Elizabeth Alexander, inaugural poet

From The Guardian:

Barack Obama, perhaps the most literary president-elect of recent years, has chosen his friend, the poet Elizabeth Alexander, to read at his inauguration on 20 January.

Obama had been spotted carrying what appeared to be a book of the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott’s poetry last month, but it is Alexander, a professor of African American studies at Yale University, who will compose a poem to be read at his swearing in as president. She will perform alongside Aretha Franklin, Itzak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma. The participants were chosen based on requests from Obama and from vice-president-elect Joe Biden.

Alexander, who has published four collections of poems, most recently the 2005 Pulitzer prize finalist American Sublime, will be only the fourth poet to have read at a presidential inauguration. A tradition eschewed by current incumbent George W Bush, Bill Clinton invited poets to both of his inaugurations, with Miller Williams reading in 1997, and Maya Angelou in 1993. The only other poet to have read at an inauguration was Robert Frost, who recited The Gift Outright for John F Kennedy in 1961.

. . .

She said the challenge would be to write a poem which “speaks to the occasion [and] has its own integrity”. “But it’s a good challenge”, she added. “It’s the balance between listening to the muse and speaking to many many people.” A personal friend of the Obama family, Alexander said the friendship made the opportunity “all the sweeter”.

She will be contending with the spectres of Angelou’s On the Pulse of Morning (“today I call you to my riverside, / If you will study war no more”), Williams’s Of History and Hope (“We have memorized America, / how it was born and who we have been and where”) and Frost’s The Gift Outright (“Summoning artists to participate / In the august occasions of the state / Seems something artists ought to celebrate. / Today is for my cause a day of days. / And his be poetry’s old-fashioned praise / Who was the first to think of such a thing.”).

“A lot of her poems explore the history of slavery, civil rights and women’s rights,” said Alexander’s UK editor Neil Astley at Bloodaxe Books. “She’s very much someone who’s engaged with issues such as race, gender and politics, which she invokes in a compelling way as a poet.”

Click through to the article to read Alexander’s poem “Ars Poetica # 100,” a poem that I like quite well.

Another article at the Washington Post.

AND a wider sampling of Alexander’s poems at her website with some audio files.

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