368 | Elizabeth Alexander on Why Democracy Needs Imagination

In all sorts of ways, the modern world makes it difficult to nurture our individual humanity and connect with the humanity of others. The disciplines that try to do so are, naturally enough, the humanities. Poet Elizabeth Alexander's new book, Signals Across Vast Distances, grapples with the question of how literature and other humanistic studies can help us build empathy and become better people, and why that task is crucial to a flourishing democratic society.

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Elizabeth Alexander received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Pennsylvania. In addition to her work as a poet and writer, she is currently the President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She composed and read a poem for Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009. Among her honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Magazine Award, and several Pushcart Prizes for poetry.

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Click to Show Episode Transcript

0:00:00.2 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I'm not sure whether I've ever told this particular story on the podcast before, but a few years ago I was playing poker in Las Vegas. And one of the things about playing poker is it can be a social game. It's fine if everyone at the table is just playing quietly, that's okay. Sometimes there are drunk/obnoxious people. That makes it less fun. But the best is when you get a gregarious bunch or at least some people who want to sort of laugh and joke and have a good time while they're trying to win each other's money. In this particular case, there was a guy sitting across from me with a thick British accent. And he was a very working-class looking guy. He was middle-aged, heavyset, bald head, and very voluble. He was cracking jokes, making everyone laugh, and it was a good time. He was a good person to have at the table. At one point, someone asked him what he did for a living, and he said that he was a writer. And immediately, I don't know why, but immediately I wanted to joke, "What kind of writing do you do? Poetry?" Because he just seemed so down to earth and working-class that poetry seemed like the last thing that he would be writing.

0:01:16.6 SC: Someone else happily did ask him, "What kind of writing do you do?" And he said, "Poetry." He's a professional poet. Indeed, he had a weekly poem appearing in a newspaper back where he was from. So what do I know? What does anyone know about what anyone actually does? Poetry plays a weird role in our society, right? It's both respected and kind of denigrated at the same time, like it's a little bit prissy or whatever, but it's also really impressive when it's done well. And we don't spend a lot of our time these days sitting by the fire in the evening reading poetry to ourselves or to anyone else. But it's also important. It's a distillation of language and imagery and thought into this really kind of elegant, rigorous art form. So today our guest is Elizabeth Alexander, who is a professional poet. In fact, she gained celebrity by being a poet who wrote and read a poem at Barack Obama's inauguration back in 2009. Currently, she's the president of the Andrew Mellon Foundation, so spreading the wealth to other people in the humanities out there. But her new book, 'Signals Across Vast Distances,' is a collection of essays and some artwork illustrations with the theme... One of the themes. There's a lot going on in the book. It's a short book, and this is the skill that a poet has: you can fit a lot into a short book. The theme of what poetry has to offer democracy in particular. So, of course, I became fascinated by this. The idea being that democracy involves people of different types and different values working together to form a society, and poetry and the humanities more broadly can help us talk to other people, understand them, think about ourselves as well as to other people. So I thought that was a fascinating take on the issue because I'm a huge, huge supporter of the humanities and literature and the arts, especially in higher education. And I feel like sometimes I'm not as good as I could be at articulating why it's so important. It's just so obvious to me that I struggle to put it into words to people who might be skeptical. So here's a discussion about the humanities, the arts, poetry in particular. You'll even get a couple of poetry readings along the way. So let's go.

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0:03:59.2 SC: Elizabeth Alexander, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:04:00.7 Elizabeth Alexander: Thank you for inviting me.

0:04:02.5 SC: You know, I was thrilled to see the title of your new book is 'Signals Across Vast Distances,' which apparently is a line from Muriel Rukeyser. Is that right?

0:04:11.2 EA: Rukeyser, yes, yes.

0:04:14.1 SC: Because she is... I'm not super expert at poetry, I know a little bit, but she's one I know in part because she wrote a celebrated biography of Josiah Willard Gibbs, one of the famous American physicists.

0:04:27.2 EA: She sure did. Yes. Yes, yes. I mean, Rukeyser was an absolutely extraordinary person, and I have long loved her poetry, but also her whole life, her curiosities, her bearing witness in the way that she did, that's what is really speaking to me very strongly right now. The way that, for example, when she was 19 years old and a student at Vassar College, she felt that she needed to go south to witness the trial of the Scottsboro boys, who were unjustly accused of rape, and that staying in school was not even a question. She had to go see and write about it. That when in 1936 in Spain, there was a counter-Olympics to the Olympics that Hitler presided over in '36, so she went to see what happened, and while she was there, the Spanish Civil War broke out.

0:05:32.1 SC: Yeah.

0:05:33.4 EA: And she wrote about it. To my own particular converging interests, she went to West Virginia to write about and find out more about the Hawks Nest mine disaster, which was at the time, and perhaps even today, the biggest corporate industrial accident in American history.

0:05:57.0 SC: Okay, I don't know about that one.

0:05:58.7 EA: This was Union Carbide, and they were blasting their way through a tunnel, and they did not provide the workers, most of whom were African-American, with protective equipment. They did a kind of blasting that was not wet blasting.

0:06:17.4 SC: Oh, right.

