It’s a question few writers like being asked, and most writers know better than to pose.
Still, when news came that Elizabeth Alexander would write and deliver a poem at President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration, it was hard not to ask the 46-year-old poet and Yale University professor, “So, have you started yet?”
“I am working,” she said shortly after news of her selection. She was calling from Cambridge, Mass., from where she has been commuting to New Haven, Conn., for the past year.
“I’ve got phrases. I’m moving things around. I’m trying to be very open. I’m trying to listen on a whole lot of different registers. Trying to find a way to live up to the possibility of the moment.”
Alexander first met the Obamas when they were both teaching at the University of Chicago.
“He and Mrs. Obama were people you always knew about. It’s the nature of Hyde Park — same age, same cohort.” she says. “They’re just warm, smart, interesting and interested people.”
On election night, Alexander watched the results with a two other couples who, like her and her husband, have young children.
“It was really wonderful to be with families. Here were the grown-ups having all these powerful emotions because we understand the journey. And here were our children, who this will be their norm. Even as we have told them the history that has led us to this moment.
“For my 9-year-old, this will be his norm. This will be the first president he consciously remembers. The convergence felt really powerful and really sweet.”
What won’t be young Simon’s norm is the fact of his mother reading to an estimated 2 million attendees, not to mention all those watching on TV.
Alexander is only the fourth poet to compose a work for the presidential swearing-in. At John F. Kennedy’s ceremony, an aged Robert Frost struggled to read “Dedication,” which he wrote for the occasion, before reciting his better-known “The Gift Outright.”
Maya Angelou, and later Miller Williams, did the honors at President William Jefferson Clinton’s inaugurations. Angelou’s “On the Pulse of the Morning” went on to be a national best seller.
In 2007, Alexander became the first recipient of Poets & Writers’ inaugural $50,000 Jackson Poetry Prize. She has written four books of poetry and a collection of essays. In what was a watershed year for black female poets, Alexander was among four writers awarded prestigious prizes: Lucille Clifton (the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize), Natasha Trethewey (the Pulitzer Prize) and Tracy K. Smith (the James Laughlin Award).
“This is a moment for people to say, ‘Look what we have been missing,’ ” Alexander told a National Public Radio interviewer at the time. “None of the poems sounds anything like the others. Our voices, our backgrounds, our aesthetics, our concerns are quite distinct.”
Talking about the promise of Obama’s campaign and election, Alexander couldn’t help bringing up two more poets whose influence she feels: Audre Lorde and June Jordan.
Like Alexander, both wrote poems and essays. Each died far too soon. Lorde died of breast cancer in 1992. Jordan was felled by the same disease in 2002.
Alexander believes Lorde’s ideas about the complexities of identity — “as a strength, not as a dividing thing, as a necessary aspect of understanding ourselves individually and as a community” — was a hallmark of the Obama campaign.
“Did they get it from Audre Lorde? I don’t know. But that’s not the point,” she says with a laugh.
“June Jordan said, ‘I can’t just have a politics of refusal, a politics of “no.” I have to have a politics of “yes” and love.’ The only way I really work well with people is for us to be saying ‘yes’ to things in common, to know what we’re working for, not just what we’re working against. I think that’s a very profound insight.” She pauses.
“Again, I don’t know where he got it. But as an idea in the culture, June Jordan expressed it the most powerfully.”
During his campaign, Obama quoted a line that came from Jordan: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
It’s not a surprise that Alexander sees poetry as vital, necessary.
“Poetry matters for us because of the way it exemplifies that language bears power. Language is the medium in which we communicate across difference. Language is what we live in. In poetry, that distilled and shifting language is what gives us a moment of meditation as we face serious challenges.”
The challenges for Obama — and the nation — are monumental. As Obama looked to a poet to set a tone, Alexander looked to another for inspiration.
“Walt Whitman, one our nation’s great poets, was a poet of the Civil War. He gave us a vision of a complex, robust, rambunctious, clashing but unified America when the country was, in fact, brother-to-brother at war.
“The soaring words that articulated such a keen sense of “Americanness,” she says, “were written at a moment when the country was figuring out what it was. That’s power.”
So as she pondered and collected her thoughts, her phrases, Alexander agreed her task was a humbling one:
“Because poetry is a great art, and I’m always humble before that art.
“And this is a great moment.”
Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com
An Elizabeth Alexander sampler
“Poetry . . . exemplifies that language bears power.”
