In the years preceding her death in 2010, Carolyn M. Rodgers shared a home with her sister Nina Rodgers Gordon in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. She had familial support there for a life dedicated to writing, allowing her to work even as she suffered with the cancer that took her life at age sixty-nine. Among the literary papers Rodgers left behind was a body of work she produced after the early phases of her career, following the influential output of the 1960s and 70s that had made her a preeminent poet of the Black Arts Movement (BAM) nationally. After the “militant” poems of such works as Paper Soul (1968) and Songs of a Black Bird (1969), both published by Chicago’s Third World Press, and the “spiritual” poems of How I Got Ovah (1975) and The Heart as Ever Green (1978), Rodgers began a third phase of her career, striking out for a new artistic autonomy and issuing her poetry for the next two and a half decades through her own independent operation, Eden Press.
Born in 1940 in Chicago, Rodgers was raised in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church on the city’s South Side, where she graduated from Hyde Park High School. While studying English and psychology at Roosevelt University, she met Gwendolyn Brooks at an academic reception and later joined the Brooks Writers’ Workshop, which introduced her to Margaret Walker, Amiri Baraka, and other major influences. Introduced to Hoyt W. Fuller, another mentor, at a meeting of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), she soon became a founding member of the OBAC Writers’ Workshop. In 1967, the same year John H. Johnson’s Negro Digest/Black World published some of her earliest writing, Rodgers teamed up with Haki R. Madhubuti and Johari Amini (Jewel C. Latimore) to cofound Third World Press. After a string of provocative poetry collections that helped define the BAM poetic idiom, she made what was then a controversial move to a mainstream commercial publisher for How I Got Ovah, a National Book Award finalist in the mid-1970s. Around 1980, with funds from the Illinois Arts Council, she established Eden Press, publishing her writing through homemade chapbooks, broadsides, and newsletters. After earning an MA in English from the University of Chicago in 1984, she took the experience she had from jobs at such schools as Albany State College and Indiana University and became a full-fledged teaching writer, serving as a longtime instructor at Columbia College Chicago and the City Colleges of Chicago’s Harold Washington College.
The chapbook Translation Part One (1980) was the first of Rodgers’s Eden Press publications. Others also found in her papers include the chapbooks Morning Glory (1989), We’re Only Human (1994), and A Train Called Judah (1998); the broadsides If We Touch Each Other, We Can Heal Ourselves (2007), and Mary in the Garden with the Risen Master (undated); and the newsletter Small Miracles. Rodgers kept much of this work close to home, acting as her own publisher without a definite distribution arrangement, often sharing the work through personal contacts. The private nature of Eden Press was a risk for Rodgers, whose reputation and achievement warranted widespread interest from editors and publishers at shops large and small. It became another kind of risk decades into the venture when a tragic accident befell her papers. As Rodgers wrote to activist and author Judy Juanita in January 2006, portions of her archive had just been lost to a flood that destroyed documents kept in storage.[1] Despite this tragedy, the archive of Eden Press lived on, though the full scale of what was lost may never be known. Works listed in Rodgers’s biographic and bibliographic materials but not yet found include the chapbooks Eden and Other Poems (1983) and Finite Forms (1985).
In the summer of 2016, when I told the poet Ed Roberson about research I was doing for a project on BAM in Chicago, our talk quickly turned to Rodgers, who had become Roberson’ s colleague and friend after his 2004 move to Chicago. He told me to get in touch with Gordon, Rodgers’s sister, saying she was organizing Rodgers’s papers and could possibly use the help of a graduate student. Meeting that summer, Gordon and I began an inventory of the papers, launching what would become an ongoing collaboration to collect and preserve Rodgers’s writings and bring them more attention from readers. I had learned from both Gordon and Roberson about the loss to Rodgers’s archive. The survival of Rodgers’s Eden Press collections, which I had only read about in bibliographies, became a question of particular concern. When we discovered several versions of Translation Part One, our project seemed to have found a starting point.