0:06:17.9 EA: Which is the kind that basically tamps the dust down. So almost everybody who was part of this died of silicosis, which is... I mean, all deaths are terrible, but this, your lungs drown from the silica dust. And so she wrote about that. She called the names of the people who died. She understood that poetry and that writing were ways that many more people could know what happened and that we could be connected in our humanity across human experience, across identities. She went to places that were not where she came from and were not the people she came from. And so sometimes there was, as with the Josiah Willard Gibbs biography, there was that kind of writing. She has another extraordinary prose book called 'The Life of Poetry,' which is kind of a manifesto for living. But then most famously, and I think most beautifully, there are the poems. And the poem from that you note, from which the title of the book came, was one that she wrote in 1967, and it seemed so incredibly resonant to the way that we are thinking about today. I would actually, I would love to read some of it, if I might.

0:07:52.3 SC: Of course. That's always welcome. Yeah.

0:07:54.8 EA: Okay. So it is called "Poem." "I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane. The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories. The news would pour out of various devices, interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen. I would call my friends on other devices. They would be more or less mad for similar reasons. Slowly, I would get to pen and paper, make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day, I would be reminded of those men and women, brave, setting up signals across vast distances, considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values. As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened, we would try to imagine them, try to find each other, to construct peace, to make love, to reconcile waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other, ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means to reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, to let go the means, to wake. I lived in the first century of these wars." And so, I mean, I just think that it speaks absolutely, positively to today, and her directness and her commitment to human connection is something that I really revere in Rukeyser's work.

0:09:39.9 SC: I love the idea of telling us about her life because it's exactly the kind of life that makes me think, "I've tried to be a good person myself, but we all have our pros and cons," and I've never been someone who could pick up stakes, suddenly change my life in order to do the right thing. I've always been someone who... I'm an academic, I'm a professor, like, sorry, I got... On September 1st, I gotta be teaching my class, right? And I love it that there are people like that, like her, who could do that and also be super successful at their day jobs.

0:10:15.9 EA: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think that she was a quester, and again, I don't... She was very of her identity. In another poem of hers that I really love, she says, "To be born a Jew in the 20th century is to be given a gift." And so I've thought about that a lot. But she also didn't believe in any of her deeds that who she was confined her in her affiliations, in her empathies, in her loves, in her curiosities, in her service. And I admire that very much.

0:11:01.9 SC: I read about that poem that it was chosen for inclusion in some books of prayer by Jewish organizations, and she was very surprised at that. She was like, "I am Jewish, but I don't go to the synagogue very often. I never thought of myself that way." But that's what can happen. But I did want to home in on the actual title, 'Signals Across Vast Distances.' I mean, it's impossible for me, I know this is very tawdry, but I can't hear you recite the poem without thinking about podcasting, right? Signals Across Vast Distances for podcast listeners unseen and unknown.

0:11:39.0 EA: Yeah.

0:11:39.9 SC: For your purposes in your collection, what are the signals we're talking about here? What are the distances?

0:11:46.9 EA: Well, you mentioned podcasts, and one of the things I love about the freshness of that poem, again, 1967, that she talks about devices, the news pouring out of various devices. And so I suppose at that time the devices were landline telephone, radio, and television, but most people didn't use that word for those things at that time. So I like the idea that there are ever-expanding ways that we can be connected. And I think that I have always believed that the word is the... It's the flesh. The word is the thing with which we connect, the thing that can move across various media. When I started writing poems in the late 1980s, there was, of course, no internet. So the ways that poems made their way to each other were in books that were usually published in very, very small editions or literary journals or through the poet reading them at a reading. And I would always marvel, it seemed like absolutely sheer magic that a book published in, maybe even only 500, an edition of 500, would nonetheless move in ways that you couldn't anticipate, sometimes hand-to-hand, because I think that that is also very much, as Rukeyser would say, the life of poetry. Something speaks to you and you read it to someone, you give it to someone, you copy it out, you Xerox it out of the book. And so I really like now that with the internet and with social media and with podcasts, poems, which I think are pithy and portable and potent, can move even more than they miraculously always have.

0:13:50.1 SC: And in this book in particular, you give it a very interesting spin in connecting the idea of poetry and the humanities more generally to democracy. And democracy... Well, I'm not gonna put words in your mouth. What comes to mind in your mind when I say the word democracy? How are you thinking about it?

0:14:09.4 EA: Well, in a number of different ways. One of the ways I'm thinking about democracy is that art and the arts and culture, including poetry and including in this book, there are paintings reproduced by different artists, so it's meant to be a book full of the arts, that is democracy itself. It's not an illustration of democracy, that the arts are, in fact, one of the pillars of democracy. The arts... We often talk about protecting free speech with regard to journalism, which is, of course, of paramount importance. But I also think that free speech, that another cornerstone of democracy, is as easily tampered with with our artists...

0:15:04.1 SC: Oh, sure, yeah.

0:15:05.3 EA: With the words, with censorship, with books being banned, with people being increasingly told what they can and cannot teach. And so I think that also there is no national self, there is no freedom movement, there is no collective without the word, without the word to express the ideas of the collective, who the collective is, what does the collective value, what are the voices of society? They take the form of language. And so I think that it is so important that we understand that, again, that poetry and art is not just here to be a flag for values.

