“Poems Are Fireflies, Not Breadcrumbs”

Elizabeth Alexander Returns For A Reading at the Beinecke Library

The distance between poetry and Elizabeth Alexander presses on her. In recent years, the focus of her work has shifted from poetry to philanthropy; her responsibilities as president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—a position she has held since 2018—seem to not leave much time for writing. Standing at the podium at the Beinecke Rare Book Library last Wednesday, November 4, for a reading of her work, she comforted herself: “I haven’t been writing much poetry lately. But my friend Terrance [Hayes] asked me, ‘Do you not walk into the room as a poet? Do you not have a poet’s eyes?’” “Poets,” she added, “are united by an ache for meaning.”

It would seem this ache persists independent of poetic output; Alexander’s ability to engender it in others still quickened within her that night. Beinecke acolytes, in royal blue t-shirts, added eight rows of provisional seating in the back of the room, stools that folded out like luggage racks to hold her listeners. They made ocean sounds of reverence as she read.

In many ways, this reading was a homecoming for Alexander. She had many beloveds in the audience that she called to between poems and essays: She is returning to her friends and colleagues at Yale, where she accumulated fifteen years teaching poetry and chairing the African American Studies Department; to New Haven, where her husband died and is buried, and where her son almost died (he still “lives outside [her] body”); and to Blackness, where all of her work returns and originates, in celebration, in memoriam, in perpetuity.

There was no daylight between Alexander’s words and Black experience, Black music, Black history. She exhorted her audience to attune to free Black men; she described her father’s first childhood encounter with police; she compared the vigilance of Black mothers to migratory birds with two-chambered brains that allow them to sleep as they fly. Unsteadily, she sang riffs from John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and Duke Ellington’s Lush Life. She read sections from her long-form poem “Amistad,” chronicling the revolt aboard the slave ship which came to trial in New Haven. “Our enslaved progenitors are within reach of memory and lore,” Alexander told her listeners, who hummed with closed eyes.

There was an old hope present in the poet and her audience. It was the day after the midterm elections, when great swathes of the country rolled away from the Republican Party in fear, or disgust, or the poet-ache for meaning. “No one can use the word ‘rebuked’ like Black people,” Alexander laughed. She is still willing to imagine political transformation within the current social framework, a battered topic which has lost some credibility since the Obama era. Alexander can count the years since Obama’s inauguration, when she read “A Praise Poem for the Day” in D.C. in a red coat and matching red lipstick.

Perhaps we can no longer afford realism. As Alexander says, “poems are fireflies, not breadcrumbs.”