The poems gathered in Translation Part One illuminate a pivotal moment in Rodgers’s career. They continue and elaborate a theme established in her 1978 collection The Heart as Ever Green, which concludes with a poem titled “Translation (Thinking of Enoch) for Black people.” Alluding to Enoch, the descendant of Adam who lived for 365 years and then “was no more, because God took him,” according to the Book of Genesis, the poem’s title foreshadows a theme of resurrection and ascension, and suggests a deepening of the poet’s interest in spiritual transformation. The poem speaks for a “we,” casting them as “spirits” who “live like leaves bowing trees […] brushing, bruising & mingling / with each other.” Mirroring the belief in Enoch’s assumption into heaven, it delivers a statement that lets the spiritual and the earthly interpenetrate, responding to social conflicts that affect a community’s spiritual selves : “no death is a / singular unregenerating / event. / we will continue to be / constant / to flux / into each other.” The poem is “for Black people” and calls upon the traditional symbol of “incalculable storms” impeding the journey to freedom. It suggests that intraracial conflict and division can be resolved and redeemed in a higher spiritual union, where being multiple and changeable is the key to synthesis.
The end of The Heart as Ever Green marks a plateau before the further spiritual ascendancies of Translation Part One. But it’s Rodgers’s 1975 collection, How I Got Ovah, that critics often interpret as the beginning of a religious turn in her work, as David Lionel Smith noted in a 1976 review in these pages, which he discusses elsewhere in this issue.[2] And that return to the church, as Rodgers described it, is supposedly matched by a turn away from Black revolutionary politics. How I Got Ovah is the book in which Rodgers declares, “i woke up one morning / and looked at my self // i saw more than a ‘sister’ … / i saw a Woman. human. / and black.” Soon enough, Rodgers would seem to answer those critics who said “a spiritual transformation / a root revival of love,” as this poem calls the experience, was a breakup with other advocates of emancipatory politics. “i, the ‘militant’ gone mild? / well i’m mellow in my meanings, ain’t i? / i love my people. i relate to their, welfare” she writes in The Heart as Ever Green. But the fallout was real. Perhaps the intraracial strife described in “Translation (Thinking of Enoch)” reflects disagreement with cultural nationalists and Rodgers’s wish to resolve it through “a root revival of love” itself. For those linked in spirit, the poem envisions constancy in spite of, or because of, flux; in this period, the poet’s own political identity was certainly in flux. In an exchange with Mari Evans published in 1984, Rodgers wrote, “I have no distinct and defined political stance.” The former “soul sister poetess of the moment,” as she describes her early persona in How I Got Ovah, saw a new imperative to “write as a human, a woman, who is Brown. I am questioning the use of the word Black, i.e., Blacks. I now prefer the word Brown, i.e., Brown people, and with this change goes an ideology and a set of new ideas.”[3] Though Rodgers goes no further in her account, it’s possible to hear in it a universal humanism in the service of oppressed peoples everywhere. The outcome of the “spiritual transformation” Rodgers announced in How I Got Ovah and explored in The Heart as Ever Green was not a rejection of politics but rather a new social and ethical vision.
The first stirrings of her “Translation” poems, in The Heart as Ever Green and elsewhere, suggest just how profound this spiritual transformation and the vision it inspired were for Rodgers. It was in the mid-1970s that she returned to the Christian faith. As Angela Jackson argues elsewhere in this issue, spirituality had always been a feature of Rodgers’s work. Early poems in Songs of a Black Bird dramatize the conflict between a young Black cultural nationalist and her devout mother, a committed member of the AME Church. Foreshadowing “Translation (Thinking of Enoch),” these poems already tend toward resolution. In “IT IS DEEP” (1969), the poem’s speaker comes to terms with knowing her mother “would not be / considered ‘relevant’ or ‘Black,’” realizing ultimately that, nonetheless, she “is very obviously, / a sturdy Black bridge that I / crossed over, on.” In this poem, what “is deep” is religious faith, submerged in personal identity and recoverable as a legacy of communal history.
But if religious faith is deep-seated in Rodgers’s earlier work, it is really deep in the “Translation” poems. By the end of The Heart as Ever Green, Rodgers takes her spiritual transformation into mystical experience. Her allusion to the story of Enoch, with its similarities to such later traditions as the Assumption of Mary, underscores an extended metaphor predicated on the mystical union of soul and body. The poem reflects the specific nature of her turn to religion. When Rodgers embraced Christianity again, she did not return to the AME Church of her parents. Instead, she practiced the Catholic faith, worshipping at the now-demolished St. Charles Lwanga Church in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, at St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church in Hyde Park, and at Holy Name Cathedral on the Near North Side.[4] The religious idiom and the social and ethical vision of Rodgers’s “Translation” poems take shape from her embrace of Catholicism.[5]
Consider an uncollected offshoot of Translation Part One, a poem titled “The Translation of Eve.” Rodgers included the poem in her 1984 exchange with Evans, its only known publication, where she discussed it as an example of her poetic craft. Invoking Genesis, the first stanza could be a proem for the “Translation” series :
and flesh had breath. a soul began to be. the rise and eve’s of my
eve-ness. even. balance. man. now, wo-man, even me. Lord. even me …
Eve.
the beginning of yeses and no’s.
the paradigm of mourning and sorrow.
a door opened and another one closes. prayers, and the “we wish,”
forever, transformed.
