As the 2012 election nears—yet another historic one, most say—I think about Elizabeth Alexander, the poet who read her poem “Praise Song for the Day” on January 20, 2009, at the Inaugural of President Barack Obama. The perils of writing “public poems” are well known, and most said she fared well, if not spectacularly so. But in many ways it didn’t sound like her at all. Its lines lacked the usual tightness of her lines, and missing was her deep sense of gender, her intense, lyrical eroticism—something that probably would have been hard to place appropriately in a poem for an occassion like this.
Born in New York City in 1962 and raised in Washington, D.C., Alexander currently teaches at Yale, but she also taught at the University of Chicago, winning the Quantrell Prize for excellence in undergraduate teaching. This, as well as her relationship to Chicago’s Tia Chucha Press, plus her wonderful poem “Blues” made it easy for me to tag her enough of a Chicago poet to include her in my book Black Writing from Chicago. This is how “Blues” begins:
Wrigley illuminates
the night sky violet,
indigo city tonight,
Chicago, city
surrounded by Magikist lips,
baci baci baci
benedicting the expressways
You can tell right away this is about a thousand miles away from “Praise Song for the Day.”
Besides poetry, Alexander has published fiction, critical essays and reviews in the Paris Review, the American Poetry Review, the Washington Post, the Village Voice, and other important periodicals, and collected her poetry in The Venus Hottentot (1990), Antebellum Dream Book (2001), and Body of Life, published in Chicago by Tia Chucha Press. A collection of essays, The Black Interior, along with a fourth book of poems came out in Fall 2003. She has won NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, among many other awards.
For me the poem that most represents those qualities I mentioned above—the intense lyricism and eroticism coupled with a deep sense of history and race/gender consciousness—is the three-part “The Josephine Baker Museum,” Josephine Baker embodying the intersection of eroticism, race, history, and feminism as boldly and ironically as anyone ever has. Here are a few lines from “The Wig Room,” Part Three of the larger poem.
A gleaming black sputnik of hair…
Black profiteroles of mounded hair…
Black crowns to be taken on and off, that live
in the room when the lights go out, a roomful
of whispering Josephines, a roomful
of wigs in the dark.
This part echoes Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask.” Masks, wigs, more masks, some grinning and lying—you often have to do all these to fool, even mock, those that threaten your humanity, sometimes your very survival. It’s not dishonesty in the normal sense, but a tactic only those who have faced overwhelming racial—and gender—odds will ever understand fully.
√ Go to a list of Black Writers written about on this site, OR to the Teaching Diversity main page. Go here for a list of poems and poetry commentary on this site.
Sedona, the Movie: Vortexes, Auras! Oh, My!
What’s got the main character, Tammy, so frazzled is that she—a high-powered, work-obssessed business woman—is rushing down to a meeting in Phoenix when a freak accident strands her in Sedona. The movie opens with gorgeous views of Sedona’s iconic red rocks, canyons, and valleys shot from one of the many tourist planes that—with helicopters and balloons—constantly criss-cross Sedona skies. The plane has engine problems and can’t get back to Airport Mesa, landing instead on the city’s main north-south drag, Highway 89A, and crashing into Tammy’s car. We follow her typically exasperating adventures trying to get the car fixed, adventures which bring her into contact with sometimes zany locals—one who not only massages but reads feet—all steering her away from her work and car-obsessed life into some deep, healing soul searching. It’s a labyrinthine quest featuring her walking through an actual Sedona labyrinth as she begins to mend the broken pieces of her present life by dealing with the brokenness and abandonment of her past life. Veteran actress Frances Fisher plays her beautifully.
There’s a second story line. A gay couple, Scott and Eddie, have taken their sons, Denny and Jeremy, on a Sedona vacation. Scott is also frazzled, work-obssessed. It’s hard to get him off his Blackberry, until Eddie shames him into leaving it their van, something Scott wishes he hadn’t done when youngest son Denny gets lost. One viewer commented astutely that the movie leaves out all Hispanics, a large presence in Sedona, but, though perhaps a bit forced, it does nod towards Sedona’s Native American heritage, bringing in actor Tatanka Means as the Native American park worker who helps track Denny down. Of course, he’s calm and wise, a blaring contrast to Scott.
These two story lines meet briefly near the movie’s beginning but go their separate ways immediately, so much so that we’re sometimes annoyed by their utter dislocation, the movie becoming rather jagged as it continually cuts back and forth between them. Eventually, the two stories do meet. In fact, they literally crash into each other when Tammy’s finally-fixed car plows into Scott’s van. As they exchange information, the movie begins to suggest an eerie, deep relationship between Tammy and Scott, a relationship that makes Tammy forget about ever getting to Phoenix. The suggestion is heavy, but wisely stays at that level.
That’s the trouble with the there-are-no-coincidences stance. When things work out too perfectly, when seemingly random events turn out to be eye-poppingly non-random after all, a movie, a book, any story-telling vehicle, has to handle this very carefully or discerning viewers will just throw up their hands and scream, “Awwww!!!” They’ll feel cheated—though, of course, most people won’t, which is why sappiness or spectacular conspiracy plots rule the box office. Sedona balances on the line between reality and wish fulfillment, truth and sappy optimism, and, overall, I think it keeps its balance relatively well.
Chaos theory and Quantum Physics have told us for decades that reality, at its base, is chaotic, random, unpredictable—a tissue of coincidences. Our days often seem organized by nothing more than clocks telling us where to be next. More than that: people suddenly get ripped out of our lives, jobs and marriages crumble, people get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time all the time, and for no apparent reason. That’s why, even if we have to slug down a big draught of sap, we hunger, secretly or openly, for something neat, something beyond coincidence. A good poem, Robert Frost said, is “a temporary truce with chaos.”
I’ve grown less dismissive of Sedona’s loopiness over the years, knowing how sincerely so many believe in auras, crystals, past lives. Walking its stunning landscapes, I often catch myself thinking, I see why people feel spirits roaming here and vortexes doing whatever they do. But it’s really Sedona’s intense beauty that gives rise to the idea that there are no coincidences. One key component of anything we call beautiful must be a sense that somehow everything fits together perfectly, so much so that even coincidences don’t seem accidental. It’s tough to plot the beautiful without getting saccharine, and capturing beauty on any kind of camera will always be a dicey, difficult job. And maybe Sedona is too much a special case. Many moments in our lives just aren’t all that beautiful, just as most places aren’t Sedona—unless you’re one of those that insists that everything is beautiful in its own way. I suppose at some high-up level that could be true, but people walking around up there are often humming some pretty pollyanna songs and wearing some strong, rose-colored glasses.
(2011. Dir. Tommy Stovall. NR. I say, 2.5 stars.)
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