Podcast #106: Elizabeth Alexander and Hilton Als on Dreams and Obsession

By Tracy O'Neill, Social Media Curator
April 5, 2016

Elizabeth Alexander and Hilton Als are two of the great minds in American intellectual life today. Alexander is a poet, essayist, and scholar perhaps best known for reading her poem "Praise Song for the Day" at the inauguration of President Barack Obama. Her latest work is a memoir, The Light of the World. Als, theater critic of the New Yorker and author of White Girls, joined Alexander for a LIVE from the NYPL event recently. For this week's episode of the New York Public Library Podcast, we're proud to present Alexander and Als discussing poetry, journalism, and genre.

Elizabeth Alexander and Hilton Als

Elizabeth Alexander and Hilton Als

Als recalled an event at which he watched Alexander read an Elizabeth Bishop poem called "In the Waiting Room" at Cooper Union. Alexander spoke about revisiting poems, in particular those in Bishop's Geography III:

"I love Elizabeth Bishop, she’s one of my favorite poets, and I think that one of the—the interesting thing about living with certain poems over time and revisiting them and going back and understanding or being interested in different things as your own life changes is that great poetry will continue to reveal those different things to you and allow you to—like, I have a real relationship with this poem because when I first read it, my grandmother, she didn’t read a lot of modern poetry, but she had a copy of Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III that was one of—and she had a beautiful little perfect bookshelf in her little beautiful tiny studio apartment near the United Nations and when I would go and visit her, which I did often, I would read her books over and over again and this Elizabeth Bishop was one of the books she had. I’m not quite sure why. She had Countee Cullen, she had classic black poetry, she had Shakespeare, but she had this Elizabeth Bishop. I remember as a child being compelled and a little embarrassed and fascinated and not having words for what I was feeling, and then at different points revisiting the poem I had more words."

Alexander has, as an artist, developed a sophisticated view of genre. While she noted her interest in genre in her work as an academic, she also has found a sense of artistic freedom in working across these genre lines:

"[T]hough I as a professor and a scholar am incredibly interested in genre, I’m interested and wrote a whole dissertation on collage and hybrid genres in, you know, black women’s creativity, I think that the properties of genres are very, very—or genre—are very, very important. I think that young writers need to understand what they are writing into and against both historically and also formally. It’s very, very, very important but right now what I’m feeling is that to police those borders too avidly is sometimes fundamentally anti-creative, and that, you know, if to discover that I can feel a word and then a phrase and then some music coming up out of my viscera in the way that it does in poetry but that it then builds into something that is prose, but its own kind of prose, was thrilling and it made me feel that I could make so much more. It made me feel that I could keep working. It made me feel that I was a real artist more than I ever felt that in my whole life."

Alexander briefly worked as a journalist at the Washinton Post. She regards the professional experience as having helped her become a braver person.

"I love journalists, and when I, my little period working as a journalist, I felt that it made me much braver, you know, it gave me a reason to go talk to people that I didn’t know and to explore the city where I grew up but to places where I hadn’t been, because they’d send me, you know, to Lorton Reformatory to write a story about something that was happening there, they’d send me to wherever I went, I went and I had a reason to be there, and so I couldn’t be shy and that was a really, really great thing, but what I realized was, I mean, it’s really true. I felt the will to embellish. I felt that I could see the line. And this was very serious business because it was the Washington Post, I arrived shortly after Janet Cooke unceremoniously left, and this was an amazing story of a black woman journalist who made up a whole story about you know an eight-year-old who was on heroin and so forth, and it turned out. And I don’t know, maybe I need to write about that one day because this is still one of the most stomach-churning, dramatic tales of negressitude I have ever heard, right up to the fake résumé and when the story falls apart then on her résumé it says she speaks French and Ben Bradlee comes up to her and says, “[fake French]” and she can’t answer because she doesn’t speak French, but she’s put it on her résumé that she does. Like this in the newsroom he unravels her, but she’s unraveled herself. Lord have mercy."

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