Here the poem uses sound patterning and phonemic recombination to enact a language coming into being. While “the rise and eve’s” doubles as an image both of dawn and dusk and of an irruptive, displacing event (eve’s/heaves), the recasting of “eve” and “eve-ness” as the poet’s own sense of “balance” sets up another pattern of transmogrifying syllables : the vowel in “now” draws “wo-man” out of “man.” With a touch of the feminist-revised creation story, centered on Eve, the poem shows us Logos at work in the creation of a self, as the words create a sui generis reality from their own assembling. What materializes is the beginning of human intention and pain. In this etiology of human being and selfhood as suffering, the poem displays rhetorical features that also define Translation Part One. For instance, abstractions such as “the paradigm of mourning and sorrow” bear immense semantic force, both as signs with self-contained meanings and as symbols of an overall theological system. Moreover, abstractions often rise to the level of nominalizations, where repeated acts of naming give concepts or locutions such as “the ‘we wish’” the presence of things or the agency of subjects. This is a language populated by hypostatized entities, which create a union of human mutability and self-identity. Finally, the searching language of coming fully into being and selfhood often finds itself discovering or rediscovering the apposite folk wisdom available in commonplaces (“a door opened and another one closes ”).
Embracing the image of a mystical union of human and divine existence, the language Rodgers develops here and in Translation Part One scales up how it describes spiritual transformation. It’ s as though the poet’ s introspection has led to a view of the spirit’s inner workings from the perspective of a divine cosmology. From this vantage point, spiritual life seems, like organic life, to follow its own evolutionary processes. Key to the “Translation” concept for Rodgers was the soul’s status as an eternal and eternally protean substance. “The most prevalent theme is becoming, or becomings,” she told Evans. Divine inspiration launches a human soul into creation (“flesh had breath. a soul began to be”), and we hear the evidence in that small, individual expression of personhood and identity that echoes the Yahweh proclamation :
and the i am is illuminated. the i am of every man. not the great
I AM of forevermore, but the small everyman. and then, after the
heels of our souls have been bruised. a crucifixion. a resurrection.
a Transfiguration. and the translations began again.
Just as “Translation (Thinking of Enoch)” suggests ascension, these lines allude to the visionary event of Christ’s transfiguration, which gave three disciples an early image of what Catholic theology calls the glorified body after resurrection. Here the poem also makes transfiguration an event in the language : the figure of pure presence, “i am,” gets refigured through repetition and difference, as the cadences accede to chant. Through the instability of “am,” or the constancy of its flux, as Rodgers might figure it, the poem testifies to the paradox of identity’s mutability. Of course, after the transfiguration Jesus too would be put through more changes, not the least of which stood at the cross : “and the translations began again.”
Nominalizing “the i am” is also a major figure of speech in Translation Part One, a work with some mutability of its own. Rodgers told Evans in their early-1980s exchange that Translation was the title of her then most recent book. From that point forward, the chapbook regularly appears in published bibliographies of Rodgers’s work, alternately titled Translation and Translation Part One.[6] Based on all available evidence, these appear to be interchangeable titles for the same work; if a “Translation Part Two” was ever planned, no record of it has been found. We know that Rodgers counted Translation Part One among her books, but it remains unclear how widely it circulated as a chapbook. Despite the partial loss they suffered, Rodgers’s papers contain copies of this and other Eden Press titles the author listed in her biographic and bibliographic materials but no correspondence about the chapbook that illuminates a trail of private circulation. Individual poems from Translation Part One certainly had a readership. In the decade following the chapbook’s 1980 publication, a select few of the poems appeared in anthologies of African American and working-class writing.[7] The present publication marks the first time since Rodgers issued her Eden Press chapbook that the entire sequence is appearing in print.
