins: “ ... the caged parakeet’s tumult of skyjones and waterpeal” -- in short, this is a virtuoso book, ambitiously beautiful. The poet leaps from precipice to precipice of language, with passion casting the lines undergirding this risky flight. It is typically difficult to sustain this kind of energy -- in the hands of a lesser poet, the writing might seem overwrought. Here the poet knows exactly how to edge her echoing, deliriously evocative style with restraint:

I know it in the lustrous, slow and mating strokes

of the fireflies, in the coded tonguings

of each occidental swag of mistletoe, every bitten branch,

...

and though I cannot dwell there, I live

for those illuminated eternities of unharmed hope.

The poems are concerned with desire -- also with prayer and sleeplessness, interrogation of loss and oblivion. Her meditations on the “Insomnias” of famous souls -- Thomas Edison, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Wordsworth, William Blake -- are both witty and emotionally precise as portraits. Reading Russ Spaar, one is reminded of Dickinson’s famous honeybee phrase, “Inebriate of air and Debauchee of Dew.” In Russ Spaar’s own words: “I’m haunted by your supple spark, / the hidden glide of soul.”