In 1985, Queen of the Ebony Isles won the American Book Award and made Colleen McElroy one of the most celebrated figures in late 20th century poetry. In my grandma and auntie’s women’s book clubs in the historically diverse neighborhood of Hilltop in Tacoma, Washington, it made her a heroine, the most beloved local writer of those sisters trying to survive gang violence and the knotted cruelty of Northern racism. The women who came to Mrs. Eulalah’s on 27th and I Street, and to Mrs. Virginia’s on 41st and McKinley Avenue, were poor to working-class, either from the South or from families who came from the South, who needed mall-salon hairdos for their jobs and couldn’t afford mall-salon prices. Like so many of these DIY Black institutions, their primary mode of entertainment was literature and the discussion of it, with almost half a century’s worth of Essence Book Club pics and magazines that ranged from the present-day to Black college magazines from the 1930s. When the neighborhood wasn’t safe, I would run errands for them and walk them from their cars and back again. In return for my work, I gained a wealth of knowledge about Black literary history.
More than anything, I learned that few Black poets had the grasp of history that McElroy did, and those Black women loved her more than any other living writer. In her pages, she was their fighter: a single mother with two kids and real problems, trying to process heartbreak and perform cost-benefit analyses of what she needed to do to survive as a Black woman in America. Like them, she also loved her aunties and uncles, cried deeply when her heart was broken, and was dishy, hilarious and fun with her homegirls. Yes, she was a genuine trailblazer and one of the most skilled and gifted poets in American literature, but that didn’t matter as much as her success in telling them that their lives were worth something at a time when everything else in Black and outside media was telling them something different. Where the media and pop-culture figures like Bill Cosby were telling them that their lives, their single motherhood and their blues were the reason that the race was failing, McElroy was showing the world that they were worthy of high culture.
That they praised those men and passed over McElroy, an NEA, Fulbright and Rockefeller Foundation fellow, was a source of great pain and consternation.
ESTABLISHING DEEP ROOTS and bringing her vast knowledge of Black poetic composition to the Pacific Northwest, Colleen McElroy was the literary North Star for a community that called itself Up South, a community of Black people — like my family — who made the migration to serve the country during World War II. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, McElroy traveled to various places in the U.S. and absorbed every poetic tradition she encountered. She made her name as a poet’s poet with 1976’sMusic from Home, a street-and-schooled coming-of-age collection that brought a new wit and energy to the Post-Black Arts Movement, a group of Black writers who added more interiority and more sophisticated gender dynamics to the Black protest poetry popularized by Amiri Baraka. Add to this her cultural trailblazing as the first Black woman to be granted tenure in the history of the University of Washington, and you have a life that exhausts superlatives.
After working around the country as an academic, young poet and teacher, McElroy found her feet teaching speech therapy at Western Washington University in Seattle. Under the tutelage of Denise Levertov and Richard Hugo, she caught fire as a poet. Like Gwendolyn Brooks, she took years to master her craft, and by the time Music came out, she was remarkably gifted at Midwest formalism, Detroit free verse and New York organic jazz composition brought together in a tight, distinctive package. Together, they fire up the pan that heats the good cultural grease in these poems, with their fine rhythms, lyrics and ideas bursting off the page and making good trouble on race, gender and culture.
Winters Without Snow, her follow-up in 1978, deserved more than the tepid response it received. She may have been too close to the source material — her own divorce — but that kind of thing has never stopped critics from praising confessional poets with half her talent. What she pulls out as she processes the end of her youth and her experience with racism and sexism is often powerful, heartbreaking and beautiful, as these four lines are in the opening of her poem “Liberation”:
I breathe and sunlight hurts. It expects
a Dry Gulch, fines instead of field of weeds
and wet Moss, my chest the fungus bearer,
my tears draining into its sewage.
She hid a good deal of the vulnerability she revealed in Snow in the otherworldly powerful persona she created in the second book that followed it, Queen of The Ebony Isles. If Home established herself in her own vast, idiosyncratic Black world, Isles showed her taking her voice everywhere she wanted to go, without watering down a damn bit of who she was. Isles was where she fused her gift of poetic, polyrhythmic social realism with a Rolodex-like understanding of the canon. It was also as ’hood as a 72-deuce coupe blasting Kool and The Gang from its speakers.
