Poetic in many ways

Jan 20 2009, Written by Chelsea Allison in News, 1 Comments

Toward the end of an interview with President Richard Brodhead last week, after he’d told me what books he read over break (for the record, among them were a biography of Obama and The Tender Bar) he confessed something:

“I taught the poet for Obama’s inauguration, you know.”

I hadn’t, but it makes sense. Brodhead, long-winded and long a lover of words, taught and chaired Yale’s English department, where Elizabeth Alexander is both a graduate and a professor. According to the Yale Daily News, Brodhead taught Alexander in a non-fiction prose writing class when she was a sophomore.

It seems that although she later turned her focus to poetry, she may have gleaned a bit about delivery from former professors, at least according to the group I was watching with. She spoke carefully, evoking the oft-mimicked cadence of the man himself.

And although Alexander was Obama’s official choice—marking only the fourth poet to be included in a presidential inauguration—The Associated Press also called on poets to compose poems to commemorate the occasion.

Alexander was selected for the 2007 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers by Lucille Clifton, Stephen Dunn, and Jane Hirshfield. Hirshfield spent a recent Fall weekend at Duke as the Blackburn visiting poet.

The poem will be released in a chapbook Feb. 6, according to the AP.