The version of Translation Part One published here comes from an archival copy annotated with an additional poem in the author’s handwriting a decade after initial publication, which makes this in effect an updated edition. Rodgers’s papers include multiple versions of the chapbook, with some variation in length and arrangement. Ranging from fourteen poems to the sequence of twenty-one published here, Translation in its different instantiations embraces an aleatory quality that defines the core of the work itself. Take the bedrock of the chapbook, a numbered subset of “Translation Poems.” Across the versions, their order and placement in the sequence vary, but there is a deeper constant. In each version, including the one published here, Rodgers eschews numerical order for the “Translation Poems” and leaves gaps in the numbered subsection. This is no accident or anomaly. Rodgers hewed closely to a pattern in keeping Translation Part One a work with indeterminate boundaries, inviting aporias to emerge inside the chapbook and letting some “Translation” poems fall outside it, as we have seen with the “Enoch” and “Eve” poems. Moreover, this is “Part One” of a work with no “Part Two” in sight, its horizons kept clear and open. Rodgers’s approach to seriality is non-totalizing, consistent with the work’s humanist and spiritual vision. It captures human life in flux, striving and becoming, involved in translations from the earthly to the divine that require no deathly finality. There may be a grand system in place on a higher plane, but the speakers and characters of these poems remain constantly emergent as its elemental components.
Translation Part One reveals Rodgers in a period of “becoming” on two fronts, as she moved into a mystic and visionary poetry and committed herself to independent publishing. When Rodgers left her major commercial publisher after 1978, she did not return to an established Black-owned press, choosing instead to remain independent and publish her own work on her own terms. This part of Rodgers’s story is just beginning to come to light and warrants deeper study. The reasons for her independent turn are not entirely certain, but several factors could have played a part. First, according to her family, Rodgers prized artistic autonomy and had an abiding desire to bring forth her work her way. As Gordon told me, Rodgers believed in patronage support to allow the individual artist to pursue her own vision. Though Eden Press was possibly just as entrepreneurial as it was art for art’s sake, it did rely on a state arts council grant for early funding, and it seems to have operated in something of a gift economy, outside the system of commercial publishing. Above all, Eden Press was Rodgers’s vehicle to determine her work’s agenda from start to finish. Second, remember that Rodgers was a cofounder of Third World Press. Starting an independent organization and having control in the publication process were part of her artistic makeup. Eden Press chapbooks even resemble the earliest Third World Press publications, including Rodgers’s own Paper Soul, in format and look, down to the handprint of the author—the handwritten publisher’s price on the covers. Finally, given Rodgers’s position as a poet of both BAM and second-wave feminism, it’s possible Eden Press was her way of creating ampler space for a poetry of Black womanhood than she was finding elsewhere. Translation Part One gives us a window onto the kind of women’s culture Rodgers was trying to forge in a new period of her career—one that was spiritual, ethical, and alive to all forms of being human.
Notes
[1]Judy Juanita, “Whatever Happened to Carolyn M. Rodgers? ” Africology : The Journal of Pan-African Studies 11.6 (April 2018): 165–66.
[2] David Lionel Smith, “Looking Back and Breaking Through,” Chicago Review 28.3 (Winter 1977): 206–11.
[3]/ Rodgers’s exchange with Evans was conducted through a written questionnaire sometime between 1982 and 1984. See Rodgers, “An Amen Arena, ” in Black Women Writers (1950–1980) : A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans (Garden City : Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984), 373–76.
[4] Author’s interviews with Nina Rodgers Gordon (March 18, 2019) and Ed Roberson (May 4, 2019).
[5] Rodgers’s sister Gloria reports that the poet attended Catholic masses for a period after she graduated from high school. She and Nina Gordon believe that her membership and practice in the Catholic Church became full-fledged after her return to Christianity in the mid-1970s. Thank you to Gloria V. Rodgers and Nina Rodgers Gordon for this information.
[6] See, for instance, World Authors 1980–1985, ed. Vineta Colby (New York : H. W. Wilson, 1991), 718–20; Black American Women Poets and Dramatists, ed. Harold Bloom (New York : Chelsea House, 1996), 177–78; and The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature, ed. William L. Andrews, Frances Smith Foster, and Trudier Harris (New York : Oxford University Press, 2001), 350–51.
[7] These anthologies include Confirmation : An Anthology of African American Women, ed. Amina Baraka and Amiri Baraka (New York : Quill, 1983); Nommo : A Literary Legacy of Black Chicago (1967–1987) ; An Anthology of the OBAC Writers’ Workshop, ed. Carole A. Parks (Chicago : OBAhouse, 1987); and Working Classics : Poems on Industrial Life, eds. Peter Oresick and Nicholas Coles (Urbana-Champaign : University of Illinois Press, 1990).
To read Carolyn M. Rodgers’s Translation Part One, purchase a copy of CR 62.4/63.1/2.