Arbutus Reviews

As the inaugural approaches and with Barak Obama’s commission to write a poem for the event, there has recently been a large amount of spotlight focused on Elizabeth Alexander. She appears up for the challenge. In radio interviews and photographs in national newspapers Alexander projects a happy confidence both engaging and inspiring. See appears sure of herself, but not arrogant. See seems larger than herself, but also personal. These are, of course, traits she shares with the man who asked her to write a poem for January 20th.

According to interviews and articles I’ve read, Alexander has known President-Elect Obama for many years professionally and personally, but the quality and the tenor of her work is obviously the major factor in commissioning her to write an inaugural poem. With five books of poems and her most recent book American Sublime short listed for the Pulitzer she has amassed a strong presence on the contemporary American poetry scene.

Alexander has published her last two books of poems (American Sublime and The Antebellum Dream Book) and her first book of essays on Graywolf press (who also republished her first book, The Venus Hottentot). I admire the fact that President Obama selected a poet whose body of work has been primarily published on what must be called a small press. Though Graywolf, to poetry readers, is not a small presence in the world of poetry, they publish less than a dozen books a year. Alexander’s career has established her as a poet known and read by other poets. Her name may not have been on the mind of many of our nation’s readers prior to her commission. Robert Frost and Maya Angelou, two of the other three poets asked to write a poem for presidential nominations were already part of the national consciousness. Alexander seems a perfect fit. I hope her reading on Tuesday not only raises awareness of her fine work, but brings people to the books of Graywolf, whose books are always well designed and compelling to read.

I think Alexander is a strong choice and a powerful compliment to an Obama candidacy. Her voice following the newly sworn in president will flow nicely to a new era of aesthetics in American politics. I think this is one of the best things that Obama has brought to American politics. Beyond policy, beyond parties, and personal opinion Obama brings an aura of eloquence and dignity back to a White House tainted. He is a hard man to criticize because so much of what he does looks and sounds so good. He, of course, also is intelligent and knows how to imbue his aesthetic with meaning. This same quality runs through Alexander’s body of work.
I read the three books of poems Alexander published on Graywolf press and was not sure what to expect. Her titles and the back cover copy indicate that she writes about race, history, and gender. She does write about these things, and does it well, but what surprised me was her often restrained voice and wide use of forms. Her poems are personal, historical, and full of race and gender relations, but they are also dedicated to song and all of its forms. I feel strange saying this because it seems to me that this focus is the focus of all poets, and perhaps it is, but it seems to me that it is a focus that has become blurry or lower on the priority list in the current poetry climate. Form is often substituted for cheap tricks to get the poems down the page and the result is dull poetry. Alexander is never dull.

The first poem in The Venus Hottentot begins,

“Science, science, science!
Everything is beautiful

blown up beneath my glass.”

She moves through odes, sonnets, quatrains and other poetic forms to tell personal stories of her childhood as in “House Party Sonnet: ‘66” and “Ladders” or to wander through the art of Monet, John Coltrane, Frida Kahlo.

Her two more recent books use form as a device to structure the entire book and allow the poems more freedom with their elastic lines. In Antebellum Dream Book the poems march through the subconscious of a intelligent, creative, and aware mind. The poems again mix personal history with American history and Alexander seems to construct the argument that all wars, both public and private, are constructed within similar situations. In the opening poem, “Fugue” the five sections set up the larger themes of the book.

1. Walking (1963)

after the painting by Charles Alston

You tell me, knees are important, you kiss
your elders’ knees in utmost reverence.

The knees in the painting are what send the people forward.

Once progress felt real and inevitable,
as sure as the taste of licorice or lemons.
The painting was made after marching
in Birmingham, walking

into a light both brilliant and unseen.

The ideas of progress, reality seen and unseen develop as she imagines Nat Turner dreaming his bloody revolt and the wonderful dreams Alexander’s persona has while pregnant full of the violence and beauty of birth and parenting.
American Sublime continues the book-length meditation of Antebellum but draws on the more restrained voice of The Venus Hottentot as displayed in the poem “Autumn Passage” which ends the first section of the book:

On suffering, which is real.
On the mouth that never closes,
the air that dries the mouth.

On the miraculous dying body,
its greens and purples.
On the beauty of hair itself.

On the dazzling toddler:
“ Like eggplant,” he says,
when you say “Vegetable,”

“ Chrysanthemum” to “Flower.”
On his grandmother’s suffering, larger
than vanished skyscrapers,

September zucchini,
other things too big. For her glory
that goes along with it,

glory of grown children’s vigil,
communal fealty, glory
of the body that operates

even as it falls apart, the body
that can no longer even make fever
but nonetheless burns

florid and bright and magnificent
as it dims, as it shrinks,
as it turns to something else.

The second section consists of a series of “Ars Poetica” poems. Each poem begins with “Ars Poetica #” and a more specific subtitle consistent with Alexander’s themes. The penultimate poem in the book is the title poem and one I find engaging and emblematic as to why Elizabeth Alexander is a strong choice for inaugural poet. The poem is in parenthetical and reads like a mind circling through a footnote in a history book attempting to make sense of the mess and beauty that is this country:

American Sublime

(At the same time, American paintings wherein
the biodynamic landscape explodes in flames,

ice, violent sunshine that seems to burn the canvas,
apocalyptic nature that roils and terrifies.

The Beautiful: small scale, gentle luminosity.
Sublime: territorial, vast, craggy, un-

domesticated, borderless, immense, unknown,
awful, monumental, transcendent, transcending.

Go West and West young man, to blinding snowstorms. Leave
shark-infested waters, shipwrecks without slaves.

Miraculous black holes of color large enough
to blot out the sun, obliterate the unending moans,

to exalt, to take the place of lamentation.)

I dare to hope that Alexander’s inaugural poem contains the attempt to define the country at this current moment as this poem works to define the contradictions of our history. But, of course, the inaugural poem is an occasional poem wrought with the problems and difficulties of that genre. If it doesn't, I am confident it will be a strong poem for the moment and a nice bookend to the ceremony. A good day for poetry, poets, Graywolf press, and the country.