Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Elizabeth Alexander

American Poet, Essayist and Playwright. Poetry Professor and Chair of the African American Studies Department at Yale University, Professor at Columbia University

"And so I write to fix him in place, to pass time in his company, to make sure I remember, even though I know I will never forget."

"Art replaces the light that is lost when the day fades, the moment passes, the evanescent extraordinary makes its? quicksilver. Art tries to capture that which we know leaves us, as we move in and out of each other?s lives, as we all must eventually leave this earth. Great artists know that shadow, work always against the dying light, but always knowing that the day brings new light and that the ocean which washes away all traces on the sand leaves us a new canvas with each wave."

"Art tries to capture that which we know leaves us, as we move in and out of each other?s lives, as we all must eventually leave this earth."

"Blues: I am lazy, the laziest girl in the world. I sleep during the day when I want to, ?til my face is creased and swollen, ?til my lips are dry and hot. I eat as I please: cookies and milk after lunch, butter and sour cream on my baked potato, foods that slothful people eat, that turn yellow and opaque beneath the skin. Sometimes come dinnertime Sunday I am still in my nightgown, the one with the lace trim listing because I have not mended it. Many days I do not exercise, only consider it, then rub my curdy belly and lie down. Even my poems are lazy. I use syllabics instead of iambs, prefer slant to the gong of full rhyme, write briefly while others go for pages. And yesterday, for example, I did not work at all! I got in my car and I drove to factory outlet stores, purchased stockings and panties and socks with my father?s money. To think, in childhood I missed only one day of school per year. I went to ballet class four days a week at four-forty-five and on Saturdays, beginning always with plie, ending with curtsy. To think, I knew only industry, the industry of my race and of immigrants, the radio tuned always to the station that said, Line up your summer job months in advance. Work hard and do not shame your family, who worked hard to give you what you have. There is no sin but sloth. Burn to a wick and keep moving. I avoided sleep for years, up at night replaying evening news stories about nearby jailbreaks, fat people who ate fried chicken and woke up dead. In sleep I am looking for poems in the shape of open V?s of birds flying in formation, or open arms saying, I forgive you, all."

"Art that speaks to any of us always comes from a very particular place, and then we find ourselves in it in some kind of way."

"Every shut eye ain?t asleep, every goodbye ain?t gone."

"Each of us made it possible for the other. We got something done. Each believed in the other unsurpassingly."

"Ficre breathed his last breath into me when I opened his mouth and breathed everything I had into him. He felt like a living person then. I am certain his soul was there. And then in the ambulance, riding the long ride down to the hospital, even as they worked and worked, the first icy-wind blew into me: he was going, or gone."

"Death itself is like a snake shedding its skin? A new self reveals itself when the old carapace has shed and died, as though we live in exoskeletons with something truer underneath? What we see with our eyes is different from what we know: ?The things / themselves.?"

"Everything was told! Then we could begin something new."

"Friendship in marriage is its own thing: friendship in a cup of tea, or a glass of wine, or a cappuccino every Sunday morning. Friendship in buying undershirts and underpants. Friendship in picking up a prescription or rescuing the towed car. Friendship in waiting for the phone call after the mammogram. Friendship in toast buttered just so. Friendship in shoveling the snow. I am the one you want to tell. You are the one I want to tell."

"Great artists know the shadow, work always against the dying light, but always knowing that the day brings new light and that the ocean which washes away all traces on the sand leaves us a new canvas with each wave.?"

"Giving birth is like jazz, something from silence, then all of it. Long, elegant boats, blood-boiling sunshine, human cargo, a handmade kite ? Postpartum. No longer a celebrity, pregnant lady, expectant. It has happened; you are here, each dram you drain a step away from flushed and floating, lush and curled. Now you are the pink one, the movie star. It has happened. You are here, and you sing, mewl, holler, peep, swallow the light and bubble it back, shine, contain multitudes, gleam. You are the new one, the movie star, and birth is like jazz, from silence and blood, silence then everything, jazz."

"Half of the things are as they seem. The other half, who knows. This has always been true."

"He was probably dead before he hit the ground, the emergency room doctor and the coroner and a cardiologist I later speak with tell me. That is why there was no blood on the floor, despite his head wound and the scalp?s vascularity. He might have felt strange, the doctors told me, before what they call ?the cardiac event,? but not for more than a flash. One tells me he is certain Ficre saw my face as he died. We are meant to take comfort in this knowledge, if knowledge it is."

