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ON KNOWING WHO YOU ARE AND WHO YOU ARE FROM: SOME REFLECTIONS ON CULTURE, BICULTURALISM AND IDENTITY

https://ojs.aut.ac.nz/ata/article/view/185/162 (page 21, 2nd paragraphs)

Green, E. “On Knowing Who You Are and Who You Are From: Some Reflections on Culture, Biculturalism and Identity1”. Ata: Journal of Psychotherapy Aotearoa New Zealand, Vol. 25, no. 1, Oct. 2021, pp. 19-33, doi:10.9791/ajpanz.2021.03.

INAUGURAL POET ELIZABETH ALEXANDER

MICHEL MARTIN, host:

As we continue our coverage of President Barack Obama's 100 days, we want to return to his first official day in office, Inauguration Day. And what better way to return to that day and wrap up National Poetry Month at the same time than to invite the poet invited to read her work at the inauguration, Elizabeth Alexander.

She's only the fourth poet invited to present an original work at a presidential inauguration. She joins us from New Haven, Connecticut where she is a professor of African-American studies and English at Yale University. Thank you so much for joining us.

Professor ELIZABETH ALEXANDER (Poet, African-American Studies and English, Yale University): I'm so glad to be with you. Thank you, Michel.

MARTIN: Now, I mentioned we've been celebrating National Poetry Month. I'm going to start with a question I should have asked somebody before now but for some reason did not. What is poetry for? Why do we need it?

Prof. ALEXANDER: Well, I think we need poetry because it's wonderful to have examples in the midst of our days of language that is distilled, that's heightened, that's special in some way, that makes us look at language itself and situations and the world in different kinds of ways. That's what poetry provides for us. It's out of the ordinary even when it's looking at the ordinary.

And like so many other forms of art, it provides an oasis, not necessarily of calm or of peace or of rest, but an oasis from the sort of daily experiences that gives us a way to understand the extra ordinary that's part of our ordinary lives.

MARTIN: How did you find poetry or how did poetry find you? Were you one of those little kids who was always scribbling into a composition book?

Prof. ALEXANDER: Well, I was, but I can't say that they were poems. I was certainly even more than I was one of those kids who scribbled - I was a kid who read all the time, nose in a book, and a kid who listened. I was very interested in the different ways that people used language around me in the kinds of regionalisms that I would hear and the ways that grownups talked to each other, that grownups talked to kids, that people talked in school, that teachers talked to each other, the teachers talked to kids. I noticed those differences and thought that it was very exciting that the language could shift in those different sorts of ways.

And then later on I thought I wanted to be a journalist for a while. I thought I wanted to be a fiction writer, but eventually I realized that the kind of language that I was most called to work in was poetic language.

MARTIN: Was it hard the first time you said to somebody that's what I - you know like - a lot of people just filed their taxes recently, hopefully they did - and there's a line on the tax form which says, you know, occupation - do you write, poet?

Prof. ALEXANDER: I do not write poet. I write writer and professor. Sometimes I write teacher because I think that in a way, though professor describes my job, teaching describes what I actually do. So, like all poets I know, none of us make our living writing poetry, even if it's the thing that we're most passionate about in our work lives. And my sense of myself and of my work and my mission as a teacher is really equally important, though I would say being a poet is at the center of my identity of myself as a working person.

I also do write other kinds of things. I've written a play in verse. I write essays on mostly African-American culture, painting, film. So in that regard the writing part kind of covers the waterfront.

MARTIN: If you're just joining us, this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm speaking with Elizabeth Alexander: writer, essayist, poet, professor. We're talking about poetry. And we're also talking about the poem that she prepared for Barack Obama's inauguration. About that poem, I mean, that is maybe for some people the first or last exposure they would've had to poetry since school. And I know you've been interviewed a lot about the experience, but tell me the truth, when push came to shove, when you got ready to deliver the goods, were you nervous?

Prof. ALEXANDER: I would say that I had a huge amount of adrenaline coursing through me, which I think is a little bit different from nervous. I was in a state of high anticipation. My stomach was definitely churning, but I - at that point I had written the poem and so to my mind the big part - the important part of the work was done. So what I had to do was just figure out how to breathe and keep my wits about me and get it out there.

MARTIN: I'm about to do something very terrible to you. I'm about to play an excerpt of the poem, which is terrible - a terrible thing to do to a writer, but...

Prof. ALEXANDER: Yes it is.

(Soundbite of laughter)

MARTIN: ...just play a short clip. But time is...

Prof. ALEXANDER: I'll survive.

MARTIN: Time is our master. I'm going to just play just a little bit. And here it is.

Prof. ALEXANDER: Okay.

