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Poet Elizabeth Alexander to read at Obama's inauguration
Alison Flood
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 18 December 2008 15.32 GMT
Barack Obama, perhaps the most literary president-elect of recent years, has chosen his friend, the poet Elizabeth Alexander, to read at his inauguration on 20 January.
Obama had been spotted carrying what appeared to be a book of the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott's poetry last month, but it is Alexander, a professor of African American studies at Yale University, who will compose a poem to be read at his swearing in as president. She will perform alongside Aretha Franklin, Itzak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma. The participants were chosen based on requests from Obama and from vice-president-elect Joe Biden.
Alexander, who has published four collections of poems, most recently the 2005 Pulitzer prize finalist American Sublime, will be only the fourth poet to have read at a presidential inauguration. A tradition eschewed by current incumbent George W Bush, Bill Clinton invited poets to both of his inaugurations, with Miller Williams reading in 1997, and Maya Angelou in 1993. The only other poet to have read at an inauguration was Robert Frost, who recited The Gift Outright for John F Kennedy in 1961.
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"A lot of her poems explore the history of slavery, civil rights and women's rights," said Alexander's UK editor Neil Astley at Bloodaxe Books. "She's very much someone who's engaged with issues such as race, gender and politics, which she invokes in a compelling way as a poet."
Astley said he was delighted that Obama had selected her. "People were thinking Walcott," he said. "But it seems right to me that it is a poet of Obama's generation."
Alexander, 46, is the author of poetry collections The Venus Hottentot, Body of Life and Antebellum Dream Book, a collection of essays, The Black Interior, a range of short stories and critical writing, and the play Diva Studies. As well as winning the $50,000 (£32,500) Jackson poetry prize last year, she is the recipient of the Alphonse Fletcher fellowship, given for work that "contributes to improving race relations in American society".
American Sublime includes the poem Ars Poetica #100: I Believe, in which she writes that:
Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)
is not all love, love, love,
and I'm sorry the dog died.
Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,
and are we not of interest to each other?
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