POETS IN THE AGE OF OBAMA

Poet Elizabeth Alexander, who will read a poem at the 2009 Inauguration, discusses President-elect Barack Obama and his relationship with language.


By Elizabeth Alexander
Poetry Media Service

Poetry Media Service

The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies announced on 12.17.08 Alexander's place in the Inaugural Program. This interview is transcribed from a Poetry Foundation "Poetry Off the Shelf" podcast which aired on 11.25.08. Listen to the podcast at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/audioitem.html?id=643

Curtis Fox: Elizabeth, where were you on election night?

Elizabeth Alexander: I was with my family, with my husband and my nine year-old and ten year-old sons, and two families--lovely friends with their young children as well--and we all let our kids stay up until midnight, because this is their reality and nothing could be more powerful than that. It was beautiful.

CF: How do you think the election of Obama, who seems to have gotten a lot of support from intellectuals and poets, is going to affect poetry?

EA: From the very beginning, in his public utterances we've seen that Obama is someone who takes great care with language, who understands that language is the medium that we travel in--it's what we have to communicate with each other. And so his words have always been unusually precise, unusually careful, and certainly beautiful, but not for beauty's sake. So I think that there's something that he really understands in his rhetoric about the twinning of form and function that has made him an extremely effective communicator.

CF: Do you think that this respect for language, which seems to be new in the political sphere, will take some of the edge off of poets' attitudes towards political power?

EA: I don't think so, because that is in part the very essential work that poets do. Poets are always looking from the outside. Poets are never in any significant way the center of power. Poetry is an art form that is not well compensated, which leaves poets in a wonderfully free place to be able to criticize constructively without any kinds of economic ties or incentives.

So I think that's where poets always reside in the society. But I think perhaps what I hear is a lot of poets taking heart, in that not only is this someone who takes care with his language, not only is this someone who is evidently a thinker--certainly we haven't had a president who's been a professor, that is to say, someone who spends at least a part of his professional life thinking about complicated ideas and trying to make them comprehensible and working them through with students--but also, this is someone who appears to care about poetry itself. As many people have noted, he was photographed three days after the election carrying Derek Walcott's Collected Poems. I mean, the inbox went wild!

Poets just absolutely couldn't believe that, with that gesture, he was saying that a few days after being elected president, [he was able] to find the time for the contemplation that poetry provides, to read one of the great poets of world poetry, Derek Walcott; that is to say, not to have a strictly nationalist view of where important art is found . . . it is utterly extraordinary.

We heard one of his refrains, "We are the ones we have been waiting for"--that's a line from June Jordan's "Poem for South African Women."

(From Barack Obama's acceptance speech, 11.04.08: "Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for.")

CF: Do you think he self-consciously quoted that? Or is that just a coincidence?

EA: Well he certainly didn't invent it out of whole cloth; at least that's my guess. I think that there are probably other moments [from which] we could parse little hidden gems that suggest to us that this someone who appreciates the effective distillation that poetry offers.

CF: Can you imagine how it would electrify poets in this country if they thought that not only Barack Obama but other political leaders actually read what they wrote?

EA: Well, that would be electrifying indeed, and again not just because we don't sell very many books and we like for people to pay attention to our words; but rather, because we think what we do is important. Because we struggle to be precise and that is how human beings communicate across divides, communicate across difference. We take that work dead seriously, and that is the work that we want our leaders to be engaged with, with equal care.

CF: I think this particular cultural moment is pretty exciting for a lot of people; a lot of people have a sense of the country that's dramatically different. Do you have any recommendations for a poem that reflects that spirit?

EA: Yes--I have truly in my head been hearing lines from Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing."

I Hear America Singing
By Walt Whitman

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should 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 wood-cutter'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,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day--at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

EA: So I think this campaign truly belonged to an extraordinary cross-section not only of Americans, certainly as a campaign to Americans, but of the world over. Everyone from their own particular is finding a way to sing of what this moment can be, to sing of what their hopes and aspirations and frustrations and needs are; and somehow, that can come together in one leader's vision.