MARTIN: Here's Elizabeth Alexander reading "Praise Song for the Day," a portion of "Praise Song for the Day," a poem she prepared for the inauguration of Barack Obama, January 20th 2009. Here it is.

(Soundbite of poem, "Praise Song for the Day")

Prof. ALEXANDER: Each day we go about our business walking past each other, catching each other's eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues.

MARTIN: There you go. How was it? How was it to hear yourself?

Prof. ALEXANDER: That's the first time, Michel.

MARTIN: Really?

Prof. ALEXANDER: Yeah. I haven't YouTubed - if that's a verb now -- I haven't YouTubed myself, like Googling yourself, so it sounded okay to me. My late grandmother was with me throughout the reading of that poem. And she said just be sure that you speak clearly and enunciate.

MARTIN: And what has been the response to the poem?

Prof. ALEXANDER: I hear from people who have read my work. I've been publishing it for over 20 years, but the pace has accelerated. And I find that I hear from - more letters, for example, from people in prison who sometimes send their own poetry, more letters from young people who send me their creative responses, sometimes visual work that they've put together and sometimes poems and both of those kinds of letters are very rich and interesting. Letters from people who want to collaborate in different kinds of ways and that's been very, very interesting, again, to think about this as a moment.

You know, Barack Obama didn't have to decide to have poetry at this inaugural - only the fourth time. It feels to me like there should always be poem like there should always be art, but it's not a given. And so I think that what that did in addition to the different registers of artistry that we saw with Yo-Yo Ma and with Aretha Franklin, all of this incredible multi-vocality is to say that art belongs in this civic place, but also that there are different art forms and they have something to say together and to each other.

MARTIN: I understand that the poem was also translated into Spanish. What was that process like?

Prof. ALEXANDER: That's something I'm very, very happy about. And I'm very grateful that Graywolf Press, when I said that I wanted to do a Spanish translation of the poem and issue it in North America, that they instantly felt that that was a good idea. So with the poet and translator Rodrigo Rojas, who is a Chilean, we worked on a translation because millions and millions of people are Spanish speakers and readers in this country.

And even though millions of those people are fully bilingual, I thought that - to acknowledge that we are a multilingual country. And that Spanish language and culture is such a vital part of American culture and society. I thought that that would be a terrific thing and there's been a great response to that so far.

MARTIN: You know, poetry seems to come in and out of our national life in its importance. I mean, there are times when people seem to be very engaged with poetry, at times, less so. There are some people who think of hip-hop as the poetry of today, the way that people experience it. Do you see a possibility of poetry becoming hip again?

Prof. ALEXANDER: Well, of course I think that poetry has always been hip. But I think that what's been great about this moment is that it's not about one poet, it's not about one poem, it's not about one president, it's about a conversation about American poetry and a conversation that in my little piece of it I've tried to emphasize, comes out of a great and multi-vocal tradition. And also reflects a very, very, very vigorous poetry scene that's active right now. And some of those people would call themselves hip-hop artists. And some of them are spoken word artists. And some of them are formalists who you write exquisite sonnets.

And there are very, very many different ways that American poets are being excellent. And so I think that recognizing that diversity makes us realize that this is a terrific time for poetry to stay in vogue.

BLOCK: You know, I went back and looked through the three inaugural poems that exist. Robert Frost from '61, Maya Angelou from 1993, and Miller Williams in 1997, and they're all very, sort of, prophetic. It's sort of what kind of country are we in? What are we going to be? on sort of a grand scale. Do you feel like that is sort of the model for what you should do here?

Dr. ALEXANDER: Well, I do think the call is to do something, if not prophetic, something that is grand, something that does take in and recognize the import and the potential of the moment û these enormous questions that we're thinking about, these enormous challenges that we're faced with. At the same time, in all of my work, I think it shows a great belief that what is local, what is intimate, what is precise is the best way to communicate those larger matters.

MARTIN: Elizabeth Alexander, award-winning poet, essayist, professor of African-American studies and English at Yale University. Her most recent collection of poems, other than her inauguration poem, is a collection of poems for young adults, "Miss Crandall's School for Young Ladies & Little Misses of Color." She also recently edited the essential "The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks." She was kind enough to join us from New Haven. Professor Alexander, thank you so much for speaking with us.

Prof. ALEXANDER: Thank you so much. I enjoyed this tremendously.

(Soundbite of music)

MARTIN: And finally, as we wrap up program about the first 100 days of the Obama administration, our planning editor Luis Clemens has a few words to say about another milestone, the second anniversary of TELL ME MORE, which we will celebrate tomorrow. Luis?

LUIS CLEMENS: Thanks, Michel. After two years and more than 500 shows, we've gone from a blog to a daily broadcast. One thing, though, hasn't changed. We're still turning to our listeners to ask how we can best tell you more. Do you have a story idea, a guest suggestion? Tell us what's on your mind. Visit us at npr.org. Click on TELL ME MORE and leave a message on our blog. You can also call our comment line at 202-842-3522. That's 202-842-3522. Remember to leave us your name.

