Elizabeth Alexander, the Obama inauguration poet who teaches at Yale in its African American Studies department, held forth last night, 4/8, at the Art Institute, reading for 45 minutes or so and commenting now and then.
She came across as one who should have gotten the advice I got from novelist Vance Bourjaily at the U. of Iowa in 1963. Don’t write your fiction for Catholic publications, Bourjaily told me. “It’s too easy.”
For me as a priest, he meant, but more to the point, too easy for anyone. So should Alexander not write or write less for a black audience, which she does quite often, to judge by last night’s readings.
Her frequent references to black troubles extort a respectful response, as in the story of Prudence Crandall, the Connecticut white woman who tried to teach young black women in the 1830s and was thwarted by white chicanery and violence. Alexander found the story “interesting,” she said. That’s all? a listener asked himself.
She rendered a dignified account of atrocities, but to what end is not clear, except to memorialize the victims.
“You can smell the semen in the walls,” she wrote (and read to us) of the secret room where the white man bedded with his black woman, who was later cheated of her inheritance by “distant white cousins.”
She spoke of “amazingness,” giving us a taste of clumsy diction. In what she read, she eschews verbs. Her subjects rarely have an expressed predicate, giving the effect of a parade of nouns and phrases, without syntax.
She can’t honestly sing Cole Porter’s famous song, having no rhythm. None whatsoever.
Wit is not be found, rather a lugubrious affect.
She violates rules, and not in dialect: “. . . who I did not know well . . . “
Her tone is a sort of delphic oracularity, so restrained as to be practically telegraphic.
Half-sentences abound. Nouns are rushed together. Her verse is a vocabulary exercise. But bland.
Phrases come across meaningless, as “the sweet affinity of true knowledge.” Vs. false knowledge, we presume. Affinity with what?
She considers — introducing a poem — “how we approach the quotidian,” the everyday material that some have immortalized. Pope took the snipping of hair in an 18th-century drawing room and made it “The Rape of the Lock,” a mock epic.
Alexander seems content with in-jokes, as in noting to the audience that black politician Adam Clayton Powell photographed with racial agitator Stokely Carmichael in the 60s both looked “fine,” eliciting titters from blacks.
Her touch is so light, it’s a skimming.
A poem tells of “a baby’s need to sing.” But babies gurgle and howl — and do many other things, as she tells in her quite evocative “Neonatology.” But baby has a need to sing? How does Alexander know?
The poems she read were short to the point of being slight. And sometimes banal: “We encounter each other in words . . . The mightiest word is love . . .” She asks in closing, “What is love?” What indeed?
You can’t judge a poet by hearing her read, in a museum or at a presidential inauguration. She can hardly give up Afro-Am themes, I guess. What she does about and with them is something else. Maybe what she should give up is reading her poems.
Later: I must go back to what I wrote after the inauguration, quoting New Republic’s Adam Kirsch:
Kirsch says her weakness lies in her “consciousness of obligation,” in her “poetic superego” that
leads her to affirm piously, rather than question or challenge. This weakness is precisely what made her a perfect, an all too perfect, choice for inaugural poet.
That’s it. She affirms piously, even primly. I saw that last night but couldn’t put my finger on it.
Blithe Spirit 