Our Neighbor Michael Kleber-Diggs, the Poet

In 1968, days after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, a pregnant Black nurse in a hospital on the Missouri side of Kansas City gave birth to twin babies, naming one Martin Luther and the other Michael Luther. 

Why Michael? If you didn’t know, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was named Michael upon his own birth in 1929. However, when his father—now remembered as Martin Luther King Sr., but also once called Michael—traveled to Germany in 1934, he was so appalled by the rise of Adolf Hitler, and felt so passionately that German Christianity must return to the better angels of its earlier years, that he changed both his name and his son’s. Like twin arrows shot from that moment in Missouri when they were named—in reverent memory of a prophet, in defiance of a white supremacist assassin—Michael and Martin went forward. 

Now, 53 years later, Michael Kleber-Diggs, as the elder twin is now known, has published his debut collection, Worldly Things, out this month from Milkweed Editions, and it’s astonishingly good and clear, the fitting product of an arrow shot toward a better future. Not least because it answers questions like, What is the sound a murder makes once you have decades in the peace and green quiet of Como Park? 

Michael Kleber-Diggs grew up a child of the Black intelligentsia of Kansas, first in Kansas City and later in Wichita. His father was a dentist and his mother a mental health professional, initially a psychiatric nurse but later a therapist. At 8 years old, however, this young twin and his brother experienced the last thing any poet wants: tragedy, jeopardy, pain. His father was gunned down in his own dental practice by a thief seeking drugs. Details of this death give Worldly Things depth and scope, like stars in the night sky, or rather, just the opposite. He writes now, of his father: “the weight of your absence / became a black hole revolving / around my memory of you—itself / a black hole.” 

After his father’s death, Kleber-Diggs’s mother whisked the twins closer to her childhood home state of Oklahoma. She set up in Wichita and began studying for her master’s in psychiatric nursing—later, her therapy work led her to counseling in anger management. His mother appears in Worldly Things: “Crowned by carob and silver down, lovely across / her Oklahoma earthen glow, my mother’s face is / an ovate frame with apostrophe eyebrows possessing / the massive planets of her eyes.” 

“Being a poet did not come up. If I said to my mom, ‘I feel called to a life as a poet,’ she would have said, ‘How are you going to eat?’ ”

Kleber-Diggs’s Wichita universe was Black, professional, brainy. “I had a fair number of Black friends whose both parents were doctors,” he recalls. “We were surrounded by people and organizations, like Jack and Jill Inc. and the Talented Tenth, who were all oriented towards Du Bois’s thinking: Go to college, get a good job, be a prominent member of the community. I did not lack for messages encouraging me into academia, law, or medicine, towards a middle-class existence and a role in the community making a difference.”  

When stars like Gordon Parks and Maya Angelou swung through town for college events and dined with Black professor friends of the family, Michael Kleber-Diggs was there. “What I remember most about Parks was that he was gorgeous, and his suit—exquisite,” Kleber-Diggs tells me. “Maya Angelou, of course, it was her voice I couldn’t get over. She was so down to earth. It was a take-your-shoes-off-and-relax, let-me-get-you-a-drink sort of dinner, and there she was, helping in the kitchen, with that voice. I sat there thinking, This woman is amazing. Her comfortable, authentic self is amazing. I was electrified by her visit.”

In the midst of all this, he was also traumatized by the loss of his father. And it’s telling that while talking about it with a stranger today, Kleber-Diggs’s first instinct is to make the stranger feel OK about it: “When I talk to friends, I tend to say, ‘You shouldn’t ever lose a parent when you’re a child, but if you do, 8 might be the age. Much younger and you might not have memories of him, older and it’s much more difficult.’ As it turned out, the loss was significant. But I have a greater sense of that loss now than I did when I was a kid. I compartmentalized a lot. I went down to Kansas City to find out more not too long ago. They said: You want Missouri. Victim Services. I said: I’m not a victim. But then: Oh, wait. I am!” 

Kleber-Diggs grew into a bookish child. “I was such a reader, a showy reader,” he says now. “In junior high, I had such an identity around being a reader—Michener, James Herriot—I was always carrying around a book, preferably a fat book. And writing. But being a poet did not come up. If I’d said to my mom, ‘I feel called to a life as a poet,’ she would have said, ‘How are you going to eat?’” So Kleber-Diggs did what many bookish children who want to eat have done before: He headed to Minneapolis for law school at the University of Minnesota.  

