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| Eve Merriam. |
Eve Merriam, a poet who dedicated herself to writing
for and inspiring children while
challenging adults to see injustice through children’s eyes, died
on this date in 1995 at the age of 75. A
life-long feminist and radical, she was the prolific
author of 85 books, many of them deceptively simple and charming picture/poetry books for young
children. Although many of her books
came to be well loved introductions to the delights of reading and writing
verse, one, The Inner City Mother Goose became for nearly a decade the most banned book in America.
Born
Eva Moskovitz in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 1916, she was entranced by the sound of verse read aloud and began writing her
own poetry by the age of 8. She
published in her High School newspaper and literary
magazine she attended Cornell
University and graduated from the University
of Pennsylvania in 1937 and then went to New York City, her adopted home for the rest of her life, for
graduate studies at Columbia University.
Moskovitz abruptly and
restlessly quit her graduate studies to get on with her “real life”. She found work easily as an advertising copywriter and then in 1939
went to work for the CBS Radio Network where
she penned documentaries, some of
the in a creative breakthrough, narrated in verse. It was during that time that she began to
write under the name Eve Merriam.
After
leaving CBS, Merriam hosted a weekly program featuring contemporary poetry on radio station WQXR from 1942-’47 while
contributing freelance poetry and prose to a number of publications. In 1945 she had a daily column in verse in
the short lived radial New York
daily newspaper PM which also had on its staff as an editorial cartoonist Theodore Geisel a/k/a Dr. Seuss.
Merriam’s
first book of poetry, Family Circle was selected by Archibald McLeish to win the Yale
Younger Poets Prize in 1946. She
then did a stint as an editor at the fashion
magazine Glamour, an experience she would draw upon for her devastating but
witty critique of the fashion industry in her 1960 book Figleaf with a glossary of garment industry jargon that defined exclusive as “a product offered to the
broadest possible mass market” and timeless as “a style that remains fashionable
for more than one season.”
Merriam
continued to publish admired poetry for adults—Tomorrow Moring in 1953,
the chapbook Montgomery, Alabama, Money, Mississippi, and Other Places in
1957, The Double Bed from the Feminine Side in 1958, and The
Trouble with Love in 1960. These
books reflected her passion for Civil
Rights and placed her as a second
wave feminist in advance of Betty
Friedan. They also reflected her turbulent personal life.
She
was married and divorced four times, including to Leonard C. Lewin, author of controversial novel The Report from Iron Mountain
which was cast as a secret
government report which concluded that
if a lasting peace “could be
achieved, it would almost certainly not be in the best interests of society to achieve it. Merriam’s marriage to her second husband
Martin Michel produced two sons, Dee and Guy Michel. Her final marriage was to formerly black listed Hollywood screen writer Waldo
Salt, who won Academy Awards for
his work on Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home, lasted until his death
in 1987 and made her the stepmother of
actress Jennifer
Salt.
In
the ‘50’s Merriam also turned to production of books for young readers, many of
them drawing on her experience writing historical documentaries at CBS beginning
with the Real Book of Franklin Roosevelt and including The Voice of Liberty: The Story of Emma
Lazarus. All together she would
pen 44 volumes of non-fiction for
children and young adults covering everything from simple counting and alphabet books to
jokes and riddles to books that challenged gender stereotypes—Mommies at
Work, Boys and Girls, Girls and Boys,
and Daddies
at Work.
It
wasn’t until the1960s that Merriam’s two passions—poetry and juvenile lit—came together
in the first of her acclaimed books of
verse for children, a trilogy published by Anatheum Press including There Is No Rhyme for Silver in
1962, It Doesn’t Always Have to Rhyme in ’64, and Catch
a Little Rhyme in ’66. In all
she produced 20 more volumes published
in her life time and four more issued posthumously. Among her notable books of children’s verse
were Independent
Voices (biographical sketches
in verse form), I Am a Man: Ode to Martin Luther King, Jr., Rainbow Writing, and
The
Singing Green: New and Selected Poems for All Seasons.
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| An illustrated page from the first edition of Inner City Mother Goose. |
Somewhat
ironically it was a book of nursery rhymes
for adults that got her in
trouble with censors across the country.
