This was a book that I purchased for a poetry writing class that we then never bothered to reference or read, so it's been sitting in my "to read" pile for a number of years, tucked away in a storage bin that I'm finally going through.

It certainly is an interesting piece, all the works included revolve around the life and times of MacNolia Cox, a young black girl who won her local, state-wide spelling bee, only to be sucker punched by the white judge at the National Bee, giving her a word that was not on the approved list and breaking her spirit. The entries do not follow any exact time frame, jumping around to different points in her life. In fact, most of the information regarding her spelling champ days isn't until the end of the book, though it was a much earlier part of her life.

Several poems in this collection are written in a hybrid screenplay form, making them very visually striking. There are also poems in the form of dictionary entries and those written in more long form style.

One of my favorite works in this book is "The Night Richard Pryor Met Mudbone," an amazing poem that detalis the moment Richard Pryor went from a descent comic mimicking Bill Cosby to the Pryor who would be considered a comedy trailblazer. It's such a powerful piece. I love it. ( )

MACNOLIA engaged me as a hybrid piece, more a novel comprised of poems than a book of stand-alone poems (and therein lies its strength, I think). As in Lyrae Van Clief-Stephanon’s Black Swan, Van Jordan’s poems come together to form a coherent and interesting whole greater than the sum of its parts. Van Jordan takes his project up a notch by playing around to a certain extent with form (I hate to use “experimental” in relation to poetry, since I think it has become almost meaningless). His approach to putting words on the page is quite varied, moving from left justified stanzas to prose blocks to double-spaced lines to a poem, “Dust,” that incorporates gaps of white space (“exploded” form). None of this is new or radical in contemporary poetry, of course, but its hybrid nature saves MACNOLIA from getting mired in a narrative which is essentially coherent and accessible to the reader (not to say that Van Jordan “tells all”). The story told is not Van Jordan’s own (except in an historical/communal experience sense) but that of a black girl from Akron, Ohio who won the District spelling bee in 1936, then went on to the national championships in Washington D.C., where she came in fifth, having lost when the Southern judges gave her a word to spell, "nemesis," that was not on the official list (in other words, a word that she was not responsible for). Some of the poems in the book relate the story of the spelling bee and others the story (more a set of images, than an account) of MacNolia’s marriage to John Montiere. Breaking up (or through) the personal story are a series of blues poems that call upon (call forth/ recall) such historical/cultural figures as Jesse Owens, Richard Pryor, Bill Robinson, Mudbone, Josephine Baker, Asa Philip Randolph and Fats Waller. By definition, spelling is about words, about how a word looks, rather than how or what it means. In MacNolia’s case, being a champion speller also came down to how she looked, rather than what she was capable of doing or being. For the poet, words have a look, a sound, meanings and histories, as well as History about them. Van Jordan plays with all these aspects of words in the poems that comprise MACNOLIA. Among the most intriguing to me are the definition poems: “inchoate,” "from," “afterglow,” “with,” and “to.” Especially in "from," “with” and “to,” I found myself emphasizing the italicized "defined" words while reading them, which set up an hypnotic rhythm and created the feel of a percussive, fragmented syntax in an on-the-surface-of-it straightforward line. Musically and thematically, MACNOLIA brings to mind Toni Morrision’s novel Jazz, while formally, although quite different in form and content, it made me think of Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Which brings me back to my initial inclination to read MACNOLIA as a novel rather than as a collection of poems.



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The story and poems here are beautiful. I've been teaching this book for two years now, and while it's not an easy read for the students, most of them come to appreciate it, and some are always touched and fall in love with it. Van Jordan brings the men and women here to life by focusing on the small things, and on their loves and fears, and as such the book comes together. Something like a quilt emerges from all of the poems, and if you take your time, this will be well on its way to being your favorite collection of poetry. It's not a book I can speak highly enough of, so I'll stop, but if you enjoy poetry at all, or even simply biographies or love stories, you should at least start wandering through it, however slowly. Take your time, and it's worth the while. ( )

I admit, the purchase of Macnolia was an impulse buy. The eyes of an inocent brown face staring at me with a definition printed across her forehead. I was intrigued. And I sat in the indie bookshop and read. A half hour later, I walked away with a new book for my collection.

mac*no*lia (mak nol ya), n. a Negro who spells and reads as well [if not better than] any white.

This is my introduction ot A. Van Jordan. This was the first poetry book that opened my eyes to what a poetry collection could be. Too often, books of poetry are loose, wandering collections of randomness. Profound, perhaps. Deep even. But strewn together without any connectivity or coherence. This is acceptable because, it is poetry. I love this poetry book because I understand with the turn of each page that each poem was written with pure intention.

Infidelity

Sometimes you learn words
By living them and sometimes
Words learn you

By defining who you are-
An eponym for appetite,
lack of trust,
A volcano, a swash
Of lust and lies,
And here you come,

Introducing yourself
As John or soem other
Alias defined by any

Trick your tongue
Can conjure, and
Before you know

The meaning of the word,
Love has brought us
Back again and again.

There's always a cure
For love, but it hurts;
And, yes, there's always

A cure for the hurt,
But the remedy drags us
Right back

To where we started.

after William Matthews

Macnolia explores the love between the man and a woman, Macnolia explores the effects of being Black in America, Macnolia the public moments which defined private experiences of Black history - A. Phillip Randolph, Josephine Baker, Richard Pryor, Jesse Owens among others.

This is a beautiful collection of poetry, a poetic storyline, a bound confession of a people.

Love,

Lhea J

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