MARTIN: Thank you, Luis. And that's our program for today. I'm Michel Martin. And this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. Let's talk more tomorrow.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 National Public Radio, Inc. (NPR). All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions page at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

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"Inaugural Poet Elizabeth Alexander." Tell Me More, 29 Apr. 2009. Gale In Context: Opposing Viewpoints, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A198771145/OVIC?u=lincclin_vcc&sid=bookmark-OVIC&xid=3ff9002c. Accessed 27 Nov. 2021.

ALEXANDER, ELIZABETH. AMERICAN SUBLIME

Alexander, Elizabeth. American Sublime. Oct. 2005. 96p. Graywolf, paper, $14 (1-55597-432-5). 811.

With a scholarly grasp of personal, political, and private histories, Alexander's newest collection examines the African American experience, particularly during the nineteenth century, in poems about ancestry, language, religion, poetry, and art. The "Amistad" cycle is a potent account of the slave-ship rebellion and the kidnapped Africans' subsequent imprisonment. In a manner reminiscent of Kurosawa's film Rashomon, Alexander adroitly retells events from different points of view with a dramatic voice and carefully selected details. The "Amistad" poems are skillfully linked to persona and personal poems that reflect modern African American experiences, from being singled out in school, as in "Tina Green," to carefully responding to white authority figures, in "Smile." Alexander has a musical voice that shifts from jazz-quick to bluesy to soulful lamentation. Nowhere is this more evident than in the incredible poem "Notes From." Although many poems in the "Ars Poetica" sequence seem less cohesive, less melodious, and at times less poignant, the collection as a whole is a powerful contribution to American poetry.--Janet St. John

St. John, Janet

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 American Library Association

http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/

St. John, Janet. "Alexander, Elizabeth. American Sublime." Booklist, vol. 102, no. 3, 1 Oct. 2005, p. 18. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A137873958/AONE?u=lincclin_vcc&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=e9b93a57. Accessed 27 Nov. 2021.

MULTIPLE CHOICE: TERRANCE HAYES’S RESPONSE-POEMS AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN LYRIC ‘WE’

(page 236, PowerPoint page 6)

Spaide, Christopher. "Multiple Choice: Terrance Hayes’s Response-Poems and the African American Lyric ‘We’." The Cambridge Quarterly, vol. 48 no. 3, 2019, p. 231-257. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/article/736975.

Origin stories. (ARS POETICA)

A poem is something that can't otherwise be said addressed to someone who can't otherwise hear it. By this definition, poetry is deeply impractical and deeply necessary. There aren't good words for most things we need to express, and lots of the people we need to say them to are dead or otherwise unavailable. Poets tend to need poems to handle subjects that are complex, subtle, nuanced, even painful, embarrassing, shameful, or simply ridiculous if actually uttered aloud. And so we have always needed poetry, as long as there has been language, and perhaps even before. Language began with poetry, with the idea that this means that, a word, a sound, can conjure a thing, with the fact that we often need our mouths to point to what's beyond the reach of our hands.

So much of life happens inside our heads, where other people can't see. Language is the fundamental bridge between inner and outer worlds, between people, even neighbors, who are always roadblocked by their skulls. Poetry is how we pay attention to that bridge, how we make sure it doesn't fall, how we maintain it, fix it when it gets rickety.

As long as people communicate, there will always be poets. But how and why do people begin to be poets, and what do they themselves gain from poetry? The people who gravitate toward poetry, usually as children or teenagers, love words, find a kind of conjuring magic in them, find them as entertaining as toys. But 1 would wager that most poets, in addition to being word fetishists, finally dedicate themselves to poetry--or find themselves helplessly in its thrall--in order to answer for something deeper and perhaps darker than their passion for words.

Though their art is a refined form of speech, poets know more about silence than they do about sound. They are people who, for any number of reasons, cannot, or at one point could not, speak. Perhaps they have something particular to say, but as often, they are people deeply, desperately in need of speech itself. The philosopher and aphorist E. M. Cioran claims, "One does not write because one has something to say but because one wants to say something." Poetry seeks to fill the silence to which most poets have a heightened sensitivity. A certain amount of loneliness--an awareness of the unsayable--is a precondition for poetry, or for much poetry. Which is not to suggest most poetry is sad or lonely, just that it must be aware of the space around it, the silence that defines it. This is why poems look the way they do, filling only part of the page. Line breaks and stanza breaks make room for silence, include it in the poem, illustrate it.

