Belle Isle
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Frank D. Rashid
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Among my early memories are evening drives to Belle Isle in my father’s 1954 Desoto, down Jefferson Avenue, past the giant stove, across the MacArthur bridge, and toward the Scott Fountain, its alternating bright colors mesmerizing my younger siblings and me. One remarkable moment of pure, unanticipated wonder happened decades later while I was running alone along the water near the Livingston Lighthouse at the island’s northeast point: A pair of Canada geese suddenly scudded before me in synchronous motion. I allowed few interruptions while running back then, but the geese, their astonishing mastery of flight, stopped me cold. Canada geese are common in Detroit—I have watched them fly hundreds of times before and since—but few settings offer such a vision: earth, air, water, and the miracle of living things in coordinated movement through space.
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Most Detroiters can describe their own singular moments on Belle Isle; a few turn them into poetry. On a glorious mid-1960s autumn day, Dudley Randall visited the island with Margaret Danner, who was then living in Detroit. As Melba Joyce Boyd explains, each composed a poem about the visit focusing on the Belle Isle Conservancy’s “bell-like flowers” (115-116). Danner’s poem, a meditation on immortality, uses the image of the flowers as a starting point and projects away from the island and conservatory to the pealing of actual bells in Belgium and Benin, contrasting the fragile “bell-like flowers” with the bells made of bronze (Danner and Randall 22). Randall’s poem stays on the island, recalls Danner’s reactions to passing freighters and motorboats, to the conservatory’s flowers, and the carousel’s music. For Randall, the experience is about poets and poetry:
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This is how poets are. This is the inner principle of their art: Joy and delight, joy and delight, poems Conceived in joy, endowing the world and time With joy and delight, joy and delight, for ever. (Danner and Randall 23)
Some poetic moments occur in winter when fewer people visit the island. In “Belle Isle Solitary, New Year’s Eve,” Terry Blackhawk offers the reader the “sidelong surprise” of a kayaker’s sudden appearance in the partly frozen river, along with a “skulking” blue jay and a hawk “boldly fanning its wing and tail” both clearly observed amid winter’s spare foliage. A freighter proceeds through “floats of ice” and “misty air,” and “the sky [is] a bell / waiting to be rung.” The speaker offers all these—and the “loneliness” that composes her life—“even if” she brings “only half of a song.” A later poem, “Ice Music” offers the late winter sounds created by “variegated / quilts of floes” as “broken / continents” of “an entire /season” float past the island. Light percussive “glissandos” and the March music rises “from a streaming / swarm of glinting / creatures herded” as the river collides with the island “in a living touching/ clinking singing surge.”Winter sights and sounds—wind, geese, fish, foliage, and river ice—also compose Nandi Comer’s “Belle Isle Song,” which she describes as “no song / for dead ears.” The speaker watches “sheets of ice / strike the banks” as a companion “scoop[s] up a mad / pike from that river” and “dump[s] it, slapping in my lap.”
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In his essay, “Belle Isle: Cultural Representations,” Donald Levin sees the island as a representation “of how place [is] more social construction than topography, alive with conflicts, competing interests and uses, even contending species.” In literature and film, Levin suggests, Belle Isle becomes a site for the performance of sacramental rituals and for the crossing of boundaries and norms, amid “the waste of industrial capitalism." To illustrate, Levin discusses the climactic Scott Fountain segment of Jerry Schatzberg’s 1973 feature film Scarecrow, starring Gene Hackman and Al Pacino, and Philip Levine’s poem, “Belle Isle, 1949,” in which Levine’s speaker and others shed their clothes on “the first warm spring night” and “baptizing” themselves “in the brine / of car parts, dead fish, stolen bicycles, / melted snow.” Levin briefly discusses the lovemaking of girls and sailors kissing on blankets in Marge Piercy’s poem, “Detroit Means Strait;” an extramarital tryst in Joyce Carol Oates’s 1973 novel, Do with Me What You Will; a potential liaison between strangers in Charles Baxter’s story, “The Disappeared;” and poems by Greg Pape (“Birds of Detroit”), Anthony Butts (“The Belle Isle Men“), and Michael Van Walleghan (“The Elephant in Winter”). In these works, the island’s location on the border between two countries, its sacramental associations, and its eroticism reinforce Levin’s observations about its role in literature.
