Inside The Mind of a Poet
Teen Voices chats with Elizabeth Alexander

Feature Editor:
Wilza Merzeus, 18
Boston

Elizabeth Alexander

I sat down with the nationally-renowned African American poet, essayist, playwright, and teacher Elizabeth Alexander. Ms. Alexander was born and raised in Washington, D.C. She is the author of four books of poetry, a book of essays, and a play. She is a professor of African American Studies at Yale University. Lucky for me, she was a fellow at The Radcliffe Institute in Harvard Square in the spring of 2008, so I had a chance to sit down and speak with her one-on-one about her life, her poetry, and her views on feminism.

Teen Voices: What were your favorite subjects in school?
Elizabeth Alexander: I loved school and always loved English. I liked reading literature and I liked getting lost in books. In high school I liked history a great deal. I had a wonderful American History teacher. I think I liked the stories of history. I liked Spanish very much. I really loved my teachers because they came from different Spanish-speaking countries and I think that made me realize as a black person that I existed in a context not only in the U.S., but also within the context of the whole world.

TV: Did you always want to become a writer or did you have other plans?
Elizabeth: I had many other plans. I wanted to be many things at the same time: dancer, lawyer, judge, and mother. Writer was usually in there, but I hadn’t settled on that being the main thing that I wanted to do.

TV: What do think poetry is for?
Elizabeth: I think poetry is for a way for us to be human in language with ourselves and for each other. I think that poetry gives us a way to communicate our souls very precisely.

TV: When did you first begin writing poems?
Elizabeth: When I was little I wrote little concentrated bursts of language in my diary, and they were very private and therefore very free because I wasn’t showing them to anybody. I wasn’t worried about whether they were successful “poems”; I just knew I just had to write them. That’s how my poetry writing was for a very long time.

TV: Who are some of your favorite poets?
Elizabeth: Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Walt Whitman, Robert Hayden, Derek Walcott, and Elizabeth Bishop.

TV: Do you remember what your first poem was about?
Elizabeth: I was very young, maybe nine or ten years old, and I remember writing a poem that had lots of magic fanciful things in it: things were golden and there were mythological* creatures. It was based on what enchanted me in my reading life.

TV: How old were you when you got published for the first time?
Elizabeth: I published my first poems in my mid-twenties.

TV: In your own words, how would you describe the style of your poetry?
Elizabeth: I usually leave that to others because it’s so hard. If I asked you to describe yourself [you’d find that] hard to do. I guess I would describe [my poetry] as richly textured, often historical, and it attends to beauty.

TV: Is writing poetry ever a way for you to escape from the world?
Elizabeth: When I’m in the midst of writing poems, really deep in it, certainly that’s when I lose track of time. I’m a mother of two sons so I don’t lose track of time because I don’t have that option, but I would say there is that moment when I say “oh my gosh look [how much time has passed]” and that is when I’m writing a poem. [I have time to do that] when I’m home at night and they’re asleep.

TV: How much autobiographical information ends up in your poems?
Elizabeth: Everybody asks every poet this question. I think whenever we read poems, me included, we think we’re getting to know [the poet]. We have to remind ourselves there is a persona* in a poem, [even if it’s] very close to who we think the [poet] is. There is still a tremendous challenge to make autobiographical details work in poetry. This involves a great deal of craft and also poetic license.

TV: What writing and publishing advice would you give to emerging teen poets?
Elizabeth: Read all the time; always have a book [with you]. Read widely and diversely; read more than you ever imagined you could. Keep learning and keep taking in examples of what good writing is. It’s very important to keep healthy, to attend to the health of your body. It’s difficult to listen to your distinct and magical voices if your body is not as it should be. That means fresh unpackaged foods, moving [your body] every day, and spending some time in a quiet space. Send your work to places where you imagine your work would make sense. I try to tell people you should be published [only] when you’ve written really well.

TV: How do you accomplish everything you set out to do?
Elizabeth: I don’t accomplish everything I set out to do, and I think that’s important to remember. I have a very close cadre* of girlfriends who, when I’m being unreasonably hard on myself, will say to me “It’s okay, you’ve done the best you can do today, you’ve done many things and you will do many more things, just maybe not today.” I think that letting go [is helpful].

TV: Do you consider yourself a feminist? If so, in what ways does feminism influence your life and your writing?
Elizabeth: Yes I do. I came of age in a time when feminist struggles and the need for them was very clear. Many of these struggles are not resolved [today as] women are still not paid the same as men. For me, what feminism meant was that my friends and I saw ourselves being equal to our male friends and we felt we should be considered as intelligent as men. We wanted to be valued according to how hard we worked and what we were able to accomplish. We wanted to be able to have choices.

TV: If you only had one month to live, what would your last piece of writing include? What message would you want to leave behind?
Elizabeth: I would try to articulate something about overcoming fear. [There are] things that terrify us and should terrify us: there is a lot of violence in this world like large-scale violence, emotional violence, family violence, and societal violence. The question is, are we going to succumb to that fear or are we going to find a way to move through that fear? [We need] to find allies and to find our inner resources.

Visit Elizabeth Alexander’s website to learn more about her and read some of her poems.

* Mythological: lacking factual basis or historical validity.
* Persona: a character assumed by an author in a written work.
* Cadre: a core group.