"Henry Ford believed the soul of a person is located in their last breath and so captured the last breath of his best friend Thomas Edison in a test tube and kept it evermore. It is on display at the Henry Ford Museum outside Detroit, like Galileo?s finger in the church of Santa Croce, but Edison?s last breath is an invisible relic."

"I been in sorrow?s kitchen and done licked out all the pots. Nobody knows the trouble I seen. Steal away to Jesus. I ain?t got long to stay here."

"I have not yet learned to use our television DVR. One of the points of marriage is that you split labor. In the olden days that meant one hunted and one gathered; now it means one knows where the tea-towels are kept and the other knows how to program the DVR, for why should we both have to know?"

"I have heard from so many different kinds of people who have experienced loss?yes, some widows, but mostly people who have lived to tell the stories of many kinds of loss and want to share them. We need to tell our stories. I never imagine a reader because I think you can?t; it interferes with the writing process. And then, you get the beautiful surprise of all the people out there who connect with your words and share themselves."

"I wake up grateful, for life is a gift."

"I hope you?re not turning all Christian, Simon says, when he comes home and finds me uncharacteristically blaring gospel music. I am not, but I am listening to Mahalia Jackson in a whole new way. How I got over, My soul looks back in wonder, I hear it for the very first time. The gratitude in that song is what washes over me, the word thank repeated over and over. My soul does indeed look back in wonder; I had Ficre; I have Ficre; I have these extraordinary children; I have a village; I have an art-form; I am black; we are African; we come from survivors and doers; my parents are wise and strong; my body is strong; I was loved without bound or condition; I exist in time and in context, not floating in space; my troubles are small compared to some; my troubles are not eternal; my days are not through."

"If we?re evolving in life I think that the difficult things that happen to us?I don?t think they necessarily get better in a straight line, just climbing the steps one at a time straight up and then you?re better. But I do think that it changes depending on the circumstance, depending on who you?re intersecting with, you know? Because sometimes when you share a sorrow with somebody else that can be sometimes seemingly more painful and more intense but ultimately very, very beautiful and powerful."

"It happened; it is part of who we are; it is our beauty and our terror. We must be gleaners from what life has set before us."

"In all marriages there is struggle and ours was no different in that regard. But we always came to the other shore, dusted off, and said, ?There you are, my love.?"

"In the absence of organized religion, faith abounds, in the form of song and art and food and strong arms."

"It?s a big, beautiful, connected world, and I want my children to experience it that way. You belong to more than just where you are standing at any given moment."

"Lightning struck and did not curdle the cream but instead turned it to sweet, silken butter."

"My mother-in-law?s last night on earth, a fox crossed our path in Branford, Connecticut, as we left the hospice. We knew somehow that it was her, as I now know the ravenous hawk came to take Ficre. Do I believe that? Yes, I do. Poetic logic is my logic. I do not believe she was a fox. But I believe the fox was a harbinger. I believe that it was a strange enough occurrence that it should be heeded. Zememesh Berhe, the quick, red fox, soon passed from this life to the next."

"Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don?t let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand."

"Now I know for sure the soul is an evanescent thing and the body is its temporary container, because I saw it. I saw the body with the soul in it, I saw the body with the soul leaving, and I saw the body with the soul gone."

"Loss is not felt in the absence of love."

"Now I know my capacity for awe is infinite: this thirst is permanent, the well bottomless, my good fortune vast."

"On suffering, which is real. On the mouth that never closes, the air that dries the mouth. On the miraculous dying body, its greens and purples. On the beauty of hair itself. On the dazzling toddler: ?Like eggplant,? he says, when you say ?Vegetable,? ?Chrysanthemum? to ?Flower.? On his grandmother?s suffering, larger than vanished skyscrapers, September zucchini, other things too big. For her glory that goes along with it, glory of grown children?s vigil, communal fealty, glory of the body that operates even as it falls apart, the body that can no longer even make fever but nonetheless burns florid and bright and magnificent as it dims, as it shrinks, as it turns to something else."

"Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss."