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Two more recent novels corroborate Levin’s views about Belle Isle’s literary functions. In Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, Belle Isle is a site for crossing boundaries. At night, “the island takes on an offshore attitude of relaxed morals,” as the shape-shifting Jimmy Zizmo introduces Lefty Stephanides to his prohibition-era “rum-running operation,” transporting liquor that arrives on the Island via motorboat from Windsor, Ontario (111-12). After Zismo’s disappearance, Lefty and a group of new partners take advantage of the island’s secluded wooded areas for another business opportunity: producing a series of erotic photos featuring women dressed in lingerie--or less--posing in and around automobiles (157-58).
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In the second novel, Alice Randall’s Black Bottom Saints, the narrator, Ziggy Johnson has a sacramental “best day in my life” on the island (283). He and his friend and landlord, John White, owner of the Gotham Hotel, dressed in linen suits, share a picnic lunch—“Cold lobster, whole, and cracked. A split of Champagne. A hard-boiled egg”—in celebration of Ziggy “hitting the numbers big.” After a card game in which White wins all $1,000 of Ziggy’s numbers money, he returns it and tells Ziggy,“Ê»Moses did not make it to the Promised Land, but we made it to Black Bottom.’” Ziggy concludes, “Nothing was missing from the moment. Nothing. Nothing is missing” (284). This quintessential, quasi-religious experience becomes a gentle celebration of transgressing, even transcending, cultural norms in a space isolated from the society that reinforces them.
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As Detroit urbanist Janet Anderson considers Belle Isle’s use over the centuries by Native Americans, Europeans, and African Americans, she reflects on the vistas created by its distinctive geography: “Walking to the western edge of the island, where the formal Scott Fountain grounds narrow to a point in the great river, and cities of two countries are outstretched before you, it is not difficult to see what the park means to Detroit: it is a place to celebrate the hard work of life and its fruits. The park is the promise of the city” (3).
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Belle Isle is ancient, antecedent, linking today’s visitors with the Anishinaabe peoples who lived here centuries before Cadillac when the space we know as “Detroit” was called Waawiiyaatanong. As I cross the bridge onto the island, I carry its historical and literary associations, along with memories of each person who has accompanied me in my past—sharing a picnic, playing ball, riding bicycles, running and walking on the paths, skating or canoeing on the canals, observing its animals and plants—transforming the seemingly ordinary into the extraordinary. Like Tiger Stadium, Hudson’s, and Eastern Market, Belle Isle is a focal point of personal memory and regional history, this area’s most beloved place and its space most often visited in life and literature. ​
Works Cited
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Anderson, Janet. Island in the City: Belle Isle, Detroit’s Beautiful Island. The Friends of Belle Isle and the Detroit Historical Museum,
2001.
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Baxter, Charles. “The Disappeared.” A Relative Stranger: Stories. W. W. Norton, 2001, pp. 161-189.
Blackhawk, Terry. “Belle Isle Solitary: New Year’s Eve.” The Whisk & Whir of Wings. Ridgeway Press, 2016, p. 28.
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---. “Ice Music,” One Less River. Mayapple Press, 2019, p. 34.
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Boyd, Melba Joyce. Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press, Columbia University Press, 2003.
Butts, Anthony. “The Belle Isle Men.” American Poetry: The Next Generation, edited by Gerald Costanzo and Jim Daniels. Carnegie
Mellon University Press, 2000, pp. 74-75.
Comer, Nandi. “Belle Isle Song.” A Detroit Anthology, edited by Anna Clark, Rust Belt Chic Press, 2014, p. 121.
Danner, Margaret and Dudley Randall. Poem Counterpoem. Broadside Press, 1969.
Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002.
Hernandez, Lolita. “Over the Belle Isle Boundary.” Detroit Noir, edited by E. J. Olsen and John C. Hocking. Akashic Books, 2007, pp.
235-249.
Levin, Donald. “Belle Isle: Cultural Representations.” Politics and Culture 2 (2003), available through the Internet Archive’s Wayback
Levine, Philip. “Belle Isle, 1949.” New Selected Poems, Knopf, 1993, p. 131.
Oates, Joyce Carol. Do with Me What You Will. Vanguard, 1973.
Pape, Greg. Storm Pattern. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992, pp. 71-2.
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Piercy, Marge. “Detroit Means Strait.” Mars and Her Children. Knopf, 1992, pp. 124-5.
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Randall, Alice. Black Bottom Saints: A Novel. New York: Amistad, 2020.
Schatzberg, Jerry, director. Scarecrow. Screenplay by Garry Michael White. Performers: Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, Eileen Brennan.
Warner Brothers, 1973.
Van Walleghan, Michael. “The Elephant in Winter.” The Last Neanderthal. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999, pp. 11-12.
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Frank D. Rashid is the editor of this literary map. .
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October 8, 2025