http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&q=...-8&sa=N&tab=wn

She was, I believe, the youngest poet in Rebel Angels and at least began as a formalist. I must admit I haven't kept up with her work.

Sam, do you have any of her work available?

HERE'S A LINK to bio and three poems from the Academy of American Poets.



[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited December 17, 2008).]

She has a home page, with a link marked "Poems."
http://www.elizabethalexander.net/home.html

I think that some of her stuff is interesting. I'll read more. Thanks Maryann.

A review notes that her last book contains sonnets, and a review of her prvious book called it "a return to form - in fact, to many forms."

I've read about five: prosaic.

Nothing here knocking me sideways.

Bob

sunshades, looking for the way the sun is red
noise,

Hard to find a worse enjambment. Am I in a bad mood?

Shameless

Robert-

Well, if you're in a bad mood, so am I. What's up with people from Yale publishing whatever kind of crap they want cos they're from Yale? It's sickening. And her stuff is full of that kind of enjambment.

I'm quite harsh about enjambment but I thought there was a good feeling for sound and some intelligent ideas. I haven't read much yet. I rather liked her Stravinsky poem.

I've read about six or seven. All fur coat and no knickers as my old granny used to say. I agree with Janet that the Stravinsky one is better than the others I've read. I'm trying to imagine a context in which I would say 'naked buttocks'.

Charlotte Bronte said, 'Wow, sisters, what a man!
He laid me face down on the ottoman.
Now Don't you and Em'ly
Go telling the fem'ly,
But he smacked me upon my bare bottom, Ann!'

Pity they don't ask Conquest to read at Obama's thingy. By the way my Daily Telegraph has a picture of the man smoking with a hat on. Quite made me warm to him.

Sam, Rafael Campo (born 1964), Rachel Wetzsteon (1967) and Greg Williamson (1964), all in Rebel Angels, are younger than Alexander. (And better poets, in my opinion.)

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.

Thanks for the links to the Post, Julie and Sam.

It looks like good politics to me. Don't know how much Obama had to do with it, in that a Congressional committee apparently made the choice, but it sure looks like his handiwork.

I think that the choice, when it occurs, has to be political. Clinton chose Maya Angelou, whom we have mocked as a poet. JFK chose a prime time New England Poet. It appear to work that way: Obama's neighbor who apparently listened to MLK's cadences when she was one year old. It's a good story.

Couple years ago I had to write a poem for a wedding to be attended by many D.C. and internationally connected doers and it was hard work. I don't envy Elizabeth the task, but it's a great honor and I hope she writes a splendid piece.

I'm mellowing.

Bob

Does this mean the election's over?

It makes the football season look short.

PQ

"African Leave-Taking Disorder" is one I like, though to be honest it could be sleeker, sharper. It's on her home page under "Poems."

Here is a video of her reading when whe won the Jackson award.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tURYL...eature=related


and another reading
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lC9V...eature=related

Oh gosh. Is it alright to say, after complimenting her on her clear diction, that she is dull?

I feel no pulse.

"But there is little doubt, given the intense global interest in President-elect Barack Obama, that Ms. Alexander’s verse will be broadcast to more people at one time than any poem ever composed."

From piece in Washington Post
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/25/bo...=pol&emc=polb1

My son told me that in his Honors English class today (8th grade), they studied EA's inaugural poem.

I asked him if they had studied any other poems this year.

Nope. Just that one.

I asked him what his teacher thought of the poem.

She thought it utterly Brilliant.

I imagine this going on in classrooms all across the nation.

All eyes and ears spanning the world were in a position to receive a poem, and instead were given:

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone

and then others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side;

I know there's something better down the road."


-


What an enormous missed opportunity for the art.

But we're supposed to be thrilled that poetry was represented at all..

I don't think so. Better no poetry than bad poetry.

Shame on yer, Barack.