Once in Mill City, Kleber-Diggs did many of the things a law student does: He fell in love, lived in Uptown, bought a south Minneapolis duplex with his love, started at a law firm. Next, he did the things that an after–law school man does to knit together a whole life: He survived a big breakup, traded in general lawyering for real estate behind-the-scenes lawyering, met another girl—this one named Karen—at a neighbor’s backyard party thrown to christen a newly built deck, discovered Karen was a horticulturist from Northfield, married her, moved into a happily-ever-after house by Como Park where Karen works among the beautiful plants you have likely posed next to for photos. (The couple is so close to the park they can hear the lion in the zoo roaring from their front steps.) In time, a baby was born and turned Kleber-Diggs into a dance dad, hovering around classes and rehearsals at Falcon Heights’ Out on a Limb and the Saint Paul Conservatory, holding coats and reminding small dancers not to forget their shoes. 

Two decades of quiet and healing and Minnesota dad-ing ensued. Or, as he says in his poem “I Love My Neighbors as I Love Myself”: “I drive around admonishing strangers. / Hurry up! I tell them. Or, Wear a helmet! / Kids needing parental guidance get it from me.”

Or, as he says in a poem about his neighbor, in a passage every Minnesotan will recognize as the utter encapsulation and perfection of a certain attentive domestic local dad-ness: “Bob and I had a competition / for best shovel and best mow, except / he had no idea we were competing.” 

Or, as he says of himself, when a stranger in his neighborhood recoils in fear from a Black man: “You guys, I am the nicest man on earth.” 

What did it take to start this very stable dad—held safe by home, two goldendoodles, and St. Paul—on the path to saying the true but sometimes difficult things inside him? It took a very Minnesota Christmas present in 1999, a gift certificate to the Loft from Karen. She had noticed that Kleber-Diggs was attending just about every poetry reading at the Grand Avenue bookstore Hungry Mind. She watched him read and reread Jorie Graham, Lucille Clifton, Jane Kenyon, Sharon Olds, and Louise Glück. She saw the books pile up and got the perfect gift. 

Kleber-Diggs chose a class by Minneapolis poet Juliet Patterson. All of a sudden, Karen found herself going to bed alone while her husband stayed up till three o’clock in the morning working at the dining room table on line breaks. Once the class concluded, Kleber-Diggs joined a close poetry study group at Patterson’s house and spent 18 years considering poetry with her, first as a student, then as a mentee, and finally as a friend. 

In 2015, Patterson encouraged him to start sending out work for publication, and in his efforts to be more involved in the life of poetry, in a way his legal career could accommodate, he volunteered to be a sort of pen pal mentor for the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. 

They asked him to teach a class instead. 

And that was how a poet whose father was murdered by a thief walked into a prison, armed with trochaic meter, sibilant sounds, and a great many thoughts about importance of rhythm and line breaks. 

“My first class was at Oak Park Heights,” remembers Kleber-Diggs. “No belt, no watch, slip-on shoes, go through the metal detectors. I’ve never been arrested. I have been pulled over, but I’ve always had insurance and proof of registration and good luck in life. But as soon as I was in that room, I thought, I found the room I was meant to walk into my whole life.”

Memories that had been compartmentalized for decades began opening up, he says. And his gentle dad nature found work, and people, to nurture. 

“That first class, I had two students with white supremacist tattoos on their bodies,” Kleber-Diggs recalls. “You can’t ever forget where you are, because of safety, because there are so many visual reminders. But at the same time, you can almost forget, because the poem becomes central. Some of the best poets in Minnesota happen to be in prison; I am certain of that. I’m also certain I have taught people who killed people. It changed something inside me. I don’t see my students as criminals, the same way I didn’t see myself as a victim.” 

Instead, he began to see himself and them as poets all, meaning-making and beauty-making. “I am notoriously introspective,” says Kleber-Diggs. “I love to think and rethink and double back over that thinking.” The poetry he was making, 15 years after that first Loft class, prison-informed, changed.  From “End of Class”: “He’s barely surviving the day, and looks at me / from his sick situation… / Canary in a coalmine, negro in the pipeline / his life is full of cages.”

Poet friends saw the prison-sparked change in his work and told him, You’re ready to start sending out your work as a collection. He won Milkweed’s prestigious Max Ritvo Poetry Prize with his first batch of submissions and was downsized out of his job in the same season, as if God wanted him to focus on his poetry.