Elizabeth Alexander is a professor of African American Studies at Yale, and her latest book of poems is American Sublime, published by Graywolf Press. This interview originally aired on the podcast series "Poetry Off the Shelf." Distributed by the Poetry Foundation. Read more about Elizabeth Alexander, and her poetry, at www.poetryfoundation.org

© 2008 by Elizabeth Alexander. All rights reserved.

Return to Poetry Foundation Column Index >>>

MICHAEL ROSEN

An interview with the Children's Laureate of Britain.


By Bruce Black
Poetry Media Service

Few of his legions of fans were surprised when Michael Rosen was appointed the fifth Children's Laureate of Britain--the first poet to win the honor. Adored for his tongue twisters, puns, rhymes, riddles, and nonsense verse, Rosen also subtly explores the emotional nuances of childhood, including its more serious subjects.

Bruce Black: It's the first time a poet has been selected as children's laureate. Why is this important?

Michael Rosen: I'm not sure that it's terribly important, but it does feel like an affirmation for poetry in general. The laureateship is becoming a post that is trying to represent different sectors of the children's book world. I thought it would get round to poetry one day, and I was a little surprised, but of course delighted, that it got there so soon.

BB: How does your post enable you to influence the attitudes of adults and children toward poetry?

MR: I'm not sure that it helps much more than before. That's to say, I spend a lot of time and energy expressing my point of view about the reading of poetry by children and have always done so. A really good thing coming up, though, is that Booktrust [the charity that administers the laureateship] is devoting a Web page to what I'm calling "How to make a poetry-friendly classroom." It's an extension of what I've been banging on about for some time. This time it will be a proper professional job, with the possibility of teachers exchanging views between each other.

BB: What's been your greatest pleasure so far as children's laureate?

MR: It's accelerated my thinking around using the Internet for the dissemination of ideas about children's books and the performance of poetry.

BB: How did you discover your own voice as a poet?

MR: Through reading D.H. Lawrence and Carl Sandburg in particular, but also the early pages of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. These were the voices that I was interested in at first. I then became fascinated by Gerard Manley Hopkins. However, there were the voices in my life from my parents, my brother, and the people at my schools in northwest London. These all contributed to how I wrote--and still do, of course.

BB: Did schooling impede or enhance your understanding of poetry . . . and your voice?

MR: In primary school I enjoyed what was called "choral speaking"--a kind of choir that got together in order to recite poems. I didn't like the poetry we did in lesson time. It always seemed so mournful and sad. At secondary school, something fizzed when a teacher in my second year introduced us to dramatic monologues--Browning, mostly. I thought that was brilliant. The next time I remember something good going on was when I did GCE [General Certificate of Education, a secondary-level academic qualification], as it was called then. For that, my father and I read A Pageant of Modern Verse, and it has poems in [it] by Lawrence, Housman, Hopkins, and others.

BB: Once you found your voice, how did you know it was suitable for children?

MR: I think that came about because the moment my first book was published, I was invited into schools, libraries, and children's book groups to read my poems. I quickly found out which ones interested them and which ones didn't. This was crucial.

BB: So when did you first realize you might write for children?

MR: When Pam Royds at Andre Deutsch said that a group of poems I had written could be published as a children's book. I had thought that they were "adult" but that children might like them. To tell the truth, I hadn't really thought it through. I lived in a house where "adult" poetry was repackaged in anthologies and radio broadcasts and given to children--poems by Dylan Thomas, James Stephens, Robert Graves, and the like. So perhaps I thought I was doing that--being an "adult" poet whose poems might be taken up by anthologists putting books together for schools.

BB: Is writing poetry for children different than writing for adults?

MR: I think adults who like poetry have tremendous staying power. They will read and reread poems because they enjoy the effort of untangling them. I think there is a tiny minority of children like that, but in general, poems for children have to sound interesting on a first reading.

BB: Do you have any suggestions for adults who want to help children learn to love poetry?

MR: Just read poems out loud to children. If you know any by heart, then say them at odd times, like when you're walking down the street or doing the washing up. Leave poetry books lying around the house. Take children to see poets reading their poems.

BB: Would you like to offer any words of encouragement for children who want to become poets?

MR: Read and read and read poetry. Keep a notebook for putting down ideas, thoughts, and "snippings." A snipping is where you see or hear something that you find interesting or odd. You snip it and put it in your notebook. One day, these will turn up in your poems, or you'll change one or some so that they can be in your poems.

