Poetry

During his Hearst Foundations Fellowship in 2019, David researched slavery in antebellum New England—focusing on Massachusetts and on New York City, where the country’s oldest and largest slave cemetery is located. In the video above, he discusses his writing career and how the American Antiquarian Society introduced a more focused archival aspect to his writing.

In her book of poetry, The Age of Phillis, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers uses creative strategies based upon fifteen years of archival research to shift emphasis away from the usual historical narratives on Phillis Wheatley Peters. Scholars of Wheatley Peters have usually focused on her life following her enslavement as a small child, beginning her biography with her 1761 arrival in Boston Harbor.

Dangerous Goods tracks its speaker throughout North America and abroad, illuminating the ways in which home and place may inhabit one another comfortably or uncomfortably—or both simultaneously. From the Bahamas, London, and Liberia, to Bemidji, Minnesota, and Milledgeville, Georgia, Sean Hill interweaves the contemporary with the historical, and explores with urgency the relationship between travel, migration, alienation, and home.

Set in Virginia and Philadelphia during the mid-19th century, Suck on the Marrow (2010, Red Hen Press) traces the experiences of self-emancipated bondswomen, kidnapped Northern-born blacks, free people of color, and the slaves of a large plantation and small household. The interconnected narratives of six fictionalized characters use traceable dates, facts, and locations to investigate moving aspects of American history.

My fellowship at AAS in the summer of 1999 was crucial to my project, a book of poetry about the Salem witch trials, titled The Afflicted Girls (LSU Press, 2004) and crucial to my work as a writer ever since.

I was a William Randolph Hearst Fellow in 2001. As it turned out, I was in the very early stages of work on a motley group of poems about various episodes and figures of American history, poems that would come together more than a decade later in the collection Voices Bright Flags (2014). For me they were experiments in the limits of political poetry and what is sometimes called “public poetry,” as distinct from the more personal poems I was also working on the same time.

In this video, James Arthur reads his poem “On a Portrait Bust in Worcester, Massachusetts,” which was written while he was a Jay and Deborah Last Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society in January 2018. The poem was inspired by an anonymous marble portrait bust acquired on behalf on the Antiquarian Society in 1881.

David Roderick is a poet, editor, book critic, and teacher.