0:15:55.3 SC: Right.

0:15:56.2 EA: It is the thing itself. And I think that democracy doesn't stand tall, doesn't flourish, isn't healthy without that being in free and unfettered space.

0:16:12.2 SC: And poetry can be a way of stating of value, but it's also a way of sort of interrogating values and thinking through the challenges that we have of maybe not always agreeing with each other's values.

0:16:27.1 EA: Absolutely. One of the things... I don't teach poetry anymore, but I've taught a lot of poetry in my day. And one of the things that's always really interested me is a real question in a poem, a real argument in a poem, a real turn of thought in a poem, that you start off in one place and then you move with the poem through uncertainty and then turn into conviction and new understanding, all in a very, very concentrated and almost sort of time-lapsed way, because sometimes revelation takes a little bit longer than the time it takes to read a poem. And I think that also the world of creativity is really infinitely capacious and also the safest of places for diversity. The tools it plays with, the stakes, are artistic power and excellence. Can you make a reader see something, feel something, taste something, look at a different angle? That is what the power of the art form, if you're using it well, allows you to do with your readers.

0:17:56.0 SC: You've already read Muriel Rukeyser's poem. Can I give you the opportunity to read a poem of your own, since you are a working poet here too?

0:18:04.8 EA: Yes, I would be happy to. So this poem is called 'Ars Poetica 100, I believe.' And an Ars, A-R-S, Poetica, as many of your listeners, no doubt know, is a poem on the art of writing poetry. And there was a period where I was really excited about writing Ars Poeticas. I kept writing them and writing them and writing them because I thought that as I explored what is the art of writing poetry, that really what I was, I don't know, investigating was the art of living and the arts of different aspects of living, and that the Ars Poetica was a great way of exploring that. So this is Ars Poetica number 100, I believe. "Poetry, I tell my students, is idiosyncratic. Poetry is where we are ourselves. Though Sterling Brown said, 'Every I is a dramatic I, digging in the clam flats for the shell that snaps, emptying the proverbial pocketbook.' Poetry is what you find in the dirt in the corner, over here 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?"

0:20:03.9 SC: And I think that... That was wonderful. Thank you very much. It makes me think, I think I understood everything you said there, but oftentimes poetry has a reputation for being esoteric and hard to understand. I guess. I mean, there's a continuum. Maybe on one hand we have popular songs, which are easy enough to understand. On the other hand, we have literary poetry, which can be, there's more going on, there's levels. And I'm sure if I were given the chance to sit down and read your poem, I would go, "Oh, look, there's something I didn't understand the first time around." But can you say something about sort of the place of poetry in our culture today? Is it what it was? Is it gonna come back? Is it doing okay?

0:20:52.1 EA: Well, yeah. First I wanna address what you said about accessibility of the poem. And I'm happy that that poem was clear. It is, I would say, a clearer and more straightforward of my poems, although I do think the poet's responsibility is to a clarity that, even if it takes time, is absolutely pristine. Right? I mean, I think that the poem has to be very deliberate in what it means and what it is doing and what it is trying to get across. And yet, with a poem that might be understandable on first reading, you always want them to be something that you would return to, something that would reward on subsequent... I mean, I think that's really one of the tests of a poem. If you would only read it once, then it's not very good. It should be something that you can find more and more and more as you go through it. And so that is the great wrestle and the challenge and the hard part and the great part about writing poems. I also think that poems are places for the wonders of language. So while I would never use a word to be unclear on purpose, I also think that words are astonishing. And where, if not in poems, can... That's where the wonders of language belong. And there are some poems that you might read or hear straight through and you got it, and others, and I say this as a reader of poems, where you have to look something up. Nothing wrong with that.

0:22:51.1 SC: Yeah.

0:22:51.9 EA: Where you have to learn something. Nothing wrong with that. Where you have to think, "Oh, this is a word that has multiple meanings. Let me play with, turn it over, see what it might mean. Let it be an object of some meditation, of contemplation, of study." I think all of that, the time of engagement that a small poem can create, I think is pretty miraculous, actually. And what I like in the poem that I just read to you, and what I sort of remember, I wrote it a long time ago, but being surprised myself of coming to the ending and that money question: Are we not of interest to each other? Are we not of interest to each other? Am I not interested in you? Am I not interested in my neighbor? Am I not interested in someone I don't know? Signals across vast distances, right?

0:23:57.0 SC: Right.

0:23:57.8 EA: I mean, where are we if we cannot be in a healthy way curious about each other with the desire to find points of understanding and connection? To... Go ahead, please.

0:24:15.7 SC: I was just gonna say I love this issue of taking time to think things through and come to an understanding. Look, I write nonfiction books about physics. And I'm constantly struggling and there's a room for pluralism here. Some people want to just give a good impression, a warm feeling, like a whiz-bang, "Isn't the universe cool?" And that's very important and I love it. And I'm challenging my readers a little bit and I'm hoping that they will sometimes take the time to realize, like, "Oh, I gotta... This isn't what I'm used to. I gotta think it through." And I just sometimes I wonder whether or not that's becoming a lost value in our culture.

