The XX Factor: What women really think.

Poet(ess) Laureates

As of Friday, Britain has its first female poet laureate: Carol Ann Duffy. She is a writer who favors plain language arranged "complexly" rather than what she has called "Seamus Heaney words" like "plash." She is also openly bisexual and much has been made of that in the press. Coincidentally or not, America's poet laureate, Kay Ryan, is a gay woman who favors plain language arranged complexly too. Women are coming into their own, it would seem; just this weekend, I was talking with a poet friend who felt very powerfully that women were about to become a major part of the next generation of poetry here and abroad; she's a teacher, and she felt the power and range of her female students was extraordinary and, somehow, new.

Britain's poet laureates hold the job for a term of 10 years, unlike American poet laureates. They also have to write poems to honor royal occasions, unlike American poets. It'll be interesting to see what Duffy, with her slyness, does with those moments. Here's a poem of hers called "Words, Wide Night":

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you

and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.

Craig Arnold, Missing

When I'm not a journalist, I'm a poet, and today some bad news came: Craig Arnold, winner of the Yale Younger Series of Poets prize and author of several collections, has gone missing on a small volcanic island off Japan. He was there on a creative fellowship exchange. A search party was sent out for him, but it's not clear whether the search is ongoing, and so poets and writers are trying to ensure that it is not given up yet. Here's a link to more information, and a call for help from anyone who might have connections in the area. Here is the beginning of a lovely poem of his, which you can also find on the Poetry Foundation Web site:

Sylvia Plath's Legacy

I imagine a lot of you saw that a few days ago, Nicholas Hughes, son of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, committed suicide. Today, the New York Times has devoted a short commentary section to answering the question "Why the Plath Legacy Lives." To answer that question, they've wrangled short pieces from smart commentators like Joyce Carol Oates and Peter Kramer (author of Listening to Prozac). Of them all, only Elaine Showalter begins to answer the question by really addressing Plath's work.

Certainly Plath's honesty about suicide helps create a mythology about her, but it's hardly the whole reason readers are drawn in. Plath made being a woman an equal subject for the imagination as being a man, and she did it (mostly) without being didactic or ideological, unlike many of her peers. Plath's poetry is astonishing for its musical insistence; she was inspired by nursery rhymes (which she was reading to her children) to explore hard, repetitive rhymes as a way of creating meaning. Her poems about motherhood, particularly "Morning Song," capture the ambivalence of the mind that has been tangled up in the bodily reality of  motherhood. In that poem, she speaks of standing "cow-heavy" in her floral nightgown looking down at her child, whose "moth-breath" has tickled "the flat pink roses" of the wallpaper. And she records an impermissible thought:

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

I have written about Plath for Slate here and here, and for Poetry magazine here, and I continue to think that Ariel, her posthumous book of poems, is one of the most important books of English-language poetry of the 20th century.

Why Did Obama Choose Poet Elizabeth Alexander To Read at His Inauguration?

So Barack Obama has chosen poet Elizabeth Alexander to read at this January's inauguration. Who is she, and why her? It's a choice that reflects his serious, pragmatic side. Alexander is an African-American, born in Harlem in 1962, who has published four books; the last, American Sublime, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A professor of African-American studies at Yale (from which she also matriculated), Alexander writes poems that are metaphorically and linguistically dense, layered, and subtle. Her work speaks about black experience (see the excerpt from The Venus Hottentot on her Web page). But she can't be said to privilege identity politics over aesthetics; her poems work more at being complex than didactic. In this sense, she's an analogue to Obama, who doesn't privilege identity politics over his strategy of inclusiveness. Her choice also reflects Obama's faith in the meritocracy: a poet with a Ph.D., Alexander comes across as methodical and hardworking. I saw her give a reading last fall at Princeton with the wonderful young poet Terrance Hayes, a witty former basketball player (whom I'd half-hoped Obama would choose; he would've reflected the president-elect's playful side). Alexander was businesslike: There was no quipping or flirting with the audience.

Though only four poets (I think) have ever read at inaugurations, Alexander won't actually be the first African-American woman to receive the honor —Bill Clinton asked Maya Angelou to read at his 1993 inauguration. Alexander doesn't have much else in common with Angelou, though; she's more like Robert Frost, who read at Kennedy's inauguration. Her best poems are imaginatively expansive as well as philosophical. Here's a representative poem, called "Stravinsky in L.A." You can imagine Obama liking the end:

Stravinsky in L.A.

In white pleated trousers, peering through green
sunshades, looking for the way the sun is red
noise, how locusts hiss to replicate the sun.
What is the visual equivalent
of syncopation?  Rows of seared palms wrinkle
in the heat waves through green glass. Sprinklers
tick, tick, tick. The Watts Towers aim to split
the sky into chroma, spires tiled with rubble
nothing less than aspiration. I've left
minarets for sun and syncopation,
sixty-seven shades of green which I have
counted, beginning: palm leaves, front and back,
luncheon pickle, bottle glass, etcetera.
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.