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October 2003
A Poem by Julie Ellison
Ice Words in
April
(for the Mitchell School poets)
Listen to "Ice Words in April (for the Mitchell School poets) " mp3  (requires audio plugin)
You start with one cold word.
Then you step forward, planting your rubber-soled thought
cautiously on the ice-coated road. So far so good.
But your mind loses its balance.
Your words start down the frozen hillside of a sentence
with a wicked twist at the bottom,
skid out of control around the turn,
and ski-jump off the end of the next line, and the next.
Just when you think you are doomed,
you see yourself approaching with surprise
the patch of dry, flat ground
where those speeding words will rest.
They careen down, brake, and halt.
Each bumps a little into the one ahead.
Then, finding the firm place where language plants its feet,
those words take a deep breath together
and compose themselves proudly into your poem,
saying, “We told you we could do it, and we did.”
Julie Ellison, professor of American Culture and English,
is the director of Imagining
America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life. Based at U-M,
Imagining America fosters collaborations between universities and
communities in the area of the arts, humanities and design.
Ellison, who has published poems in a number of quarterlies
and magazines, is working with undergraduates on a project for third-
and fourth-graders, “The Poetry of Everyday Life.” The
project was supported by U-M's Arts of Citizenship Program. She
wrote “Ice Words in April” for the poets at Ann Arbor’s
Mitchell Elementary School. Her collaborator in "The Poetry
of Everyday Life," over the five years of the project, was
Chris Maxey-Reeves, public school teacher, jazz singer and wordsmith.
Ellison has taught at Michigan since 1980. Her undergraduate
studies were at Harvard, and she received her PhD in English from
Yale. Her scholarly work ranges across 18th- and 19th-century Anglo-American
literatures and cultures. The University of Chicago Press published
the most recent of her three books, Cato’s Tears and the Making
of Anglo-American Emotion (1999).
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