The first edition of Inner City Mother Goose was released
in 1969 and sold over 100,000 copies. It was illustrated with black-and-white
photography by Lawrence Ratzkin. It employed classic nursery rhyme forms to
describe the daily experience of life in the urban Black ghetto and did so as
an impartial observer neither passing
judgement on what is seen or preaching solutions
or panaceas for the social ills uncovered. The book included powerful, sometimes raw
language including the N word, other
racial epithets, and common curse words
which could be heard on any street corner.
Censors
freaked out on the assumption that
this was a book intended for children which would expose them to harsh realities from which they would
better be protected. Of course the bulk
of the criticism came from whites who wanted to deny racial disparity in the
country, but some came from middle class Blacks who felt stigmatized by
identification with urban slums, crime, and
poverty.
The Knights of Columbus
called it “obscene and degrading.” An
outraged Baltimore official charged
it was “part of a nationwide plot to just cause this nation to disintegrate.” Still others saw it as an “incitement to
violence and insurrection,” as if Black readers were somehow unaware of the
conditions she described. Most hung all
of their objections on the opening verse, taken straight from Mother Goose with
one amended line:
Boys and girls
come out to play,
The moon does
shine as bright as day;
Come with a
hoop, and come with a call,
Come with a good
will or not at all.
Lose your
supper, and lose your sleep,
Come to your
playfellows in the street;
Up motherfucker
against the wall.
But
one suspects that other verses without the naughty words caused just as much
consternation:
Hey, diddle diddle,
Hem haw and fiddle;
How do we integrate?
A jot and a tittle,
Too late and too little,
That’s how we integrate.
Inner City Mother Goose became the most
widely banned book in America.
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| The creative team behind the Broadway production of Inner City--composer Helen Miller, director Tom O'Horgan, and librettist/lyricist Eve Meriam. |
Merriam
went on to collaborate on a Tony
Award-winning Broadway musical, Inner
City which ran in 1971 and’72.
Later a second musical adaption, Sweet Dreams produced a decade
later.
After
her introduction to the theater via Inner
City, Merriam turned to other
dramatic efforts as a playwright. Her Obie
Award-winning musical The Club was
staged by Tom O’Horgan in 1976. And portrayed
men in a private club making degrading
remarks about women. In a twist, women
were cast as the misogynistic men. Out of Our Fathers’ House, she
portrayed of prominent American women like Elizabeth
Cady Stanton. A production was
presented at the White House in 1978
and shown on Public Television’s Great
Performances series.
In
addition to all of this prodigious output, Merriam found time to lecture widely and to produce volumes
of social criticism including Figleaf:
The Business of Being in Fashion, After Nora Slammed the Door: American Women
in the 1960s—The Unfinished Revolution, and Man and Woman: The Human
Condition. She also edited and
wrote the introduction of the classic Growing up Female in America: Ten Lives,
originally published 1971, reissued, by Beacon
Press in 1987.
When
Merriam was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she faced it openly, frankly, and
with pen in hand, in one poem after noting various euphemisms for what was
happening to her, she concluded that it was, “As the Elizabethans called it,
death.”
Merriam
died on April 11, 1992 in Manhattan
from colon cancer. Her final
collection of verse dealing with her experience was published posthumously in
1995 as Embracing the Dark: New Poems.
Metaphor
Morning is
A new sheet of
paper
For you to write
on.
Whatever you
want to say,
All day,
Until night
Folds it up
And files it
away.
The bright words
and the dark words
Are gone
Until dawn
And a new day
To write on.
—Eve
Merriam
How To Eat a
Poem
Don’t be polite.
Bite in.
Pick it up with
your fingers and lick the juice that
may run down your chin.
It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.
You do not need a knife or fork or spoon
or plate or napkin or tablecloth.
For there is no core
or stem
or rind
or pit
or seed
or skin
to throw away.
—Eve
Merriam
Catch a Little
Rhyme
Once upon a time
I caught a
little rhyme
I set it on the
floor
but it ran right
out the door
I chased it on
my bicycle
but it melted to
an icicle
I scooped it up
in my hat
but it turned
into a cat
I caught it by
the tail
but it stretched
into a whale
I followed it in
a boat
but it changed
into a goat
When I fed it
tin and paper
it became a tall
skyscraper
Then it grew
into a kite
and flew far out
of sight...
—Eve
Merriam
amazing!
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