If poets are the keepers of the unsayable, then silence, not language, is a poet's natural element, the realm where the unsayable lives. Poets fetishize silence as much as words; they are disturbed and comforted by the sounds that interrupt it. This is what John Keats means by Negative Capability, his notion of a poet's basic qualification, the need for "being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." This is a fancy way of describing ambivalence, also a basic qualification for a poet, the ability to passionately hold two opposing feelings at once. Poets need ambivalence in order to acknowledge the unsayable and speak nonetheless. The hidden subject of all poems is the silence that surrounds them, the things that can't be, that will never be said; a real poem points to everything beyond it.

                             2.
Silence is certainly what got me started. I was an only child, almost paralyzingly attached to my mother. I began writing poems at the age of fourteen, just after my mother died. Poetry was an almost instant reaction, as if a symptom of her death. I used to tell her everything, talk to her constantly every day of my life. Poetry was, it is now obvious to me, my response to the shock of suddenly having no one to address everything to. I had nothing in particular to say, but needed to say something, to anyone, to everyone.
So, poetry was a natural fit. And when I began to learn, in my tenth-grade honors English class, of the many people who had devoted their lives to it throughout history, I was hooked. It's a sad origin story, I know, but it has compensated me with a life filled with joy and interest, with a community of brilliant and obsessed people, and with objects for my devotion. I think, in broad strokes, mine is a pretty common story of how and why poets begin. My early poems were terrible, but that's beside the point. I was speaking, and that is what mattered, all that matters now. I was speaking out of a silence.
Poets have always loved to write about their beginnings, about what brings them to poetry, about the sense of purpose it gives to their lives. This famous poem by Constantine Cavafy made me proud as a budding teenage poet, and gave me hope:

The First Step

To Theocritus one day the young poet

Eumenes was complaining:

"By now two years have passed since I've been writing

and I've only done a single idyll so far.

It's the only work that I've completed.

O woe is me, I see how high it is,

Poetry's stairway; very high indeed.

And from where I stand, on this first step,

shall never ascend. Unhappy me!"

Theocritus replied: "The words you speak

are unbecoming; they are blasphemies.

Even if you are on the first step, you ought

to be dignified and happy.

To have got this far is no small thing;

what you have done is a glorious honor.

Even that first step, even the first,

is very far removed from the common lot.

In order for you to proceed upon this stair

you must claim your right to be

a citizen of the city of ideas.

It is difficult, and rare as well,

to be entered into that city's rolls.

In its agora you'll find Legislators

whom no mere adventurer can fool.

To have got this far is no small thing;

what you have done is a glorious honor."


--Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn

Poets love to be a little bit haughty about what they do, to make it sound hard. And, of course, it is: time is a harsh judge of poets; it forgets most of them. But what I love about this poem is its sense of camaraderie, of mentorship, of passing the torch. Poets, even, especially, dead ones, mentor each other, as Keats continues to do, teaching the art form to any who wants it. I don't believe poetry is for everyone, that poetry should strive to be more accessible, but I strongly believe that anyone who approaches poetry's gates--and there are gates--will find that they will open after a bit of pushing. What "the young/poet Eumenes" has done, this "glorious honor," is not make great art; he has joined a company of practitioners, a maintenance crew; he has found his calling and his community. He has approached the gates, pushed, and stepped inside a world of bewilderment; he fears it will never become a familiar place. To some extent, it won't--it's the realm of the unfamiliar--but as he develops his negative capability, his comfort in ambivalence, Eumenes will find he's home. That's what Theocritus is trying to explain to him; it's what all good teachers of poetry teach. This is how and why poets begin, to find themselves among others who will listen, who want to listen and talk.
Rainer Maria Rilke, in 
Letters

 to a Young Poet, puts this initiating lesson somewhat more harshly:
Go into yourself. Examine the reason that bids you to

   write; check whether it reaches its roots into the deepest

   region of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would

   die if it should be denied you to write. This above

   all: ask yourself in your 

night

's quietest hour:

 must I

   write? Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if

   it should be affirmative, if it is given to you to respond

   to this serious question with a loud and simple

 'I must,'
   then construct your life according to this necessity.

