What’s in a name? For Chicago poet Nate Marshall, there’s a strange story to that — which involves a Facebook prank on a politician

Nate Marshall first ran into Nate Marshall about five years years ago.

The first Nate Marshall is an acclaimed Chicago poet with an excellent new collection, “FINNA” (One World, Aug. 11).

The other Nate Marshall was almost a Republican politician in Denver.

They never met in person.

They just met online, in a sense.

The Nate Marshall this story is about, he grew up in West Pullman, he’s 30, a fixture of the Chicago literary scene, an event planner, a part-time rapper and breakbeat master, a full-time teacher and fast-rising multi-award-winning poet who writes about identity, Black communities and language.

That other Nate Marshall, he lives in Colorado, he’s in his 40s and he’s not a poet: Around the time the Chicago Nate Marshall heard about him, this other Marshall was abandoning his candidacy for the House of Representatives in Colorado, because the Republican Party was distancing itself from him, because this other Marshall was linked by the Denver Post and other news organizations to white supremacist groups. This Nate Marshall told the Post he “didn’t think things all the way through” when he launched his candidacy without explaining, as the Post reported, “derogatory comments about Muslims, gays and members of Occupy Denver.”

All of which became a kind of mordantly funny coincidence of naming for Chicago Nate Marshall. So he asked some friends to prank the Colorado Nate Marshall on Facebook — albeit politely and sweetly, deliberating confusing the Chicago Nate with the Colorado Nate and thanking the Colorado Nate for his poetry and everything he’s done for African Americans. “I think he became confused then,” Chicago Nate told me, because soon after that prank, Chicago Nate found a note on his Facebook page from Colorado Nate that read: “This is not me! This is a black lives matter terrorist who has stolen my name!”

Which gained some online attention, and DNAInfo contacted Colorado Nate, who said he wasn’t a white supremacist and assumed he was being harassed by Chicago Nate.

Then the whole story went away.

Except now, on Tuesday, Chicago Nate, whose ascending star has brought him to Random House, has that new collection of poems, “FINNA,” and the first poem in it — it’s about Chicago Nate Marshall’s unintentional relationship with Colorado Nate Marshall. He notes their age differences, perceived philosophical distinctions and similarities, how both Nates googled their names and discovered unpalatable Nate Marshalls. He writes: i too have sat suspicious in my basement / wondering who was coming for my country.

Chicago Nate doesn’t stop there.

“FINNA” — which looks likely to become one of the most talked about books of Chicago poetry since his close friend Eve Ewing’s 2017 collection “Electric Arches” — finds nearly a dozen more poems in the question of what’s literally behind the name “Nate Marshall.”

Another poem reads:

what up to all the Nate Marshalls!

There’s a hockey player

& a comedian

& 1 on acoustic guitar

&

1 time a dude i knew hit me up relieved & shaken

when his timeline told him Nate Marshall had been murdered

but it was a different me somewhere on the North Side

His name is a thread that runs throughout. Several poems have the same title, “another Nate Marshall origin story.” Several take on losing and gaining a name, the legacy of slavery and naming. He imagines a great grandfather Marshall so light skinned that he passes as white and raises a white family and tells his son not to talk to “those people,” to Black people, then that little boy has a whole lineage / who don’t talk to those people.

Another poem decides:

all my names a poem.

all my names a song.

all my names do is sing.

all mine.

OK, now for the funniest part of Chicago Nate Marshall’s story.

A year ago, he moved to Colorado, to teach poetry at Colorado College.

He figures he lives “about an hour and a half from this Denver Marshall dude.” But he had never really wished to leave Chicago, he said. Indeed, his first collection of poems, “Wild Hundreds,” which garnered attention just as he left graduate school, took its title from a nickname for the Far South Side neighborhoods of West Pullman, Roseland and Morgan Park. It’s mark of his interest in names that “Wild Hundreds” was not titled “Wild 100s,” out of fear it would be read as “Wild ONE Hundreds,” getting his home all wrong.

“FINNA” is not unlike that 2015 debut. It’s full of precision and exuberance, elegance and a rollicking good humor. One poem, “welcome to how the hell I talk,” might not have been a bad title itself. Another pays homage to Kanye West, the “cartographer of our grammar.” One poem reads like a personal reckoning for every name he’s ever called women; another, for Chicago, swings for municipal legacy and comes up with a classic:

capital city of the flyover

crown jewel of the jailhouse

a town in love with its own blood ...

“FINNA” is also partly about identifying the reaction to his work from people who aren’t Black, how white people read his writing and, regardless of how charming or stuffed with everyday incident his poems are, he’s often told they’re “sad.” So, one new poem almost entirely consists of a single line: “i like your poems because they seem so real.”

On the phone from his new home in Colorado, Marshall said: “I have become very aware that when bad things happen to Black people, my own personal stock goes up. What shocks me is how we as a society are comfortable with the suffering of Black people as some kind of redemption narrative. I think of John Lewis in death, dragged across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Which might have been part of his last wishes, but it’s not lost on me, in that moment, we are also asking a dead Black person to do symbolic work for a nation — work which it will not ultimately heed. What I do, I find important, but I think on some level I dislike seeing it leveraged. If you’re reading me as ‘sad,’ it says more about you — it says that maybe it’s what you’re comfortable hearing.”

Though his own name serves as a motif, “FINNA” actually began as a broader consideration of the nature of Black history, Marshall said. “Most African Americans I know can only trace their families back to the beginning of the (20th) century, or the 19th if they’re lucky. For very obvious reasons. So Black people have a different relationship to their names — at some point someone was owned, meaning it’s less of a name than the marker of whomever we belonged to. Which is why there’s that thing of Black folks renaming themselves — Cassius Clay becomes Muhammad Ali and such.”

Writing the book, he thought of presidents and journalists who changed names — how William Jefferson Clinton became Bill Clinton, Ida Bell Wells-Barnett became Ida B. Wells — “and how we seem to know fundamentally that (changing a name) means new possibilities, different worlds.” He mentions “The Flash,” the comic book, and its “flashpoint,” its idea of place where alternate realities and identities diverge and coexist.

“What if I went to that school, not this? When I was in eighth grade a football coach from Mt. Carmel High School said that I should play football for Mt. Carmel. My mother and I dismissed him out of hand. But you know, what if I’d gone there instead of Whitney Young? What happens to my life?”

He’s realized he’s likely the best-known Nate Marshall in the world, that he is the Nate Marshall the other Nate Marshalls out there will be forced to run across when they, too, google themselves. Still, he habitually checks in with the other Nate Marshalls that he’s come across from time to time, to see how they are. He doesn’t talk to them, he just sees what they’re up to now and he moves on. Any high school athletes who are named Nate Marshall? Nate Marshall follows their seasons.

As for that title, “FINNA,” it’s slang — or rather, as Marshall writes in the book, “a whole slang of possibility.” Roughly, narrowly, it means gonna, or intending to do something. “But it’s one of my favorite words,” Marshall said, “because there’s a lot in that, because it’s a word that mostly Black Chicagoans would recognize. And it connects back to the South. And it’s about everything that comes next. It says, this is what I’m about to do. It recognizes a past, and it’s forward-looking.”

It says, here is a major career about to happen. It says, here’s Nate Marshall.

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

———

©2020 the Chicago Tribune

Visit the Chicago Tribune at www.chicagotribune.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.