0:25:02.5 EA: Well, I hope not, but I do think it is certainly a value that needs to be protected and articulated because I think we can do our exercises and become stronger and mightier physical beings, but there's a limit to how much the human body can speed up. There is a limit to even the most nimble brain, how fast it can move. And I think that what we also... Well, you would understand, have a better way of understanding this as a scientist, but the kind of homeostasis that comes from different paces and different cycles, right? I just don't think there's any getting around that.

0:25:56.5 SC: Can you just maybe pretend that we're in a seminar room a little bit for the moment and talk about the idea of close reading, of really not just skimming and getting the gist of something, but paying attention to every word, every choice, what it might mean, that process of discovery as we go deeper and deeper into the poem?

0:26:16.7 EA: Yeah, close reading is exhilarating. [chuckle] And in my new book, in 'Signals Across Vast Distances,' I use that method, which is the method of my three decades of university teaching, to talk about James Baldwin, about Gwendolyn Brooks, about June Jordan, about Rukeyser herself, to say, "Okay, now let's take the second read and let's look at the word choice and let's look at the line breaks and let's look at the spaces and let's hear it as music and let's think about an analog word that the writer didn't choose." And so we can better understand the word that the writer did choose. We talked about in the Rukeyser poem, the word "devices." You can also see there is a velocity in the poem towards the end that takes the self back to the self. If I go back to the poem, and this is a long seven-line sentence that is basically almost half of the whole poem: "As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened, we would try to imagine them, try to find each other, to construct peace, to make love, to reconcile waking with sleeping, ourself with each other, ourself with ourselves. We would try by any means to reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves." So I think we need to think about also the repetition of the word "ourselves" until it becomes almost... We're almost defamiliarized with it, right? What is "ourselves"? The whole poem is asking that question. It speaks from the self, but who is "ourselves"? Who are we connecting with? Who are the people, as she says, "unseen and unborn"?

0:28:28.4 EA: And ultimately, again, what a close read of this poem yields is that it's really important for us to understand that the writer is making poems, I'm just looking here, for, "Slowly I would get to pen and paper, make poems for others unseen and unborn." So poems are... That's the form she has, that's the tool she has, that's the gift she has, that's the weapon she has, right? And so she doesn't know, and this is really just a true thing that's so extraordinary about when you write a poem or when you write a book, you have no control once it's born. You have no control over where it goes. You can't see where it goes. And it goes extraordinary places. I mean, from my decades and decades as a writer, one of the tremendous rewards is you might imagine a reader, but that's just foolish.

0:29:41.3 SC: Oh, yeah. [chuckle]

0:29:43.5 EA: Because there's no... You just don't know. You cannot know. And again, if we just think of ourselves as readers and our own eclectic tastes, go figure, right? But what I like in the grandeur of Rukeyser as well, her poem is quite plainspoken, but it has a grandeur to it because she says she's writing for people who are unborn. She believes she's making something that will last. And I think that that takes us to the question of what are the traces we leave behind? What is our history? What are the forms it takes? Poetry is one of the ways that our history, our very existence, can be made material in a way that people for countless generations can find. And though sometimes many will try to keep us from finding our way to those traces, I believe, and this is spoken with great seriousness in a time in American history when history is being erased.

0:30:58.0 SC: Yeah.

0:30:59.5 EA: Nonetheless, I think there is tremendous valiance or valiantness. It is valiant.

0:31:08.7 SC: Right. Good.

0:31:10.1 EA: The way a poet like Rukeyser is saying, like, "Here is a breadcrumb. I'm leaving this. I know I won't always be here. I'm trying to leave this that says, 'This is what happened. This is who we are.'"

0:31:22.1 SC: Are there ways other than the obvious practice to become better at close reading and seeing these connotations and implications in a poem that we might miss on a first casual glance?

0:31:41.3 EA: Well, I think it's a... It is a method like any other. It is a practice like any other. It can be taught. It can be taught to anybody. And it's a really, really wonderful tool. I mean, another word for it might be critical thinking. And it's useful, not just poems. It's useful with the newspaper. It's useful in reading the propaganda in the world around us. And sometimes that's propaganda from on high, and sometimes that's the propaganda of advertising or very, very strong culture. It's good to understand how you're being worked on. And close reading helps make that very clear, helps you look at the structures and the power of words and language that can be used in some cases to manipulate and for bad reasons, but I think in the cases of good poems, to be as rich and complex as human beings ourselves are, very rich and complex and, to quote Walt Whitman, containing multitudes. So I think it's good. And anyone in a community college or in any kind of... There is always an English class available wherever you are. But I also think that to do it without the benefit of a class, to read poems sometimes in groups or even with someone, to really talk about them, to really... I've found that over the years, sometimes people are, especially in the States, sometimes a little nervous about poetry.

0:33:37.6 SC: Oh, yeah.

0:33:37.9 EA: They think that they are not supposed to understand it, that it's trying to keep them out. And I say, "Put your shoulders down. Let's just read it again. Let's not read it on the page. Let's read it out loud. Now you read it to me." You will hear different things every time. I mean, it's really... It's like a, it's a party trick.