Rilke was nothing if not self-important and at times overdramatic--that's one of the charms of his poetry, and one of its risks (read too much Rilke before writing and you'll find yourself writing bad Rilke). He was also endlessly wise, at least in his best writing. This passage haunted and embarrassed me when I first read it as a teenager, and it bit my conscience for years after. Would I die if I stopped writing poems? At that time, the answer was surely no. But I now think I misunderstood the question. I could have stopped writing and survived, but I could not have stopped speaking, or communicating at least. Words were--and they remain--my lifeline, my way forward, my way of knowing the silence, but not succumbing to it. That is probably true for most people, in some sense. But to be so forgiving and open-ended was not Rilke's style, and it would not have made a good and immortal piece of writing. But poetry should be--no, is --available to all who want it, as long as they are willing to apprentice themselves to its strangeness and endure some confusion and ambivalence. In his depths, I think Rilke believes that too.
A poet's apprenticeship begins when he or she starts to recognize this sense of mission, of necessity, when silence and words can live together. And perhaps Rilke's question--will I die?--is ultimately what drives them to the depths of real poetry. But it is a simple and common need that they are trying to fulfill: not to be alone.
What I'm talking about here is one of poetry's greatest genres: the ars poetica, in which the poet describes his or her reasons for practicing their art. "The First Step" is certainly such a poem, an origin story, and Letters to a Young Poet could be seen as an ars poetica in prose. The genre dates back at least to the first century BCE, most notably to a poem called "Ars Poetica," by Horace. The American poet Archibald MacLeish wrote a famous "Ars Poetica," and it is very much concerned with silence: "A poem should be wordless /as the flight of birds," he writes, an understatement, a fallacy, that makes me think of the silence, the need to speak, out of which poetry grows. He also says, "A poem should be equal to: / Not true" and "A poem should not mean /But be." He is talking about those things that can't be said that we need to say, and about the way that poetry can bring them into being, make a fact of them. This is a serious way of putting serious stuff, but not all ars poeticas are so serious.
Czeslaw Milosz has a sort of lighthearted poem called "Ars Poetica?" in which he makes some very serious claims for poetry--"poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, / under unbearable duress"--but uses humor to hold back a bit, to take himself and his art less seriously, to portray his ambivalence:
What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons,

who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues,

and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand,

work at changing his destiny for their convenience?

It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today,

and so you may think that I am only joking

or that I've devised just one more means

of praising Art with the help of irony.

There was a time when only wise books were read,

helping us to bear our pain and misery.

This, after all, is not quite the same

as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric

clinics.

I like to think of poetry as a pasture--rather than Milosz's and Cavafy's cities--where demons can graze, can move around freely, within bounds, munching grass, making mischief and meaning, in a safer place than the streets of my life. Of course, as Milosz points out, they always escape--for Milosz, they were never cordoned off--and make real trouble in the real world. They "work at changing ... destiny for their convenience"; they make us act badly, hurt others and ourselves, make us live out our fears. They are our fears, our feelings, let loose as action. Poetry seeks to help us understand this, perhaps to change or control it, though poetry is not, as Milosz says, psychology, purely intended to help us. He continues:
And yet the world is different from what it seems to be

and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.

People therefore preserve silent integrity,

thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors.

The purpose of poetry is to remind us

how difficult it is to remain just one person,

for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,

and invisible guests come in and out at will.

Perhaps poetry is the best forum in which to acknowledge that "the world is different from what it seems to be," that it is, in its wholeness, unseeable, and so unsayable. But for Milosz there's something a little funny about all of this, as though the poem tacitly asks, "if we can't see or say what's real, why bother?" And yet we do bother, we must. This is Samuel Beckett's central conflict too--"I can't go on. I'll go on." It's the dark comedy that lets us bear "unbearable duress." It's why many poets are funny, why many comedians are sad. Ambivalence--opposites equally true--is at the core of poetry, and comedy.
Marianne Moore's famous poem "Poetry" is a deeply ambivalent justification for the art form she practiced all her life, with which she struggled deeply. The best-known version of this poem is three lines long, distilled from a much longer poem Moore finally turned against. Here is the short version
I, too, dislike it.

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one

     discovers

in it, after all, a place for the genuine.

Moore may have been the rare poet who was a word fetishist first and foremost, a collector of words and the unlikely bits of information they carried. What she was after may have been something purer than poetry, a place where she could have her words and nothing else. But we must read her as a poet, and ambivalence, "Reading ... with ... contempt," may be the truest sign of love. The "it" in the first line is not poetry as a whole but the esoteric culture that surrounds it, and what people mean when they say, "I just don't understand poetry." (Did Moore's friend Ezra Pound even understand what he meant half the time in the Cantos'? Perhaps not.) But what I think she believes in, what she likes, is the discovery that happens at the enc of the second line--what "one discovers" is the capacity to communicate, to be understood, to use these precise and sinewy sentences (or other kinds of sentences) to reach another person, to accept the silence and the words. What could be more genuine?
Here is another unconventional ars poetica, an abecedary, meaning each line begins with the next letter of the alphabet, by the contemporary poet Mary Szybist, in which she finds a justification for poetry in a happy conversation between two or more kids:
Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle

Are you sure this blue is the same as the

blue over there? This wall's like the

bottom of a pool, its

color I mean. I need a

darker two-piece this summer, the kind with

elastic at the waist so it actually

fits. I can't

find her hands. Where does this gold

go? It's like the angel's giving

her a little piece of honeycomb to eat. 