Bruce Black is a writer and editor of children's books. His stories for children have appeared in Cricket and Cobblestone magazines. This article originally appeared on www.poetryfoundation.org. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

© 2008 by Bruce Black. All rights reserved.

Return to Poetry Foundation Column Index >>>

NATURE POEMS IN A POST-NATURAL AGE

Poet Gary Snyder thinks the landscape of contemporary poetry should include wildflowers . . . and highway fast food joints.


By John Felstiner
Poetry Foundation Media Services

One of the original voices of the Beat Generation, Gary Snyder has been publishing poems for over 50 years. In addition to writing poems, Snyder has had a firm commitment to sustainability, a concern that is echoed in both his poems and essays.

John Felstiner: Do you remember some moment in your recent or remote past when you got the connection between poetry and environmental consciousness, where you felt it as a kind of absolute truth?
Gary Snyder: I grew up with it. Beginning when I was four years old, five years old, in the countryside, in a wooded landscape north of Seattle, back in the days when kids weren't programmed. We just ran loose around the family dairy farm and went through the gap in the fence and right back into the woods. I felt as welcome and as much at home in the forest, second-growth forest growing back, as I did anyplace else, and I was comforted by it. I was always easy being alone. And if I went with a friend, that was fine too.

JF: How would one distinguish an environmental poem from what is sometimes called an ecological poem?
GS: Look at the words. "Environment" means the surroundings. The surroundings can include an oil refinery, can include all of Los Angeles and the I-5 strip. That's the environment too, whatever surrounds us.

JF: So there's an "us" in "environment."
GS: Everything surrounds everything else. Yes. What is "ecological"? Etymologically, the "household of nature" is what's being called up. "Ecological" refers to the systems of biological nature, which include energy, and mineral and chemical transformations and pathways. "The environment" is used more commonly to also include human and technological productions. And it's not an absolute, hard and fast separation. . . .

JF: Have you written poems that could be qualified as one way or the other, or as both together--environmental and ecological?
GS: The best example is in this little book right here, Danger on Peaks.

"In the Santa Clarita Valley": That is the first valley north of the San Fernando Valley on Interstate 5. There's a little river there, and it has become almost entirely suburban development now. Here's the poem:

Like skinny wildweed flowers sticking up

hexagonal "Denny's" sign

starry "Carl's"

loopy "McDonald's"

eight-petaled yellow "Shell"

blue-and-white "Mobil" with a big red "O"



growing in the asphalt riparian zone

by the soft roar of the flow

                  of Interstate 5.

This is playing with the possibility that we might look at the human, physical, made environment as if it were natural environment.

JF: So we move from "Mobil" into a "riparian zone."
GS: Yeah.

JF: And hear that word "flow" for the highway.
GS: Right, it's ironic. I comment when I read this in meetings, that this is to help prepare us for a post-natural age. For writing nature poems in a post-natural age.

JF: We were speaking of (William Carlos) Williams' "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there." In 1950 or so he took his Western tour, and he came to Reed, where you were with your poet friends. Is there anything specific you remember about that event?
GS: What stayed with me was how he said ultimately the poet, the artist, brings to society and to the world "conviviality." That surprised me and stayed with me: conviviality.

He said art is about conviviality. I saw instantly that this goes past the idea of the solitary, romantic, lonely artist suffering for his art, which I never trusted. And the acknowledgment that artists have a role in society, which is to contribute to the community -- to the heart of the community.

Take Williams' statement that people "die for lack of what is found there," I think this means lack of open-heartedness, lack of sweetness and tenderness to each other. But then a little later I saw that meaning also as ecological, that openness not just for the human community but for the natural community; it's for our immediate neighborhood of all the other species, all of us passing through time. I get angered when the bears eat my apples right off the tree. But I can say well, okay, they got to them first; they must have enjoyed them.


John Felstiner's translations and critical work have been widely published and awarded. He teaches at Stanford. John's newest book, So Much Depends, dealing with poetry and environmental urgency, will be published by Yale University Press in 2008.

© 2007 by John Felstiner. All rights reserved.

Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.