"One night at bedtime, Simon asks if I want to come with him to visit Ficre in heaven. Yes, I say, and lie down on his bed. ?First you close your eyes,? he says, ?and ride the clear glass elevator. Up we go.? What do you see? I ask. God is sitting at the gate, he answers. What does God look like? I ask. Like God, he says. Now, we go to where Daddy is. He has two rooms, Simon says, one room with a single bed and his books and another where he paints. The painting room is vast. He can look out any window he wants and paint. That room has four views: our backyard, the dock he painted in Maine, Asmara, and New Mexico. New Mexico? I ask. Yes, Simon says, the volcano crater with the magic grass. Ah yes, I say, the caldera, where we saw the gophers and the jackrabbits and the elk running across and Daddy called it the veldt. Yes. Do you see it? And I do. The light is perfect for painting. His bed in heaven is a single bed. Okay, it?s time to go now, Simon says. So down we go. You can come with me anytime, he says. Thank you, my darling. I don?t think you can find it by yourself yet, he says, but one day you will."

"Poetry can indeed be taught, like most skills. But the gift of voice is its own thing, as well as the determination to work through and despite discouragement."

"Poetry has always existed, and always existed in a communal context. Part of what people get from that is the story of who I am and who we are. I gotta tell you my story. I gotta tell you what happened. Let?s think about who we are."

"Poetry is what you find in the dirt in the corner, overhear on the bus, God in the details, the only way to get from here to there."

"Poetry, I tell my students, is idiosyncratic. Poetry is where we are ourselves, (though Sterling Brown said Every 'I' is a dramatic 'I') digging in the clam flats for the shell that snaps, emptying the proverbial pocketbook. Poetry is what you find in the dirt in the corner, overhear on the bus, God in the details, the only way to get from here to there. Poetry (and now my voice is rising) is not all love, love, love and I'm sorry the dog died. Poetry (here I hear myself loudest) is the human voice, and are we not of interest to each other?"

"So ?what if the mightiest word is love?? is ? it?s a question of fact that perhaps asks in these times, as an incredibly heterogeneous collective, as an incredibly diverse country, is there such a thing as a love that can supersede or guide or take us through disagreement? What would that mean? What would that love look like? Mighty, that?s a very, very particular kind of word. Is there a kind of enduring power of love as I so fervently want to believe, but then I think, once again, love with no need to preempt grievance, love that is not about marital love, it?s not just about familial love. It?s not even about national love. In fact, love cannot just be for the people in our nation, even though right now we?re having this incredible national moment ? when I say now, in the moment of the inaugural."

"So something that I?m really interested in is this the connection between what is universal and what is particular and how what is particular illuminates the universal. So recently I had a conversation with the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain who said this striking thing that he thinks moral imagination begins with universality and ends with particularity, which is kind of the reverse of how we?ve come to think of it maybe superficially of diversity in Western culture, is that the goal, is to get to a place where we realize how alike we are, right? Where we can celebrate what we have in common."

"Sorrow like vapor, sorrow like smoke, sorrow like quicksand, sorrow like an ocean, sorrow louder and fuller than the church songs, sorrow everywhere with nowhere to go? I did not grow up in the black church, nor with the Negro spirituals. Now I understand them as never before. Their poetry feels pure and profound. I been in sorrow?s kitchen and done licked out all the pots. Nobody knows the trouble I seen. Steal away to Jesus. I ain?t got long to stay here."

"So I think that then going through such an extreme of both grief but also shock, you know, we lose people in all kinds of different ways and so one factor that was part of ours was the shock of it. And so I was very interested to find that the way I really knew how I felt, and not just how I felt like I feel happy, I feel sad, but what was happening was to write it down. And that the process of writing is a process of living."

"Sorrow everywhere with nowhere to go."

"The basket of remembrance has three sides; one is open, can it tilt and spill out?"

"The earth that looks solid is, in fact, a sinkhole, or could be. Half of things are as they seem. The other half, who knows."

"The story seems to begin with catastrophe but in fact began earlier and is not a tragedy but rather a love story. Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss. Loss is not felt in the absence of love."

"The days are long but the years are short, some say, about the early years of child rearing"

"There will always be children and there will always be old people. We spend most of our lives somewhere in between. When we produce the children, we get to be royalty for a short while--the world pulls out its chair for the pregnant woman--but soon we are once again worker bees, tending the little ones."

"They shared an unshakeable belief in beauty, in overflow, in everythingness, the bursting, indelible beauty in a world where there is so much suffering and wounding and pain."