0:34:01.9 SC: Yeah.

0:34:02.8 EA: If you read that poem back to me, and I know that poem intimately, I would hear something I hadn't heard before because it's that big and yielding, right? So I think that just like reading poems out loud and together and treating them as things that are meant to be aerated and contemplated and wrestled with and turned different ways in the light, that's close reading, too.

0:34:38.8 SC: At the risk of giving into the temptation of overly facile cultural commentary, do we need this more than ever right now? Because attention spans are degrading and we're all spending time looking at our phones. I mean, I'm on social media. I've seen many, many times people don't have the patience even to read an entire tweet before reacting to it.

0:34:59.7 EA: I know. I know.

0:35:00.7 SC: So do you think of maybe this is a little bit of exercise that we need to be more intentional about than we did 100 years ago?

0:35:11.5 EA: Well, I mean, I think certainly. And I think one of the challenges is... Information is good, curiosity is good, voraciousness is good. Taking in a lot is good, but we can't take it all in. And also, all things are not created equal, right?

0:35:28.1 SC: Yeah.

0:35:33.7 EA: So, yeah, I think also one of the... Because poetry is akin to music and because poetry is related to the human breath, there are some poets who believe that iambic pentameter, a beat, a line, da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da. "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun." Da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da, da-da. You know, ten syllables, five beats. Many poets believe that that is a kind of organic unit of breath, of utterance, that that's about the amount, if you will, that might be spoken out with an idea in it, with a thing in it, if you will. And so I think that if we really, really understand how poetry comes from the human body, comes from breath, attempts to make music, music of different kinds, it can have a meditativeness to it when you understand that relationship to breath. And when you read something again, you know that experience when you're reading a poem and the line break isn't the sentence break.

0:36:59.2 SC: Yep.

0:37:00.4 EA: So you have to look ahead. Or maybe there might be... Maybe the poet's done something clever, which is that maybe that word at the end of the line can have one meaning, but then another meaning when you understand where it's going, right? All of that is breathwork. And I think that... I do believe there is a way that we can access and experience meaning with a particular depth when we're aware that we are in a rhythm, in song, in something that has been made in a pattern that is related to how we speak and breathe.

0:37:53.5 SC: It makes me want to found a school of martial arts where we combine yoga and poetry reading and...

0:37:59.5 EA: Listen, I think that would be great. Or if you look, like the poet Mary Oliver, many, many poets, but she talked about walking and writing, and how pace, how walking would set the metronome of the line for her. That as she walked in her daily walks, then the line would start to form itself with her pace, which I think is pretty cool. And I certainly... I mean, you talk about yoga or walking as a form of moving meditation, and a cool thing does happen, which is when you walk, your thoughts start to settle into clarity. I mean, I think that's true even if you're not trying to write.

0:38:59.1 SC: Oh yeah, sure.

0:39:00.6 EA: But if you just have something on your mind, what do you have on your mind? Sometimes you don't know when the walk starts, but then the pace captures it. So, yes, make that school. I will teach there, and I will study there.

[laughter]

0:39:21.0 SC: Maybe, yeah, maybe Tai Chi is better than yoga. I'm not quite sure. I gotta think about this. It's a new idea. But, you know, look, as a physicalist about consciousness, the brain, I think, is part of the body. Of course, they're closely related to each other. So I think this does make sense. But I did want to reconnect with the democracy angle here. One of the things you talk about in the book is the idea that perhaps poetry can help us empathize, can help us think about other people, other ways. I mean, I do know... I try to recognize my own limitations. I am a writer of nonfiction, and when I contemplate writing fiction, one of the biggest barriers is that I don't think I'd be good at expressing people who are very different than myself. [chuckle] But maybe poetry is a way to become better at that.

0:40:11.4 EA: Well, I think, different strokes, right? Different strokes. And I think that even when in poetry, if you're writing about something that is not your lived experience, you're still writing it from your perspective, even if the poem doesn't say that. So the self is always there.

0:40:34.4 SC: Yeah.

0:40:37.4 EA: But the self is there, hopefully trying to carry something, shuttle something human between human vessels, right? And I think, again, to the democracy question, one of the things that I have been thinking about over the last few years when I look at poems that are about history in some kind of way, and it may be official history, the history of places that we might know about otherwise, or it could be buried history or the history of a people or a family or a community, I think that poems often keep those histories safe and tell them in a way that is really, really important to understanding the multivocality of democracy and understanding that, looking at the United States, there are so many different experiences, there are so many different histories. It is such an extraordinary place. And part of what makes it so extraordinary is that people from all over the world have made this place what it is. And so I think that... I don't say democracy without saying multivocal democracy, multicultural democracy, tolerant democracy. That's really the harder part, but the most essential part is how are we gonna understand and make space for the many, many different experiences, non-sovereign, that make this country.

0:42:37.1 SC: Well, I think there's a line, I think it's in your book, about listening across differences that might be somewhere in the press release or something like that. But I sometimes worry about democracy. I'm a huge defender of it. There's no better system. But is it overly utopian to hope that we can all come together and not try to just homogenize everybody, but admit that we are a little bit different and nevertheless live together with those differences? Is this something you think that really, when we're being super honest with ourselves, poetry or the humanities more broadly can help us with?

