Elizabeth Alexander, poet

Elizabeth Alexander has been asked to recite an original poem she’s written for the U.S. Presidential Inauguration on January 20, 2009. I’m about half way through one of my own making, which is difficult for me because writing an occasional poem is always too intentional a construction. If I finish the other half of it, I’ll post it.

Here’s a poem about poetry she’s written; she read it tonight on PBS’s News Hour, and I copied it here from her website.

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

at Professor Collins’ door

(written on Tuesday, January 25, 2005, around daybreak)

Knocked on Professor Collins’ door,
hoping to hear from the horse’s mouth
how to write a sensible poem.
For the life of me, I couldn’t do it.
And Gary seemed to think
that meeting a real Poet might help.

I thought that once we talked,
the Professor could put his suspicions
into reasonable words:
“a wounded duck hardly flies straight
tumbling through smoky gunshot air”
and conclude his pithy argument:
“it’s hard to see the ground
while spinning round and round.”

Perhaps, rather than being physicist,
he would be physician and
diagnose the wrenching cramps
of my remorse and aspiration.
Then he might prescribe a palliative,
yes a laxative for evacuating the soul!
There must be a confessional somewhere on campus,
like a plastic blue johnny for moving one’s bowels in a hurry.

As I began anticipating the relief of clarification
and rehearsed my thankfulness in advance,
a secretary walked out of the Professor’s office,
flicking off the lightness of being I was already feeling.
“He plays golf on Thursday afternoon,” she said.

return to poetic stuff