As with most writers, there's more to this one than meets the eye. (photo of Elizabeth Alexander courtesy of Yahoo.news)
One good satisfying read through Elizabeth Alexander’s Body of Life, and it becomes easy to see why President Barack Obama chose her to serve as his inaugural poet. Although only three short words, the title of this book is big because it indicates something of the scope of Alexander’s poetic vision in terms of her examination of life as it has been known in the past on up until an individual’s, and a society’s, present precarious times.
A very shrewd observer of subtle oddities, Alexander unearths the comic and tragic ambiguities of the human condition, allowing us to alternately laugh at ourselves, cry for ourselves, and stare in awe at the beautiful complexity of what it means to be human.
Published in 1996 by Tia Chuca Press of Chicago, Body of Life is comprised of more than 40 poems that sweep brilliantly through both social history and personal autobiography. Many of these were first published in such distinguished literary outlets as Callaloo, Chicago Review, Voice Literary Supplement, and Yellow Silk.
The book is divided into four parts, the first containing a gallery of eight profiles of historic individuals. The manner in which Alexander gently frames the inner life of these individuals within their external social and historical context is marvelous to behold. Take, for example, her portrait of the great Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, in “Stravinsky in L.A.,” as he stands: “In white pleated trousers, peering through green/ sunshades, looking for the way the sun is red/ noise, how locusts hiss to replicate the sun.” The composer meditates on the relationship between colors and music, then concludes: “One day I will comprehend the different/ grades of red. On that day I will comprehend/ these people, rhythms, jazz, Simon Rodia,/ Watts, Los Angeles, aspiration.”
Likewise, we entertain new insights in poems that make the historical very personal. Such is the case when the poet revisits the great Harlem Renaissance diva Josephine Baker in “The Josephine Baker Museum”; when paying renewed attention to the daughter of the extraordinary W.E.B. Du Bois in “Yolande Speaks”; or when entering the traumatized genius of Virginia Woolf in “Fugue.” The impact is both potent and claustrophobic as readers journey inside a hot cramped box with escaped slave Henry Porter (known in text books as Henry “Box” Brown) as he ships himself like a parcel post package from Richmond to Philadelphia, fantasizes about food, and weeps for the family he has left behind.
II.
The second section of Body of Life takes a decisively autobiographical turn. As might be expected, it includes poems that invoke the innocence of childhood “Summertime,” as well as the eventual loss of innocence in unexpected ways and places. Rather than simply wallowing gleefully in nostalgia, Alexander allows her pen to roam through some unsettling territory. The titles of the poems “Aspirin” and “Cough Medicine” sound simple enough but the lines reveal more than memories of childhood illness. They hint strongly at the threat of childhood drug addiction to over-the-counter medicines. At the same time, they describe a quirky mystical sensibility that prefigures the development of the accomplished poet Alexander one day would become. While that idea may sound like a stretch to some, consider these lines from “Aspirin”: “…Sometimes I long/ for the fevers of my childhood./ I miss actual delirium,/ the hot brain burning through its caul/ to imagination.”
The childhood referenced by Alexander took place during the 1960s and 1970s. The poems “Bossa Nova” and “Family Stone” illustrate how the music of the times informed both the era and the life of the poet. Alexander is sometimes startling when painting full portraits of places from her youth. In “Washington Etude,” “Manhattan Elegy,” “My Grandmother’s New York Apartment,” and “In the Small Rooms,” we get large enough doses of childhood reveries but we also get hard slaps of realism in the forms of abuse and disillusionment. Particularly notable in this section is “What I’m Telling You,” Alexander’s homage to Betty Shabazz (the widow of Malcolm X) as “a nice woman in a dark house filled with/ daughters and candy, something dim and unspoken,/ expectation.”
III.
From the foundation of history established in section one, and personal autobiography presented in section two, Alexander branches out in part three with heated lines of sexual awakening, a deep sensitivity regarding the nature of love, and penetrating explorations of what it means to be a singular individual in a world filled with multicultural distinctions. She is comfortably erotic in poems like “Six Yellow Stanzas” and “Float.” But in “Affirmative Action Blues (1993)” the poet reaches beyond her own pleasure principles to acknowledge the following: “…And meanwhile, black people are dying,/ beautiful black men my age, from AIDS. It was amazing/ when I learned the root of ‘venereal disease’/ was ‘Venus,’ that there was such a thing as a disease/ of love…” This sudden appearance of AIDS creates a tragic historic marker in both recorded time and in actual human bodies––while also introducing one of the book’s major themes.
In “Haircut,” Alexander ponders, “What is black culture?” A number of the poems throughout Body of Life would seem to answer that black culture is the ability of black music to empower daily existence with hope, strength, and wisdom; and the ability of black families to sustain themselves with love and dignity in the face of both external and internal major challenges. Surviving the struggle itself is something to be celebrated, as her family does in “Harlem Birthday Party” with their 96-year-old grandfather: “…I cannot think/ about this party without thinking how glad I am/ we had it, that he lived long and healthy, that two years/ later he was gone. He was born in Jamaica,/ West Indies, and he died in Harlem, New York.”
IV.
The fourth and final part of this book is definitely not for those who like their poems cute and dainty. It would be easy to write that the concluding section deals with the inevitable death that comes to any human “body,” but it might be more accurate to note that Alexander examines the different routes taken toward that eventuality during our modern times. The graceful passage due to old age after a life fully lived stands in sharp contrast to the thieving specter of AIDS (the most increasingly visible threat to Americans’ longevity prior to the wars generated by September 11, 2001). In the poem “Dream,” and in the title poem “Life of the Body,” Alexander confronts with bold lucidity the compulsions of desire and repression that led to the epidemic humanity has now been battling for more than a quarter of a century. In “Dream,” she provides rare snapshots of the kind of relationships that may have been sincere and even innocent in their own way but nevertheless often added to the spread the disease:
“You take me to your bed and are suddenly naked,
and plump. You leave your glasses on. Your curls come back.
Then your best friend comes into the bed, who is my friend, too, who is not yet sick but will be, and we lie
together, all of us naked and beautiful…
This treasured triple-layered intimacy turns out to be as deadly as it is “beautiful” and the poet later observes:
“Love is a dream where someone is dying, the faint
smell of shit and the memory of poems that breathe
on this bed. I kiss you on the mouth…”
The title poem is set respectively in the years 1990, 1983, and 1994. The dates are significant because they mark the decade when an entire generation grew into sexual maturity at the same time that AIDS was discovered, denied, and then painfully acknowledged as the major threat that it remains in 2009. As public and private knowledge of the disease begins to increase, our poet heroine grows from a young woman who enjoys jazz, travel, eclectic friendships, and other cultural delights into one who finds herself marking time by the death of people she loved:
“One by one you leave
the picture, nix nix nix…”
The poem’s conclusion is a sobering one because it presents witnessed truth without artificial adornment:
“Life is only momentarily fearless; life is only for a moment full of cures; the body, as always, tells the round, bald truth
when my stomach grips to say, no cure in sight.)”
Body of Life is the second of Elizabeth Alexander’s five (thus far) volumes of poetry. It leaves no doubt that she is an exceptional poet who has established some very serious purposes for her life and her art. Like her inaugural poem, Praise Song for the Day, this volume also reveals her as a wordsmith with a keen eye for overlooked beauty and a sharp ear for the music of language. The beauty shared and the music sang through these pages are intensely brilliant, profoundly relevant, and amazingly courageous.
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