My home copy of RA is up in smoke, but I do recall that Alexander was first in the anthology, which was alphabetically arranged. She was also one of the weakest poets in it, and a couple of dismissive reviews focused on how the book began.

Oh, she's adequate. She "will do." "Blues" is adequately amusing while being adequately narcissistic. "Ladders" is actually pretty bloody good, I think. Haven't looked at her web site stuff. May or may not.

Editing in: and the problem with web sites is that the samples of work are not always representative of the whole body of work.

[This message has been edited by Quincy Lehr (edited December 18, 2008).]

On the website, I kind of like the Emancipation poem. It's surprising....though not a great poetic achievement.

Yeah, but Rafael's thundering iambs grow tiresome. You're damning with faint praise.

BUT, I'm happy there's a poet at the scene. What was it Frost said, the first man on the moon should be a poet?

Obama has SUCH a tough job ahead of him: shaking off the $10 trillion hangover. The Nov. 5 Onion headline read: Black Man Given Worst Job in America.

Maybe we should cut him some slack on this one.

Whatever happened to the new president's honeymoon?

Bob

Oh, come now! Campo's prosody aside (and I don't recall it ever especially bothering me), even in his most allusive and slightly twee moment, one gets more of a sense of a human being with feelings than one does from most poetry.

[This message has been edited by Quincy Lehr (edited December 18, 2008).]

Bob, the first man on the moon was a poet. His name was James Dickey, the American poet Ted Hughes should have married.

I said this to my modern poetry class last week, and they actually got the joke!

Rafael can write a line, and that's a helluva lot more than I can say for most contemporary poets. Alexander ain't half bad as a choice, imho.

His first work in Kenyon Review, when Marilyn Hacker was editor, was excellent. And I agree that he's "human." But I didn't find much development and dropped off his dance list.

Perhaps I didn't give him a chance.

Youse are kind people.

Bob

I had guessed that Obama chose her on account of the strong American historical grounding of her poems--I've read her book AMERICAN SUBLIME, which has a whole section revolving around the Amistad slave ship rebellion, and other poems also engage historical subjects. But according to the Washington Post, she was a friend and neighbor of the Obamas in Chicago, and her father was a former Secretary of the Army and attorney in the Kennedy administration--so there were other reasons beyond her solid poetic credentials to give her the nod (I was rooting for Yusef Komunyakaa or Natasha Trethewey, but think it was a wise choice). The same article also says that she was one year old and present in her baby carriage on the Washington Mall when Martin Luther King gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech--what a fitting backstory to her inaugural appearance next month! http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...121702027.html

http://www.drudgereport.com/

Drudge has a picture of Alexander and a link to the Washington Post story. Nice that MD would give attention to a poet.