You should read his book. Because the work is so good and original, modest and quiet and piercing, but also because in addition to the Twin Cities’ shameful history of murdering and impeding Black men, now internationally etched into the permanent record, we also are a metropolitan area with a shadow habit of coaxing important work from American artists who are also Black: August Wilson, Gordon Parks, Prince, Marlon James, Danez Smith. 

This excellence and the literary tradition are not the only reasons to read Worldly Things. Kleber-Diggs’s debut is made specifically for you, neighbors of the Twin Cities.  

“Everything I write, it’s a conversation, and it contains some idea—a bird, how police treat a Black man, how cool dog walking is, or something fairly grand,” he says. “But the people I most want to have conversations with are the people who live right here. The people I most want to impact, the people I most want to reach are the people right here. My ambition is modest, but if I can, in a poem, get someone here to slow down and think about things differently, to make space for another perspective, what could be a more tremendous accomplishment?” 

When Kleber-Diggs writes, “Think of me forever assigned / to a period, a place, a people”—the place is our Twin Cities, the period is the last 30 years, the people are all of us three million residents of the Twin Cities. Can anyone else understand what it means to walk a goldendoodle in the snow when the main streets are still riot-scarred? 

More than anything, you should read this book because if a neighbor spends decades trying to find the right thing to say to you, you should listen. 

---

Grinding Down to Prayer

for George Floyd

I woke to the news you were dead. 

The what arrived before daylight;

the how was agony unfolding as I

dreaded my way to dusk. Unfolding

against my want not to know 

(but I already knew, have known

since I could know): officers, arrest, 

Black, man, twenty, video, knee, 

sir, back, dollar, 8:, counterfeit, 

hands, sorry, 46, mama, please,

breathe, please! Were you tired

George? I feel tired sometimes. 

America on my neck—my

lungs compressed so much

they can’t expand/contract—

take in/send out—oxygen/words. 

My dentist says I grind my teeth. 

My molars are wearing smooth. 

The next night, I jolted awake 

to find my fists clenched tight 

(some fight), my heart pounding fast,

my mouth hanging open, slack, 

not tight that time, just me 

on my own gasping for air 

6 times a minute—a raspy sound. 

The world was darkness; my room was

darkness. I lay in a state of 

in between and thought of you

but also God. I wanted the sun

but did not ask. I hoped instead

for a quiet dawn and peace for us,

real peace for us. I hoped so hard

it almost made a prayer.

---

Superman and My Brother, Spiderman and Me

My brother and I were born to educated, middle-class parents

eleven days after Martin Luther King’s assassination. 

Our home aspired to non-violence—no gun culture, no

guns. Even then, folks knew black boys in a white city needed

more than their parent’s desire to stay safe; they understood

about misunderstandings. Even then, black boys were shot

in parks playing games children play. So, when we turned

eight, instead of squirt guns, we got puffy superhero heads

that sprayed water from their mouths when we pulled the trigger.

We delighted in comic-book legends spitting on our friends

at our behest. It was white boys on the block with their pistols

and revolvers that always shot harder and farther,

against Superman and my brother, Spiderman and me.

We gave as good as we got until we were exhausted.

1976, the bicentennial year—summer suggested

it would never end, but autumn always comes. 

One month before our birthday, our father was shot

and killed in his office. He was a dentist. I tell you that

for a reason. I use educated and middle-class for a reason.

I don’t want you to think our Dad had it coming. I want

you to focus on something else—our parents’ designs

were undone anyway; there is no sanctuary in the theater.

Lost for months in our bedroom, our desperate island,

we began to confront a loss that reveals itself still, spent

our allowance on comic books, dreamed of rough places

made plain, tried to hew hope from a mountain of despair.

---

My Ultimate Thought Is This

In conversation, a friend from my youth

who worked for a time as a prison guard

saw fit to say, Michael, you don’t know much—

lots of these convicts are just feral beasts.

On hearing his words, I surrendered faith.

I wound myself up so I could pounce down

on his beliefs—pinned him down hard, showed

him my teeth, growled in his face from my

far better view (I despised his and him).

Chewing on the cheek of his claim, the next

to last thought to enter my head was this:

only a beast thinks a man is a beast.

---

Originally published in the June 2021 issue.