0:43:18.3 EA: Well, first of all, I mean, I think it has to be the goal. So if we're gonna call it utopian, then so be it. But I don't think anything an iota short of that is actually acceptable for something to strive for. We won't always reach it, but I think that we can't hope for anything less than that because anything less than that means some people are valued less than others, and obviously that's not okay. I think that, first of all, the arts in general are a vehicle for people to come together and experience something together and puzzle over something together. And that puzzling over could be in a classroom, it could be in a museum, it could be on a street corner where there's a monument or a piece of public art. I think that the experience of art together and experiencing art together and experiencing culture together is a wonderfully binding aspect of our society, even if people... So much the better if people see it in different ways. I also think, particularly to poetry and to language, the way that it models the importance of precision, not in a prissy kind of way, but that actually being precise and naming things precisely and saying what we mean and saying who we are and hearing and receiving that is very, very important. One of the most potent weapons of anti-democracy is misnaming of people. Right? Misnaming people. You know that vernacular expression, calling people out of their names. Right? Invective. We're seeing much too much of it. We're seeing it from the highest levels of government today, flattening people, calling them horrible names, characterizing the deeds of an entire people in a negative way. That is an abuse of language that is used to harm and divide. And so I think that it's important to call out the opposite of what we're aspiring to.

0:46:07.8 SC: I wonder if also...

0:46:08.3 EA: It has real consequences.

0:46:10.0 SC: Sorry, go ahead.

0:46:11.7 EA: It has real consequences.

0:46:14.3 SC: Yeah, no, absolutely. And you're right, we're seeing it. I think we don't even need to go into details because everyone knows that we're seeing it. They're being bombarded by it all the time. I do wonder, on the flip side, I think when people talk about democracy, when people are doing the work of democracy, they often think of it as persuading other people to agree with them, less about listening to what other people are saying. And I'm wondering if thinking rigorously about things like poetry and literature and the humanities can help on that side as well, actually trying to have a conversation that is two-way rather than just one.

0:47:03.1 EA: Yeah, look, I mean, I think there can be the aim to persuade that is not in any way counter to listening. Right? I mean, and again, I think we owe it to each other to make the best argument possible, to state the thing clearly or just to speak the truth, really. It's as simple as that. This is what I see. This is how I feel. This is what the world looks like from where I sit. This is what I know. This is really what I know. This is what I know to be untrue. I think that there is tremendous power there that to me is part of listening and reciprocity.

0:47:58.3 SC: I did want to ask about, there are sections in your book that confront tragedy and other sources of uncertainty in life, and you try to make the case that poetry and writing can help here. Your husband, Fikre, passed away tragically a few years ago, and you write about that and it's really compelling and moving. And I have friends who are writers who have struggled writing about their tragedies. They don't want to deal with that. It's too much. And I'm wondering if you had a feeling about that sort of too-muchness versus, oh, actually, it's really helpful to think this through carefully and put it into words.

0:48:41.1 EA: Yeah, I was really, honestly, very surprised to find myself in the writing here. He passed away now 14 years ago, and I wrote a memoir about that time pretty shortly after he died, which was shocking to me. I mean, I just absolutely never would have thought that I would write it, that I would share it, that I would... So it really was... It just came to me as a way to feel grounded and to know what I was experiencing, because it was so overwhelming and so unprecedented that bringing some things into language just helped me name what I was feeling. And so now, writing about him years later and writing about his passing and also writing about his life, it lives with me in a different way as a good responsibility that this extraordinary person who was my person, who lived such a brave and extraordinary and beautiful life, that it was part of my responsibility to tell aspects of his story. He was a chef and a painter, most primarily. He did write very beautifully, actually, but he wasn't a writer. And he left behind many, many... Hundreds and hundreds of paintings that are in museums and galleries and shown now, which is a really wonderful thing. But I think sometimes we're just given material by our lives and it's like a responsibility. And that's how I feel about that. I hope I'm not wringing it out.

0:50:56.3 SC: No, no. You're not.

0:50:58.2 EA: But on the other hand, new aspects of this extraordinary, extraordinary life and experience with this person and learning in the wake of his untimely death, I just keep learning, so.

0:51:14.9 SC: And he did have this fantastic life, including being an immigrant, a refugee, which is also something that you take advantage of in terms of using poetry, using... I keep saying poetry, but, in my mind, there's a slippery slope between just poetry and really careful prose, right? Where you're really thinking through things very carefully. It's a good example, a worked example, of thinking through what other people's lives are like. It's just so different.

0:51:46.2 EA: Yeah. Well, I hope that in this book, which is not a book of poems, it's... I call it Essays and Tales. And I hope that it is good poet's prose, which is to say all of that economy that we have to pay so much attention to in making a poem, that I brought it to the prose. That is certainly my hope.

0:52:15.8 SC: Sorry, is the difference... I mean, the poem is as distilled as it can get, right? Every word carries weight, et cetera. And prose is a little floppier, right? We have a little bit more excess baggage floating around and sometimes...

