‘The Arts Have a Place in Conversation’

It's an assignment that could induce writer's block for even the most seasoned scribes: penning a poem to be read before a crowd and TV audience likely to reach the hundreds of millions, commemorating the inauguration of America's first black president, all while the country is fighting two wars and a crumbling economy. As his inaugural poet, President-elect Barack Obama chose Elizabeth Alexander, a Yale University professor of African-American studies and a former faculty colleague from his teaching days at the University of Chicago. NEWSWEEK spoke to Alexander soon after she completed the piece, which, of course, is under lock and key until the big day. Excerpts: (Article continued below)

NEWSWEEK: Tell us how you found out you were selected to deliver the inauguration poem.
Elizabeth Alexander: I found that I was selected when I received a phone call from the inaugural committee, and it was quite an amazing moment because so many poets with whom I'm friends had been talking back and forth, hoping that President-elect Obama would decide to include a poem in the day's festivities. It's really quite an affirmation of the potential importance of art in day-to-day and civic discourse.

What speaks to you about using language in poetry?
Well, what speaks to me about language in poetry, I think, in part is a mysterious gift. This is something that I feel called to do, it's something that I'm obsessed with, it's something I feel that I must do, it's something that once I start I don't let go of.

You're only the fourth poet to recite a poem for an inauguration. Did you go back and look at these other inaugural poems?
I did go back and look at the previous inaugural poems—Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, Miller Williams—and that was a very important part of the process, to see how other people thought about this particular occasion, this sense of occasion. But I also looked at many, many, many other poems that addressed in resonant language a historical moment. So I looked at William Butler Yeats, I looked at Robert Hayden, I looked at Gwendolyn Brooks, I looked at Walt Whitman, so many poets who have found a way to stand up to occasion in ways that we still want to read now, after those occasions are long past. And then after I looked at those poems and immersed myself in those poems, I very pointedly stopped reading other people's poems so that I could listen a little bit and see what was happening inside.

What lessons did you learn?
Perhaps the greatest is that it's very, very hard. It's very, very hard to write in language that transcends the moment and also serves the moment, and that has a sense of grandeur without overreaching for that grandeur. What I learned is what I always learn when I read great poetry and when I embark upon each new poem—that you have to be very, very humble before the art form itself. It's good to go humble into a task of this enormity.