368 | Elizabeth Alexander on Why Democracy Needs Imagination

Sean Carroll (0:00)

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. You know, it's fine if everyone at the table is just playing quietly, that's okay. Sometimes there are drunk slash 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. You know, he was like middle-aged, heavyset, bald head, and very voluble. You know, 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 I 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. Someone else happily did ask him, so like, what kind of writing do you do? And he said, poetry.

He's a professional poet. Indeed, he had like a weekly poem appearing in a newspaper back where he was from. So, you know, 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, you know, 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 times these days sitting by the fire in the evening reading poetry to ourselves or to anyone else. But it's also important, you know, 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 communities 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, a lot going on in the book, is a short book and, you know, 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 in 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, you know, 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 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.

Elizabeth Alexander, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

Elizabeth Alexander (4:01)

Thank you for inviting me.

Sean Carroll (4:02)

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?

Elizabeth Alexander (4:11)

Rukeyser, yes, yes.

Sean Carroll (4:13)

Because she is, I'm not super expert at poetry, you know, 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. Yeah.

Elizabeth Alexander (4:28)

Yes, yes. I mean, Rukeyser was an absolutely extraordinary person, and I have long loved her poetry, but also kind of 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.