I don't see why Cod doesn't

just come down and

kiss her himself. This is the red of that

lipstick we saw at the

mall. This piece of her

neck could fit into the light part

of the sky. I think this is a

piece of water. What kind of

queen? You mean

right here? And are we supposed to believe

she can suddenly

talk angel? Who thought this stuff

up? I wish I had a

velvet bikini. That flower's the color of the

veins in my grandmother's hands. I

wish we could walk into that garden and pick an

X-ray to float on.

Yeah. I do too. I'd say a

zillion yeses to anyone for that.

The question with which this poem opens is a clear example of the difficulty of communicating. Can I ever be sure that when I say "blue," you think of the same color I do? Not really. It takes description, context, and trust to establish common ground. That's the true work of poetry: to bring the inner out, to give my blue to you. "You mean/right here?" Szybist asks. Where? The place where the words are pointing, the thing--or thought or feeling--to which they refer. Szybist teases us in this poem, reminds us how hard it is to communicate what we mean. We can't see the puzzle, "the red of that/lipstick we saw at the/ mall," and so we are forced to imagine it, with the help of the clues provided by the poem. It's my puzzle to work out, and yours, and Szybist's too, and where those puzzles overlap, where one interior meets another, and where inner meets outer, is poetry. Who wouldn't want to "suddenly / talk angel?" To a poet, that's a metaphor for being heard in a big way, by everyone, all the distant listeners who otherwise can't hear. Being understood: I, too, would "say a/zillion yeses to anyone for that."
Actually, poetry didn't begin for me with my mother's death; it began much earlier, with the unquenchable urge to speak that made me so close to my mother in the first place. While my friends played baseball or soccer at recess, I longed to find someone to hide with me in the distant corners of the playground and talk. I'd talk about anything--my new alarm clock, my G.I. Joe figures--so long as it was fodder for articulation. Early on, I sensed a magic in bringing my thoughts out into the air. It was a kind of transubstantiation, metaphor made into fact. Though I'd never have put it that way, that's what I wanted: physicality for my thoughts, not because they were particularly important, but because they were real. By speaking them, I could watch them take shape.
                        3.
"Clearances VII," part of Seamus Heaney's sequence of sonnets on his mother's death, is not really a sad poem:
In the last minutes he said more to her

Almost than in all their life together.

"You'll be in New Row on Monday night

And I'll come up for you and you'll be glad

When I walk in the door ... Isn't that right?"

His head was bent down to her propped-up head.

She could not hear but we were overjoyed.

He called her good and girl. Then she was dead,

The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned

And we all knew one thing by being there.

The space we stood around had been emptied

Into us to keep, it penetrated

Clearances that suddenly stood open.

High cries were felled and a pure change happened.

How this poem perplexes me, how it intrigues me, how jealous I am of what it has come to believe in the end: that witnessing a death is a threshold on the other side of which is some clear new knowledge. What changes in that moment--at the end of this Petrarchan sonnet's eighth line, its volta, the formal turn that represents the poem's major emotional event--is that he lets her go, something almost heroic, superhuman. And maybe it is only in the imaginative realm of the poem that this is possible.
This is not exactly an ars poetica, but it does suggest one of the functions of poetry: to clock, record, even enact change in ways we can't in life. Heaney wrote his share of traditional ars poeticas, too, like "Personal Helicon," in which he remembers his childhood fascination with "wells/And old pumps with buckets and windlasses" and connects that early love of the dark mysteries of water to his adult practice as a poet. Of a well he says:
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket

Plummeted down at the end of a rope.

So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch

Fructified like any aquarium.

When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch

A white face hovered over the bottom.