0:52:31.2 EA: No excess for me, I hope.

0:52:33.3 SC: No excess. [chuckle]

0:52:33.7 EA: Never, never. I mean, and I think, look, I think also the challenge of the poem is how to be absolutely economical but not arid, not desiccated, not fleshless.

0:52:43.9 SC: Right.

0:52:46.1 EA: So to still have a feeling of just it's sitting exactly where it needs to. It has body, it has weight. And so I hope to have that same precision, but maybe in prose you don't necessarily have to always apply so much economy. But I think more, I guess the way I'd put it is you have the unit of the sentence and the paragraph to work with in prose, and you're making a different arc of argument over a different amount of space. And also you're inviting a different kind of reading.

0:53:36.0 SC: Sure.

0:53:36.8 EA: I hope that this book... And part of why I also feel really excited about the art that's included as a real part of the manuscript, so not just as illustrations of the essays, but rather in a conversation, I hope that people can read this book a lot of different ways. And one of them would be a bite at a time, an essay or tale at a time, or you might take it straight through, but it's a little bit more than you would take to read a poem. So you're entering a different world of logic. But I think it's the poet in me that would like to think that it's still bite-sized.

0:54:26.3 SC: I remember once when I was relatively young, probably an undergraduate, reading a definition of poetry. I forget what it was, but it focused on the idea of imagery and metaphor, and it didn't mention anything about lines or rhythm or anything like that. And I was just shocked. Like, aren't poems about lines and beats and measures? Because you could use imagery in prose, right? What is your definition of poetry, I guess is what I'm getting at.

0:55:00.1 EA: Yeah, no, I think the line is the primary unit. And there are prose poems, I've written some of them myself, where the line break is not the same. You choose not to use that tool in the same way that you do in other poems. But the line, and also literally space and time, is something that a poem is really trying, aspiring to be able to create and control a little bit.

0:55:37.3 SC: The time of the reader going through it. I mean, you wouldn't read the first half of a poem and then put it away and then come back the next day and read the second half. If it's a relatively short poem, you gotta get to the end, I think.

0:55:49.2 EA: I think so. Unless it's the Odyssey.

[laughter]

0:55:55.3 SC: There are long ones. The Changing Light at Sandover.

[overlapping conversation]

0:55:58.3 EA: Although, I mean, but the Odyssey, of course, that's like shape by shape by shape by shape. I mean, that's not just one continuous thing.

0:56:05.7 SC: You divide it up, right? There are cantos in the Divine Comedy, et cetera. I mean, I just want to ask a little bit about the process of your poetry writing. I hesitate to ask the cliched question of where do you get your ideas, but for a poem, what comes first? Is it an image, a phrase, a form?

0:56:29.0 EA: Well, with poems... And I would say the same, I mean, this present book is not a book of poems, and I haven't published a book of poems for a while, but quite similarly, actually, a phrase, a word, an image, something that is not, "I want to write an essay about," "I want to write a poem about," but rather the thing itself. Sometimes mysterious, sometimes it's an image, I don't really know why it's rattling around in there. I don't know why. Keep track of it. Keep track of it. Keep track of it. I have a day job, as almost all poets do. So where do you keep the note when you're in the middle of doing other things? Because sometimes that language or those ideas can come in the middle of many other things.

0:57:30.4 SC: Right.

0:57:34.1 EA: But so just to capture it, and then those scraps accrue, and then when there is, at least this for me, when I can make some time to sit down with the scraps and say, "What do I... What do I want to... What feels a little bit vibrating? What feels like it's alive? What feels like if I copy it out again, that more will... That I'll keep going?" And there's that trial and error, but that's the process of trying to animate the scraps.

0:58:14.5 SC: I guess that's what I was gonna get at next. I mean, to write a poem, how much do you write and then throw away?

0:58:20.6 EA: Most. Most.

0:58:26.6 SC: Because different writers have very different styles, I know, yeah.

0:58:29.6 EA: Yeah. I think, though, I think most... I think most serious writers, I'm almost certain, throw away many times more than they keep. And that's what takes a little bit of courage, to keep writing and to write things that, umh, they're not right, they don't sound right, you're not satisfied. You keep going. You keep going. "It's not pretty. It's okay. It's not right." I mean, but you keep going and you keep going and you keep going. And I think it's actually a very exhilarating thing to get, for me, to get to the point of editing, because once the main... The beast is there, you kind of can see its outlines, you know you've got most of the stuff, then the polishing and the cleaning. And sometimes in the editorial process, you find very hard things. It's like, "Oh my God, there's only one line that I want to keep here." And so you keep going back. But I find that process to be so hard and satisfying like nothing else.

0:59:55.6 SC: And not to bring the room down a little bit, but I want to hear a little bit about the day job, too, because I think it is kind of relevant to our present moment.

1:00:05.6 EA: Yeah, well, the day job actually brings the room up, I think. [chuckle] So, I have the privilege of leading the Mellon Foundation, and we are the nation's largest funders in arts, culture, humanities, and higher ed, libraries, archives, a whole monuments project. And the work of our grantees is so beautiful and fascinating and powerful. I mean, it's story upon story of people doing extraordinary things.