When she played these contrasting strengths off each other, her highbrow mythological voice and her foot-stomping, soaring street realism, the results were a gorgeous mosaic of the Canon and the Block. In these poems, St. Louis could be the beginning of The Odyssey, African funeral rituals could be found in her mother’s sleeping, and the biblical Ruth could be found in a Northern blackbird. On one page, you could hear a sermonizing beat to schoolyard handclaps in the grass and then flip to another that equated criminal street runners to Judas turning away from God. Isles is a majestic flag of a collection that showed the complexity of Black life and history that goes as far as Black people have settled.
I LEFT THE NEIGHBORHOOD when I was 14, and my mother had enough money to make a down payment on a house in the suburbs. Ten years later, I came back to it to be mentored by my grandfather, a position whose tasks included running errands for the remaining salon members. At the time, I was a burgeoning poet, hungry to learn as much as possible. Once they realized that, the living members of those DIY salons turned me from their quiet errand boy into their student, and the discussions about literature that I quietly sat in on became lessons where I learned my craft. I started as a student in my mid-20s, coming back from a troubled period, and their recommendations were genial and part of their natural conversation. When my self-published chapbook showed I had literary potential, those book clubs became training camps, with me having to read two books that week “or else I shouldn’t bring my ass in the room.”
During those 15 years, starting from when I came back to the book clubs to when their members began dying off in 2017, I learned the history of Black poetics with McElroy as a base. I studied the specifics of her influences: how the Chicago school’s use of lyric form was different from the Detroit school’s use of lyric blank verse — which was different from the organic breath-influenced free verse of Black New York poets, which was different from the biblical-style oral free verse of poets from the South. As I grew as a writer, I learned how organic breath mattered in her form and in the forms of Claude McKay and Margaret Walker, specifically the pauses of conversations to break lines, making them readable orally and on the page. Later, I would learn how Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes alchemized the Old and New Testaments on the page in 2/3 and 2/4 accents, and how they would use those accents on passive and active verbs to indicate mood.
As I worked to write poetry that was up to their standards, I began to understand that they worked me hard because they wanted me to be their fighter. They saw that I had raw talent, yet they also saw that I wrote about our neighborhood, the people we saw, and our reference language — that I had enough of a grasp on it to turn it into poetry. They had enough of slam poets, nationalist poets and “respectable activists” writing message poems to white people, and they saw that I was someone who listened to them. Thus, they trained me to be the poet they wanted to read, with the result being The Homeboy Songs, my first full-length collection, which was published in 2014. (That Homeboy Songs went to #8 in the small press distribution bestseller list in June of that year was just icing on the cake.)
I also know they put in so much work with me partly to take their minds off the heartbreak they felt at the way McElroy was treated by the Northwest later in her life. The Seattle Times had given a glowing profile of the men who came to see Shahrazad Ali read from her controversial book The Blackman’s Guide To Understanding the Blackwoman, in which she states that black women deserve to be slapped in the mouth. That they praised those men and passed over McElroy, an NEA, Fulbright and Rockefeller Foundation fellow, was a source of great pain and consternation. After 2,800 men showed up at The Paramount to see Ali and the demand for Black women writers shifted from the rich and rewarding aesthetics of McElroy to the violent ideal those aggrieved men wanted, the book club women felt deservedly angry. In the ’80s, McElroy was popular enough to write fine screenplays and fiction, yet by the time The Homeboy Songs came out, she was either ignored, derided or cast aside by a Black literary Seattle that obsessively fixated on men.
With the noble and notable exception of Paul Nelson and the Cascadia Poetics Lab, McElroy died without receiving any of the flowers she deserved in the Pacific Northwest, ignored by the writers’ spinoff groups of Seattle’s Black upper class, who tried to redraw the culture center without including her in it. Yet there was no self-pity in her, no slovenly, cliché-ridden journey to the right or to the dark web, nothing that compromised her vast, humanistic vision. To the very end, McElroy kept her dignity, street sense and low tolerance for bullshit. I urge you to read her work and its mixture of academic and block sense — work that is a testament to one of the mightiest races a poet has run in Black history. You will see someone who helped her people have courage, someone who had a genuine impact, someone who mattered. Colleen McElroy mattered in this world, and she will continue to matter in any world that chooses to find her.
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This article appeared in the October 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Colleen McElroy and the Black Northwesterners who loved her.”
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