Poets seek reflections, ultimately in words, but, first perhaps, in nature's uncertain mirrors, which send back not an accurate image of the self but a vision of the world with the self somewhere in it, in a kind of humbling context--"A white face hovered over the bottom"--or with a difference, "echoes [that] gave back your own call / With a clean new music in it." Heaney finds he loves what he can't anticipate, or the surprises he can count on. He recognizes himself and his own mysteries in the unpredictable baggage words carry with them along with his intended meanings. This is why he says "I rhyme/To see myself, to set the darkness echoing." Perhaps, too, this is why he is able to recognize the "pure change" that follows his mother's death--he's been attuning himself to these kinds of changes--"pure," if not always welcome--all along through his poetic practice.
"Clearances VII" features all the sonic lusciousness for which Heaney is most famous: the father's quoted lines are delicious, the rhythmic beckoning of "you'll be in New Row" is seductive, simple, and songlike. And that caesura before "Isn't that right" is like a little hammock for the mind to rest in. Then there is the wonderful interlaced rhyming:--glad, head, dead, penetrated--which makes the joy, the grief, and change seem preordained, as though they were an aspect of language itself, of sound, of nature. And of course they are.
The poem's movements are also guided--one might even say steadied, as by a friend at the bedside of the dying--by the long tradition of the sonnet form. The sonnet is mysterious and magical, a little box of fourteen lines in which something vast and complete can nonetheless transpire. This one's loosely Petrarchan, with an octave--the first eight lines at Heaney's mother's bedside, which conclude "Then she was dead"--and a sestet, the last six lines in which the "pure change" dawns and is finally announced. The sonnet form is full of checkpoints like these--the poem's thinking or its narrative must change at the volta; after that, the poet has only a few lines to finish up, all while making sure to hit whatever rhyme scheme has been determined (in Heaney's case, it's a fairly odd one, with the couplet that usually closes a sonnet at the top, and a bumpy network of end words, many of which are near or perfect rhymes). It's a comforting form, predictable by design, yet subtly wired for surprises. It's the perfect form for mourning, which is the slow dawning of painful change, and for epiphany.
I'm happy for the family that they get this moment of intimacy from the otherwise reticent father, but what interests me most is that volta: "He called her good and girl. Then she was dead." The father's soul-baring does nothing to forestall his wife's death. No, she is already dead by the time the sentence is cast, and that is why the change is pure: because the death is apprehended without sentimentality; it is accepted, at least in the language used to express it, to describe it, as it happens. This is why the poem is almost neatly divided in half: Heaney leaves emotion that exceeds its cause behind him after line seven. The remainder of the poem strives to say death cleanly. He admits that the life of the mother "had been emptied / Into us to keep." The mother herself is gone, has been transformed into an aspect of the selves of her mourners. She's become a poem. Rarely does an elegy admit this fact: that the dead vanish completely, and all that is left is a diminished shadow, buttressing for the personalities of those left behind. And so, in that last line, Heaney achieves understanding of what death is, what words are necessary for letting go.
Perhaps because my mother died when I was young, I still believe, somewhere very real within me, that if I wait around long enough, I will find myself back in the past, that I will recognize my own "pure change," my coming to poetry. That hope is why this poem sticks in my throat like a bone, and why I write. How I wish I could know what this poem knows. Heaney's wisdom stretches far, far beyond this lovely, enacted insight about grief, but so much of my psyche eddies around my inability to believe it. I am desperate for a "pure change," and I think many others are too. This poem points a way toward such a change, toward what poetry can do.
And yet--and here is why it's poetry, not memoir--death happens, matter-of-factly, but as it can only in art, laced with a bit of drama. It's the opposite of transcendence, no angel rising from the corpse, no consolation from beyond, beyond the meaning the family makes of the father's naked expression of his simple love. And yet something beyond expression occurs, something worth straining after in words, something one cannot get over. Death is made meaningful, though the meaning is never quite clear--it's something unsayable addressed to someone who can't hear.
Or perhaps the meaning is heard and understood--by us, the distant readers in the room beyond the mother's--and even Heaney's--death, though it's not something we could paraphrase or explain, except in another poem. This meaning, which is heard in silence, is what Moore is referring to as "the genuine"; it's Cavafy's "glorious honor," the reminder that is Milosz's "purpose of poetry," what Szybist says her "yeses" to. When we hear and understand what can't be said and heard, that's when "a pure change" happens. It's what poets go in search of, what they write toward, why one poem, one kind of poem, isn't enough--the unsayable is never quite said.



Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of three books of poems, most recently The Trembling Answers (BOA, 2017). We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress, his first collection of 

essays

, which includes this piece_, will be published by Gray wolf in November. Teicher is also the editor of Once and For All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Old City Publishing, Inc.

https://www.aprweb.org/

Teicher, Craig Morgan. "Origin stories. (ARS POETICA)." The American Poetry Review, vol. 47, no. 5, Sept.-Oct. 2018, pp. 9+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A553280218/AONE?u=lincclin_vcc&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=7a840fa4. Accessed 27 Nov. 2021.

AMERICAN SUBLIME
American Sublime ELIZABETH ALEXANDER. Graywolf, $14 paper (96p) ISBN 1-55597-432-5
Barbecues, midwives, "Soyinka and Senghor," "Etheridge Knight, from prison," grandparents, students, "not Congo but Zaire," mom, "aggressive magic," jail, "my book," "children, fathers, brothers"--in this kaleidoscopic fourth collection, Alexander traces shifting global histories, family alliances, ways of working and being trapped, and means of escape in four broad parts. The first, "American Blue," takes in the U.S.'s post-'60s history alongside Alexander's child-, student- and adulthood (with stops at Ellington/Strayhorn's '40s, Monk's '50s and a dream of Krishna along the way). A selection from a larger series titled "Ars Poetica" covers the ways poetry confronts history: " 'Poetry,' I shouted, 'Poetry,'/I screamed, 'Poetry,/ changes none of that/by what it says/or how it says, none./But a poem is a living thing/ ... and as life/it is all that can stand/up to violence.'" "Amistad," the third section, channels the black Atlantic convincingly, while the last section, "American Sublime," consists of just two short lyrics; the latter ends "light that carries/possibility, illuminates,// but can promise nothing but itself." This collection makes similarly restrained promises and delivers lucidly. (Oct. 1)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 PWxyz, LLC