1:00:45.2 EA: And so to be able to learn about what folks are doing and to be as helpful as we can makes me feel purposeful every day, like I can be helpful every day, and like with my colleagues, we're on a mission.

1:01:07.1 SC: It is a good feeling. I've been heavily involved with the Guggenheim Foundation over the years.

1:01:10.5 EA: Yes. Oh, wonderful.

1:01:13.9 SC: On the committee of selection. And Eddie Hirsch, who is our boss...

1:01:18.1 EA: Oh, he's my darling friend. I adore him.

1:01:20.5 SC: He's a great guy. He gave a speech, they had the 150th anniversary, I forget, maybe it was the 100th anniversary, and he gave a speech about the importance. Like, it's always nice to give money to people doing good things, and it's always been important, and now it's more important than ever. And I don't think there was a dry eye in the house because everyone got the feeling of the mission, like we have to find ways to support this kind of work.

1:01:46.0 EA: Well, yeah. And I mean, Eddie Hirsch is a person... He is an extraordinary poet, he is a profound scholar and prose writer, and he is a person of tremendous and broad, broad, broad humanity himself. And when I started this job eight and a half years ago, we had a martini to talk about poets as leaders. You know, they think we're up in the clouds.

1:02:17.6 SC: Love it.

1:02:18.5 EA: They think we can't do stuff. But we can do stuff.

1:02:21.8 SC: And in the world of the stuff that needs to be done, I mean, you've already mentioned that we need to stand up for free speech, we need to stand up for the humanities and the idea of the university. I mean, I struggle to find the exact way to articulate this, but I worry so much that our vision of education, and higher education in particular, has become so economic and so goal-oriented. We're going to teach people to do their jobs and make a productive economy, and poetry maybe doesn't help that much. But to me, the poetry, the literature, the history is at the heart of the collegiate liberal arts education. I'm just trying to figure out ways to get that message across in a way that seems sincere and not just cringey.

1:03:12.4 EA: No, I mean, just... You just keep doing it. I mean, I think that one of the things that we know about the humanities, actually, it's easy to think of them as non-lucrative or what job do they lead to, but we actually know that the ability, and we've talked about this, to be a good critical thinker, to be a good close reader, to be able to glean meaning from complicated texts, the ability to communicate persuasively, the ability to imagine the life of someone else, the ability to understand multi-culture. I mean, these are really, really, very, very crucial skills that are useful in any number of things that someone could go on to do. And I think that we should be worried not only about the humanities, but even more, I think we should be worried about the attacks on higher education itself, on universities themselves, on the meddling in universities' missions. I mean, that doesn't mean that there are not serious issues about the cost of higher education that really, really do need to be addressed, but there ain't all that much that's broke about the learning. So we need to understand why it is that so many people are trying to tamper with the thing itself and also suggest that it is not a thing of value.

1:04:50.4 SC: Yeah.

1:04:52.9 EA: Because I think that creating an undereducated populace has other aims. And that's what we need to understand very, very, very, very clearly and fight against.

1:05:07.3 SC: Couldn't agree more. And maybe as the last question, it's not even a question, I will read a quote that I found in your book and then let you riff on it a little bit from Tracie D. Hall. I don't know if you know the quote already, but it's...

1:05:18.9 EA: Yes. "Free people read freely."

1:05:20.0 SC: "Free people read freely," which I just love.

1:05:23.2 EA: Yes.

1:05:24.0 SC: And it's almost a cliche. It's one of these cliches that no one really believes, right? People think that, well, they should read the proper stuff, but no, they should read freely. That's a real demand that it takes work to give into.

1:05:42.3 EA: Well, I mean, Tracie, who is poet, librarian, leader, extraordinary person, she said it so well. And I just borrow it and quote it all the time. And I would say from the African-American tradition and understanding literacy denied and withheld, understanding that controlling literacy, making it a crime as it was during slavery, not only to learn to read or write, but for someone to teach you to read or write, that could be a free white person teaching a black person to read and write was also criminal activity. We cannot forget, in "free people read freely" is also "free people read." If you cannot read, and let's let reading stand in for if you cannot be exposed to vast information, you cannot make sense of your life, you cannot have the agency you need to be able to understand how larger forces are working on you. And why would learning and reading be interfered with? Why would books be banned? What does it mean to take knowledge and learning away from people? I see it as having one fundamental purpose. When literacy is denied, you think you can control them.

1:07:22.8 SC: Yeah.

1:07:23.2 EA: And so I take it as seriously as that. And so I think it's just really, really important for us to assert that free people read freely.

1:07:35.1 SC: One of the reasons I love the phrase is that it's just four words, but already that last word, "freely," is kind of doing double duty. It means without restraint or constraint from the outside, but it also means, on your side, you better read lots of different kinds of things, right? Freely around the spectrum.

1:07:53.6 EA: That's right. Exactly. Exactly.

1:07:54.1 SC: I hope people freely read your books and many, many others. It was a great pleasure. Elizabeth Alexander, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast.

1:08:01.5 EA: Thank you. This was really, really a pleasure. Thank you.

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