Poetry comes up so often in my conversations these days and in unexpected

context. It's something many of us seem to be hungry for, though often without

knowing it until we hear it. I think we're starved for fresh ways to talk about

difficult things, for language that would elevate and embolden rather than

demean and alienate. Elizabeth Alexander was the fourth poet in American

history to contribute to a presidential inauguration, the first of Barack Obama in

2009. Her poem on that day included these lines. We encounter each other in words,

words, spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed, words to consider, reconsider.

This hour, Elizabeth Alexander shares her sense of what poetry works in us and

in our children and why it may become more relevant, not less so, in hard and

complicated times. You know, 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 got to tell you my story. I got to tell you what happened. Let's

think about who we are. I'm Christa Tippett and this is on being.

Elizabeth Alexander is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and she's the

inaugural Frederick Iceman Professor of Poetry at Yale University. She's also the

author of several books of essays and poetry including Crave Radiance and

she's just written a beautiful memoir of grief and love, the light of the world.

I interviewed Elizabeth Alexander in 2010. Her family background, though not linked

to poetry, tells a vivid American story. Her extended family was a force in mid

century Harlem culture. She herself grew up in Washington, D.C. where her parents

became players in the political dramas of the 1960s. Her mother is an historian,

...