Elegy and Celebration in the Napa Valley
A Reading by Inaugural Poet Elizabeth Alexander
Aug 3, 2009
As the Napa Valley Writers' Conference has proven for 29 years, wine is the perfect compliment to poetry and fiction. The Saintsbury pinot noir and chardonnay were flowing in the Napa Valley Opera House July 28 before the start of an evening reading by poet Elizabeth Alexander and fiction writer Peter Ho Davies. Alexander gained no small measure of renown by composing and reading a poem, Praise Song for the Day, for January’s inauguration of U.S. President Barrack Obama, only the fourth poet so honored.
Born in New York City’s Harlem district in 1962, Alexander grew up in Washington, D.C. She currently is professor of African-American Studies at Yale and was on the faculty of Napa Valley Writer’s Conference in 2007. Alexander’s most recent collection, American Sublime, was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize.
Poets of the Page and Podium
There are poets of the page and poets of the podium and Alexander is both. Hers is poetry of a simple surface, colloquial in syntax and tone, accessible in both written and spoken form. She reads her work with a strong, clear, voice without noticeable accent. In contrast to the triumphant tone of her creation for the inaugural, Alexander began by reading poems that she described as “elegiac mode.” One such poem, Tending, begins:
In the pull-out bed with my brother
in my grandfather’s Riverton apartment
My knees and ankles throbbed from growing,
pulsing so hard they kept me awake –
or was it the sound of apartment front doors
as heavy as prison doors clanging shut?
And another, At the Beach:
Looking at the photograph is somehow not
unbearable: My friends, two dead, one low
on T-cells, his white T-shirt an X-ray3
screen for the virus, which I imagine
as a single, swimming paisley, a sardine
with serrated fins and a neon spine.
Echoes of Walt Whitman
Such elegiac lyrics are a good to start when the star turn of the reading is a celebratory national ode, albeit a thoughtful one. Alexander saved Praise Song for the penultimate poem.In a Newsweek interview just before inauguration day, when asked what message Obama was sending by including a poet in the ceremony, Alexander replied:
It's that the arts have a place in conversation, that poetry, its distillation, its precision, its mindfulness, models for us a way that we might stop and think and choose our words with care, that we might offer our ideas and experiences to each other with precision and care, I think that's what poetry shows us. – (Jan. 18, 2009 Newsweek) A listener to Praise Song for the Day might hear echoes of Walt Whitman.Here’s Whitman, for example, from his poem I Hear America Singing:
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it would 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 boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The woodcutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
And this from Alexander:
Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.
Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.
As her inaugural poem concludes with an image of walking into light – praise song for walking forward in that light – Alexander concluded the evening with an unpublished poem, The Elders, that again holds out the promise of a bright future, a poem she said emerged from the 2008 campaign. (Line breaks are not Alexander’s.)
Watched him glitter; watched him gleam.
Shook his un-rough hands with
their cotton-scarred hands.
Cut their eyes at him, observed.
the ease with which he smiled,
asked finally What is love? and
Who are the people? and
How must we love them? and
What do we need?
What is now? Look at the lines
in the corner of young blood’s eyes,
line not unlike our hands. And perhaps
this is not gleam but
illumination; not merely his, but ours.
Like her praise song, this poem ends with a vision of light, an image of dawn that may not be remarkable for a self-congratulatory national event intended to celebrate a new beginning. In this case, however, one cannot help but think of Alexander's image as marking the end of the long night of slavery and racial hatred in America – an image she intends to be both precise and caring.
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