Presidential Poet Elizabeth Alexander Wows Penn State Audience (Part 1)

 Elizabeth Alexander recites "Praise Song for the Day" during inauguration
ceremony for Barack Obama. (AP photo release)

Presidential Inauguration Day poet and chair of the Yale University African-American Studies Department, Elizabeth Alexander, recited works before a full audience September 17 at Penn State University’s Palmer Museum of Art as the guest poet for the annual Emily Dickinson Lecture. The event was sponsored by the Penn State English Department and held at the Penn State University Park campus, Pa.

Although the author of five books of poetry, two books of essays, co-author of a children’s book of sonnets, co-author of a chapbook, and the editor of two more books, most of the world knows Alexander as the poet who wrote and recited “Praise Song for the Day” at the inauguration of President Barack Obama. Many also, however, recall that Alexander was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005 for her book American Sublime. She also happens to be the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and the George Kent Award.

While her inauguration poem was composed to commemorate a unique moment in contemporary history, the poems presented by Alexander at the Palmer Museum of Art covered a wider range. Quoted in the Daily Collegian Online, she noted her interest in "historical voices," and said she was, "inspired by courage, by people who face something that seems impossible to face.”

Alexander’s Body of Life

One good satisfying read through Alexander’s book Body of Life and it becomes easy to see why President Barack Obama chose her to serve as his inaugural poet. Although only three short words, the title of this book is big because it indicates something of the scope of Alexander’s poetic vision in terms of her examination of life as it has been known in the past on up until an individual’s, and a society’s, present precarious times.

A very shrewd observer of subtle oddities, Alexander unearths the comic and tragic ambiguities of the human condition, allowing us to alternately laugh at ourselves, cry for ourselves, and stare in awe at the beautiful complexity of what it means to be human.

Published in 1996 by Tia Chuca Press of Chicago, Body of Life is comprised of more than 40 poems that sweep brilliantly through both social history and personal autobiography. Many of these were first published in such distinguished literary outlets as Callaloo, Chicago Review, Voice Literary Supplement, and Yellow Silk.

The book is divided into four parts, the first containing a gallery of eight profiles of historic individuals. The manner in which Alexander gently frames the inner life of these individuals within their external social and historical context is marvelous to behold. Take, for example, her portrait of the great Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, in “Stravinsky in L.A.,” as he stands: “In white pleated trousers, peering through green/ sunshades, looking for the way the sun is red/ noise, how locusts hiss to replicate the sun.” The composer meditates on the relationship between colors and music, then concludes: “One day I will comprehend the different/ grades of red. On that day I will comprehend/ these people, rhythms, jazz, Simon Rodia,/ Watts, Los Angeles, aspiration.”

Body of Life by Elizabeth Alexander.

Likewise, we entertain new insights in poems that make the historical very personal. Such is the case when the poet revisits the great Harlem Renaissance diva Josephine Baker in “The Josephine Baker Museum”; when paying renewed attention to the daughter of the extraordinary W.E.B. Du Bois in “Yolande Speaks”; or when entering the traumatized genius of Virginia Woolf in “Fugue.” The impact is both potent and claustrophobic as readers journey inside a hot cramped box with escaped slave Henry Porter (known in text books as Henry “Box” Brown) as he ships himself like a parcel post package from Richmond to Philadelphia, fantasizes about food, and weeps for the family he has left behind.

An Autobiographical Turn

The second section of Body of Life takes a decisively autobiographical turn. As might be expected, it includes poems that invoke the innocence of childhood “Summertime,” as well as the eventual loss of innocence in unexpected ways and places. Rather than simply wallowing gleefully in nostalgia, Alexander allows her pen to roam through some unsettling territory. The titles of the poems “Aspirin” and “Cough Medicine” sound simple enough but the lines reveal more than memories of childhood illness. They hint strongly at the threat of childhood drug addiction to over-the-counter medicines. At the same time, they describe a quirky mystical sensibility that prefigures the development of the accomplished poet Alexander one day would become. While that idea may sound like a stretch to some, consider these lines from “Aspirin”: “…Sometimes I long/ for the fevers of my childhood./ I miss actual delirium,/ the hot brain burning through its caul/ to imagination.”

Book of children's poems and art by Elizabeth Alexander, Marilyn Nelson,
and Floyd Cooper.

The childhood referenced by Alexander took place during the 1960s and 1970s. The poems “Bossa Nova” and “Family Stone” illustrate how the music of the times informed both the era and the life of the poet. Alexander is sometimes startling when painting full portraits of places from her youth. In “Washington Etude,” “Manhattan Elegy,” “My Grandmother’s New York Apartment,” and “In the Small Rooms,” we get large enough doses of childhood reveries but we also get hard slaps of realism in the forms of abuse and disillusionment. Particularly notable in this section is “What I’m Telling You,” Alexander’s homage to Betty Shabazz (the widow of Malcolm X) as “a nice woman in a dark house filled with/ daughters and candy, something dim and unspoken,/ expectation.”

Continues with Part 2 of 2

By Aberjhani, the African American Art Examiner and author/co-author of eight books including Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance and The American Poet Who Went Home Again.