12 January 2009
On Penning a Verse for the President-elect
Elizabeth Alexander is only fourth poet to be asked to read at inauguration
Washington — Elizabeth Alexander will give no sneak preview of poetic lines she is writing to read at President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration.
“I don’t want to jinx it, to talk it away,” she said.
Alexander is bound to be nervous. Only three times before has a poet been asked to read at an inauguration. “I wouldn’t want to have the butterflies she will have to deal with,” her father, Clifford Alexander, said.
As in earlier instances, there is geographic symmetry between this poet and the president-elect who chose her. Robert Frost and President Kennedy were staunch defenders of New England. Maya Angelou and Miller Williams are both poets with roots in President Clinton’s home state of Arkansas. Alexander and Obama are friends from their days on the faculty at the University of Chicago.
But Alexander’s earlier roots are Obama’s future.
“I’m coming home,” she said. She lived in the nation’s capital from age 2 until college. “You learn something by osmosis when you grow up where laws are made, where you see the whole system of government at work, where glorious museums are free and art can be at the center of life.”
In 1963, Alexander’s parents took her in a stroller to the Lincoln Memorial to witness Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream” speech. Her father couldn’t stay, but left his wife, Adele, with their toddler and reported to work at the Kennedy White House. “The story was repeated as I was growing up,” the poet said. It was “a moment toward greater justice”; its retelling made it “continuous with the ways of my family.”
Alexander’s return to Washington at age 46 to read for the first black president bookends an era.
Race has been a theme in her writing and her teaching. She is incoming head of the African-American studies department at Yale University. She was among the first teachers at the Cave Canem workshops for black poets.
Alexander’s subject matter moves through centuries — from slave ships to Depression-era artists to race riots. “The Venus Hottentot” is a poetic description of the misery of Saartjie Baartman, a South African woman displayed for her sexual attributes at freak shows in Europe in the early 1800s. Baartman died in 1816 at age 26, and parts of her body were exhibited in a Paris museum until 1974. In 2002, after a request by Nelson Mandela, her remains were returned to South Africa for burial.
Speaking of Alexander’s work, Grace Cavalieri, host of The Poet and the Poem radio series, said, “I can take every one of the poems and use it to teach about race. She talks about race boldly and elegantly.”
Her children’s book, Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color, describes a school that is vilified — the well poisoned, fires set — until it closes. The book is written as a series of sonnets. Alexander takes control over frightening episodes through form.
“She is not a victim,” poet Toi Derricotte said. “In her poetry, black people are survivors.”
In “A Poem for Nelson Mandela,” Alexander writes, “my life is black and filled with fortune.”
A poetry reading by a respected poet in Washington typically draws a couple of hundred listeners. Alexander may read to 1 billion people January 20. Considering whether she will speak on behalf of her race, on behalf of poets or on behalf of all Americans, and whether she will speak to poetry lovers or politicians, her father said, “Don’t place upon her too many audiences. You can only do so much with so many stanzas. What will come out of this is what is in her heart.”
Alexander’s lines don’t overreach. In “Today’s News,” she writes:
I didn’t want to write a poem that said ‘blackness
is,’ because we know better than anyone
that we are not one or ten or ten thousand things …
Her friend’s election has her thinking of the great American poet Walt Whitman, who was a friend of President Abraham Lincoln. “In the last days of the [Obama] campaign,” Alexander said, “I could hear lines from Whitman’s ‘I Hear America Singing’”:
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work.
“The swelling of voices of all these different types of people who, together, wanted to make a turn in the same direction is like the work of so many sorts of people who wanted to make this one thing [Obama’s election] happen,” she said.
Alexander said the clear and resonant language that poets Gwendolyn Brooks, W.H. Auden and Robert Hayden use to speak to a historical moment also enters “into the conversation” as she writes.
Ethelbert Miller, a poet and head of African-American studies at Howard University in Washington, expects a well-crafted inaugural poem from Alexander, if perhaps not a reading as dramatic as Maya Angelou’s in 1993. “Unless Alexander’s hat blows off in the wind, we won’t remember the reading,” he said. “It should be about a poem that holds up, not a performance.”
As to theme, her poetry — translated into Spanish, German, Italian, Arabic and Bengali — speaks of a multicultural America.
Lines of “Today’s News” say:
Elizabeth, this is your life. Get up and look for color,
look for color everywhere.
“We’ve moved from red and blue states to ‘color everywhere,’” Miller said.
Alexander on Obama's appreciation for poetry