Dunno about you, but I really liked the Inauguration poem by Elizabeth Alexander, so I was pleased when Garrison Keillor put a second poem by her on his daily NPR radio snippet, A Writer’s Almanac. Here it is:

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe
by Elizabeth Alexander

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?

One of the reasons I like Alexander is that she is so unlike what so many people think of as poetry -- as she puts it, “love, love, love and I’m sorry the dog died.” There’s another poetry program, “The Poet and the Poem,” which comes on ypradio.org on Thursday night at 9PM my time. (You could stream it.) It’s very “yummy” and precious with a hostess who speaks in hushed tones of beloved topics, tragic though they may be.

Alexander not only writes briskly and about ordinary human things, but she speaks her words with clear crisp consonants and carefully shaped vowels. This raises an interesting topic: the artist’s voice. Compare Alexander with, say, Aretha Franklin, the voice of soul: elided, syncopated, surprising.

When I was working at the City of Portland a decade ago, one of my fellow clerks was a 3X-sized woman, very dark-skinned, who compensated for her bulk by carefully maintaining a $60 acrylic-nail manicure and wearing the tiniest of high-heeled sandals. Thus she was missing in action a lot of the time due to sprained ankles. But I liked her, because she was such a character and had such spirit. Also, she never failed to politically outflank our mean little hen of a boss.

Part of our job was to take phone calls from the general public, most of them from people either complaining about nuisance neglected properties or complaining that they had been cited for not maintaining their property. Most of the complaints came from whites. Most of the citations went to blacks, though their landlords were usually white. One day my colleague and I had an argument about whether we could tell over the phone who was white and who was black. Actually, we could -- at least mostly -- and they could tell about us, too. It was instantly apparent that my colleague, with her rich Southern accent, her querulous voice “melody,” her choice of words and so on, was black. I suppose I was as obvious, though no one is all that conscious of their own “accent.”

Actually, this person was a second generation Oregonian, her parents rather than herself having been imported from the south to work in the Kaiser shipyards during WWII. The much lighter, taller and slimmer black man who had moved to Oregon from the Texas/Mississippi border as an adult had a far softer and more melodious voice, to say nothing of his manner.

On NPR, reacting to Alexander’s poetry reading (you could almost hear her practicing the speech teacher’s mantra: “the tip of the tongue, the lips and the teeth”) and Obama’s speech patterns (which are different again) the hosts were discussing accents and the woman (I forget which one) disclosed that she is black. But she doesn’t at ALL “sound” black! In fact, there are several black hosts on NPR and the only ones I would easily identify are the ones from the Caribbean, who have rich and careful British accents. I love the voice of Charlayne Hunter-Gault.

On the same program there was discussion about whether the tear spotted in Jesse Jackson’s eye was real or not. Consensus was that it was a real tear: Jesse could see the promised land, but he couldn’t get there. His style is now old-fashioned, his strategies are ineffective. Misery no longer evokes help, being different no longer attracts sympathy. The New Black Man is competent, he comes to the rescue of the white folks. And he’s not that black anyway. Just twenty years ago black folks were assumed to be like Clarence Thomas: very dark, short, inarticulate, always indignant and more-or-less “owned” by aristocratic white patrons, Thomas probably could not be elected for anything today.

The same problem exists for Indians and red-necks. The original stereotypes of the categories are grandparents now. Many of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren are no longer “blanket Indians” or hillbillies because of affirmative action programs that got them educated, socialized, and competent along with the rest of the best. This is the great irony of education for achievement, that the means for getting there transform the “different” into something the same: assimilated. The great test now will not be the racial or social tensions between categories of people, but within the generations of those categories.

If poetry is where we are ourselves, can we still write poetry that isn’t “love, love, love and sorry the dog died” if we have become someone else? I used to ride the bus to work every day and since I lived in NE Portland, where those shipyards employees lived after the Vanport flood destroyed their original housing, I overheard plenty on the bus. What’s most relevant today was a tall, aristocratic-looking black woman who announced to her friend, “Honey, when I have money, I SPEND it! When I don’t, I do without.” I think of her often.

They say the older Kaiser workers have been moving back to the south where the world is still closer to what they know. The younger ones who don’t go off to college? They marry Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans and they don’t assimilate to the white culture so much as they create a new one. They are “idiosyncratic, the only way to get from here to there.”