Literature and Life

Brian Lehrer (0:10)

Brian Lehrer on WNYC. You may know our next guest, Elizabeth Alexander, because you've heard her on this show before, talking about her essay, The Trayvon Generation, or the work she's doing to support artists and jazz musicians as the president of The Mellon Foundation, which is the biggest funder of the arts in the country, at the philanthropy level, or maybe you remember when she read her poem, Praise Song for the Day at President Obama's first inauguration in 2009, joining the ranks of distinguished poets like Robert Frost, Maya Angelou, and others who've read at inaugurations, or maybe you read about her in Time Magazine in 2022, when she was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world for her leadership in the arts. Well, Elizabeth Alexander has a new book that came out last week called Signals Across a Vast Distance that explores the roles of art and literature and helping to make sense of our political realities. It's part memoir, part manifesto, we might say, part close reading of poetry. And we'll get into all of that in a minute, but I'll first mention that if you want to see her live, she's going to be speaking at an event tonight at the main branch of the New York Public Library at 7 o'clock. Tickets are sold out, but you can find tickets to live stream it at nypl.org.

Elizabeth, always great to have you with us. Welcome back to WNYC.

Elizabeth Alexander (1:37)

Thank you, Brian. I love when we get to have our conversations.

Brian Lehrer (1:40)

Me too.

You agreed to read something. Because there's so much writing in this book that, as I said in the break leading up to the segment is, you know, the things that you consider among the most profound things you've ever read. And one of them at the start of the book was something written by Muriel Rukeyser in 1967 It's just called Poem. But in parentheses, I lived in the first century of world wars. Do you want to dive in or do you want to set it up?

Elizabeth Alexander (2:17)

Let's dive in and think about how this is, I think, a touchstone for us today, even though she wrote it in 1967 Poem. I lived in the first century of world wars.

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. The great Muriel Rukeyser.

Brian Lehrer (3:52)

So that's the first poem you write about in the book. It has the title of your book in there, Signals Across a Vast Distance. Why did that strike you as the perfect poem to set up the rest of the book?

Elizabeth Alexander (4:05)

Well, this is a book that I've been writing over many years, and I've been writing it alongside the work I've been doing in the Mellon Foundation and also as we have all lived through what I think we would agree is a very turbulent time in this country. And so in gathering my colleagues together during the COVID pandemic, when we would gather on Zoom, I would often share poems, and this was one that I think really named what it is to feel, as she says, more or less insane, but the enduring need to connect. And it affirmed for me a faith that our words, whether they're words that we speak or words for those of us who, who make words in poems or in other forms of writing, that they can connect us and give us not necessarily solace because I think sometimes words are about calling us to action and calling us together. I mean, Rukeyser also asked this grand question, what three things can never be done? Forget, keep silent, stand alone. So, you know, I, I think she offers us tools for living and in her life, I mean, she was a very, very committed activist and witness to many, many things and different kinds of people and their struggles.