Poet and Mellon Foundation President Elizabeth Alexander’s New Book Examines How Art Can Bridge Distances

SPEAKER_2 (0:03)

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Alexis Madrigal (0:24)

Welcome to Forum, I'm Alexis Madrigal. What is it that poets do? In her new book Signals Across Vast Distances, Elizabeth Alexander provides a few answers. She writes, quote, to me, being a poet not only means making poems, it also means being attuned and reverent to the power of distilled precise words in the form of poems, but also as carriers of souls. Here is my essential self in these words, bone true.

This is a poet's book of essays. It takes the form not of a pile of evidence, but an arrangement of different types of true things. It speaks to our moment, this strange self-contradictory moment from different angles, drawing power by its movement across terrains.

Elizabeth Alexander joins us this morning. She is in her adjacent life, the president of the Mellon Foundation. Welcome.

Elizabeth Alexander (1:17)

I'm really glad to be here.

Alexis Madrigal (1:18)

Yeah, great to have you.

This new book goes deep in a few different directions. One of them is how art ends up shaping individuals in our society. Do you think given all the other sources of content and media that exist, do you think art shapes people in the same ways that it did in the past?

Elizabeth Alexander (1:40)

I think it does even more, actually, because when we say art, and I would mean art that is exceedingly well done, it speaks with so much directness, so much potency, so much power, that it can startle us. I think the power of language used absolutely precisely with the soul force that it carries, which I believe that it carries, makes us turn our heads, makes us know viscerally that something is happening to us, and that we're in the presence of another human being. And so also when we are looking at sublime dance or sublime visual art, or I think especially when music floods through us, what it also gives us when it's very well done is a sense that there is still wonder and awe in life, that people who can make something that powerful possess something that is spiritual and human.

And sometimes you see that in other forms of media, but I think that art at its best does it at its best.

Alexis Madrigal (2:57)

I think in this book, the first piece of art that moved you like this that we encounter is this poem called, well, sort of called, I Lived in the First Century of World Wars. Do you want to talk to us a little bit about where you encountered the poem, what it's about, and we're going to have you read it for us.

Elizabeth Alexander (3:13)

Yes. That poem is by the very, very great, the very mighty Muriel Rukeyser, a person who was mighty through the word, poetry, memoir, non-fiction, plays. She wrote all kinds of things, but also mighty in her humanity and in the ways that she wanted always to stand alongside people whose experiences were not necessarily her own, and to bear witness especially to injustice. So this is someone who grew up in New York City in privilege. When she was 19 years old at Vassar College, she left, this is the early 1930s, to go to Alabama to witness the Scottsboro Boys trial.

She was arrested for protesting, she was put in jail, contracted typhus when she was in jail, literally put her body on the line to say, I stand with these other human beings in a very, very different place who are not being treated right by their country, by their government, by the place where they live. So I admire her for so many different reasons, and for her, she reminds me that we are always in the tides of history, even if we don't necessarily know it, and even if we don't seek it out, we are always living in history, and so our job is to keep bearing witness. So 1967, the country is in...

SPEAKER_1 (4:42)

Not much going on.

SPEAKER_5 (4:43)

Right, right?

Elizabeth Alexander (4:45)

And I talked a lot about 1967 because I think that we sometimes mark 1968 as the really big year, but actually in 1967, there was so much going on as well. Not only conflict, not only the escalating Vietnam War, not only race riots across the country, but also tremendous moments in the culture, tremendous moments of cultural power, Aretha Franklin and respect. It becomes almost an instant anthem. And Dr. Martin Luther King is putting together in his speeches, the connections between racial discrimination and economic exploitation and the war. Muhammad Ali is boldly refusing military service and stripped of his heavyweight championship, which was an extraordinary act, a public act of courage. So Muriel Rukeyser writes this poem that I'm about to read to you, and I've always known it. But I think that in the last several years, I would say if we were to call it an era, we might start, well, we could start in a lot of different places. But I would say certainly the global pandemic, rising concerns about climate change, the so-called racial reckoning of 2020, the return of Trump to the presidency, all of these things have had us in a very heightened state in this country.