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Marilyn Nelson is a storytelling poet.

She gives winsome voice to forgotten people from history and from her own family.

She shines a light on the complicated ancestry we have in common,

and that can help us in the work we have to do together now.

She's written for both adults and children.

She's taught poetry and contemplative practice to West Point cadets.

And alongside the gentle but mightiest theme,

Marilyn Nelson commands in the communion of modern poets,

she's a voice for all of us in the work and the privilege of what she calls communal pondering.

To sit with her is to gain a newly spacious perspective on what that might mean,

and on why people young and old are turning to poetry with urgency.

Poetry consists of words and phrases and sentences that emerge like something coming out of water.

They emerge before us and they call up something in us.

But then they turn us back into our own silence.

And that's why reading poetry, reading it alone silently takes us someplace

where we can't get ordinarily.

Poetry opens us to this otherness that exists within us.

Don't you think you read a poem and you say,

and then you listen to what it brings out inside of you?

...