Posted on Sunday, 11.08.09
ELIZABETH ALEXANDER
Inauguration opened a new world for poet
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IF YOU GO
The fair runs Sunday through Nov. 15 at Miami Dade College, 300 NE Second Ave., downtown Miami. ''Evenings with . . .'' events are $10 except for appearances by Elizabeth Alexander and Ruth Reichl, which are free. Tickets can be downloaded at www.miamibookfair.com. Tickets for unfilled seats will be distributed to the standby line on a first-come basis.By AUDRA D.S. BURCH
aburch@MiamiHerald.com
Elizabeth Alexander's Praise Song for the Day, the inauguration poem that helped deliver Barack Obama into office, was in the making for almost half a century, surely for three generations: The grandmother who sang lullabies, poetry set to music. The parents who took their 1-year-old daughter to the Lincoln Memorial to hear Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech. The husband who emptied the house of the two boys, because, more than anything, Alexander needed hushed space to muster words and thoughts, then distill them into something beautiful, powerful, memorable.
``For me, the challenge was to be absolutely precise and pristine with the words,'' says Alexander, 47, who will read Praise Song in English and Spanish at Miami Book Fair International at 5 p.m. Sunday.
The challenge would be met with a muted ode to the ordinary rhythm of life, with words about routines and journeys, bridges and love and, perhaps most poignant, about possibilities.
With Praise Song for the Day, Alexander became the fourth inaugural poet. She is an Ivy League professor and Pulitzer Prize finalist; a Harlem-born, Washington, D.C.-raised child of a national civil rights advisor and a professor; a wife and mother; an essayist and a playwright.
Alexander's work often mines the lush themes of race and gender, the quilt of American and African-American history and the larger human condition.
Her words are textured and alive, steeped in the cadence of jazz. The blues, too. At times she is generous in her language. Others times, as in the boy haiku: the motherless child/rests his hand on a dead man's/forehead 'til it cools, she strips her phrases bare.
Almost all her work is colored by everydayness. In Ars Poetica #100: I Believe, Alexander wrote 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 (here I hear myself loudest) / is the human voice / and are we not of interest to each other? But that she can stitch together beautiful language is somewhat beside the point.
Much of Alexander's poetry is full-bodied, composed with a musical ear, imbued with historical truths and often interpreted in modern tongue. The poem Absence brings a certain humanness to the slaves aboard the Amistad and imagines a community without women -- the mothers, sisters, daughters: Who first hummed that deep / sound from empty bowels, roiling stomachs, / from back of the frantically thumping heart? / In the absence of women, of mothers, who found the note that would soon be called ``blue,'' / the first note from one bowel, one throat, joined by dark others in gnarled harmony.
``Her research is so impressive. She is a scholar in addition to being a poet,'' Tree Swenson, president and executive director of the Academy of American Poets, says from New York. ``She does an amazing amount of digging, then transforms that into characters that seem to live and breath.''
Alexander believes her method and her poetry adhere to any artist's larger cultural mandate.
WHO WE ARE
``Across time and history, we have seen communities produce artists whose work chronicles the story of the people -- that is to say, this is our journey, this is who we are,'' Alexander, who chairs Yale's Department of African-American Studies, says from her home in New Haven, Conn. ``And, particularly in modern times, we have come to expect our artists, our poets to go to stormy and difficult places . . . and bring forth that which is difficult.''
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