Dialogues from the 2009 Aspen Ideas Festival - In Her Own Words
Poet Elizabeth Alexander, who was tapped by President Obama to be part of his Inauguration, speaks with Institute trustee, playwright, and actor Anna Deavere Smith about the president, the craft of poetry, and why Walt Whitman was on her mind last January.
Anna Deavere Smith: You talk about unofficial language and official language. And you being the Inaugural poet, where most of the language was official, … talk to us a little bit about art as unofficial language and therefore its contribution?
Elizabeth Alexander: The whole community of poets, I speak for all of us, … we were all hoping that President-Elect Obama would decide to have a poet. It would only have been the fourth time. But what we felt it would represent was his own exemplified interest and understanding of the importance of the distilled particularity of language, that the words we use matters; it matters tremendously.
Human beings reach across divides in language. ... Just to find the words that are like tincture, like one drop, if you put them in water they would expand forever and perfectly—that’s our work, that’s our job, and we felt that [President Obama] was our guy as far as understanding the value of having people in a culture who think and write with that kind of precision. …
Poetry, in many ways, is one of the freest of the arts, because nobody gets paid for it. Really, there is no poet who makes his or her living by the word. We do other things. And I think that there is a tremendous freedom that comes with that, because we are the ones who are supposed to tell the emperor that he or she has no clothes, to observe from
the sides and not just from that central line that official language often must take. That’s what we’re called upon to do. We are called upon to leave people hopefully feeling a sense of some kind of form of felicity, but also feeling open in a sense that they might go on to another set of questions. Poetry isn’t meant to resolve everything. I think it’s meant to open us up by the end of a poem. And those are all things that official language doesn’t have.
Smith: What is the responsibility of a poet in a time of communal crisis, global crisis, crisis in the family? Is it our job to obsess on craft?
Alexander: Well, I think that our job—the speaking truth to power part being very important—is also to continually perfect our craft so that, when we do what we do, we are as lucid as possible. … The same exercises that a ballet dancer does at the bar every single day, so too a writer must always work on that craft so that, when you do raise your voice in song, your song can be heard.
Smith: How did the notion of the contemporary and the universal animate your composing the inaugural poem? Alexander: Looking out on the Washington Mall, where another of my great predecessors—and the great predecessor of American poetry—Walt Whitman tended to the Civil War dying, not only with his nurse’s hands, but also with words. On that Mall, thinking about, at the far end of the mall, the open slave market and of the slave labor that built the capital. Thinking about all of the marches, thinking about the suffrages, trying to bring that sense of this is the ground on which we walk, this is the ground on which we stand. So, even though we are in one moment—January 20, 2009—we bring the past with us necessarily as we look forward.