http://www.publishersweekly.com/

"American Sublime." Publishers Weekly, vol. 252, no. 26, 27 June 2005, p. 54. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A133676337/AONE?u=lincclin_vcc&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=b3b216c2. Accessed 27 Nov. 2021.



AMERICAN SUBLIME
American Sublime by Elizabeth Alexander Graywolf Press, October 2005 $14, ISBN 1-555-97432-5
The title of Elizabeth Alexander's fourth book of poetry is as much a description of the book's intentions as it is of the quality of the work.
In three sections, Alexander constructs a literary record of experience that is increasingly taken for granted into our cultural imagination. In each one, she reifies and reclaims values and voices in danger of atrophy from historical attrition and reorients the American aesthetic in such a way that is inclusive of black cultural experience.
In American Sublime, legacy is symbolized by the cultural memory of slavery, jazz, African folklore, a corrective historical subjectivity and a black pantheon of icons of achievement. Alexander seems to ask, to what use do we put our legacy of pride and strength today when the counter pressures of hostility turn to malignant ambivalence? The project hints at censure of a popular culture in danger of falling into forgetfulness.
The middle section of the book is a series of ars poeticas numbered out of series to suggest degree more than sequence. We should not assume that because there is an "Ars Poetica # 1,002," there must be at least 1,001 existing elsewhere (though there very well may be). Rather, numbering here builds the sense of compulsion attending the poems' composition. Though most of these poems do not readily pronounce themselves as commentaries on the art of poetry making, they are enlarged by the added context. Following the famous edict of Archibald MacLeish that "A poem should not mean / But be," Alexander understands that great poetry can't help but comment on the nature of the creative enterprise itself.
"Poetry," she writes: "is the human voice, / and are we not of interest to each other?" This interest stems from a desire to see ourselves offset in the poetry we are drawn to. In this, Alexander's portrayal of sublimity is a wealth of generosity and tempered zeal.
American Sublime concludes with poems re-imagining the lives and events surrounding the kidnapping and historic repatriation of Africans on the slave schooner Amistad. Here again, Alexander places her work in the tradition epitomized by Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage." The difference, however, is that Alexander's history of the Amistad is updated and imagined through a blues inflected lens. In "Cinque Redux," the hero foresees being "misremembered/ ... as upstart, rebel, rabble-rouser, leader." She writes: "Violent acts will be committed in my name." In his voice, Alexander critiques a future that is seen, in spite of the sacrifices made by this leader of the slave ship revolt and his countrymen, as "unfurling like the strangest dream." We are that future. What have we done with that dream?
Reviewed by Gregory Pardlo Gregory Pardlo is a poet and teaches at Medgar Evers College, in Brooklyn.
Pardlo, Gregory

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2006 Cox, Matthews & Associates

Pardlo, Gregory. "American Sublime." Black Issues Book Review, vol. 8, no. 2, Mar.-Apr. 2006, p. 18. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A143723651/AONE?u=lincclin_vcc&sid=bookmark-AONE&xid=3b666578. Accessed 27 Nov. 2021.



2019 AAR PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: "AND ARE WE NOT OF INTEREST TO EACH OTHER?" A BLUEPRINT FOR THE PUBLIC STUDY OF RELIGION.

(pages 660 et 661, PowerPoint page 22, 23)
Patton, Laurie L. “2019 AAR Presidential Address: ‘And Are We Not of Interest to Each Other?’ A Blueprint for the Public Study of Religion.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, vol. 88, no. 3, Sept. 2020, pp. 639–663. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfaa044.
· 


ELIZABETH ALEXANDER

Alexander, Elizabeth. "Ars Poetica# 100: I Believe." American sublime 26 (2005).

Alexander, Elizabeth. www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/elizabeth-alexander#tab-poems


ELIZABETH ALEXANDER'S AMISTAD: Reading the Black History Poem through the Archive 
by Wendy W. Walters 
link (https://www.jstor.org/stable/40962781?seq=16#metadata_info_tab_contents

Walters, Wendy W. “ELIZABETH ALEXANDER’S AMISTAD: Reading the Black History Poem through the Archive.” Callaloo, vol. 33, no. 4, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, pp. 1041–58, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40962781.