Poetry Friday: A Rainy Night With Sharon Olds and Elizabeth Alexander

Print Email

On June 18th in Central Park, the rain held out long enough for poems from Sharon Olds, Thomas Sayers Ellis and Elizabeth Alexander, in a reading and round table discussion sponsored by Central Park SummerStage, The Academy of American Poets and the New York City Parks Department. WVFC’s Elizabeth Willse made it there too, and noticed that the poets were clearly having fun listening to one another and discussing larger questions about poetry and life.

photo by Deborah Barber

Sharon Olds, author of nine volumes of poetry, was  born in San Francisco . Central to her work is the use of raw language and startling images to convey truths about domestic and political violence, sexuality, family relationships and the body. The New York Times has ailed Olds’s poetry for its vision: “Like Whitman, Ms. Olds sings the body in celebration of a power stronger than political oppression.” She is currently working on a series of odes, some of which she shared during the reading, along with a sampling of her past work.

photo by Deborah Barber

Born in New York City and raised in Washington, D.C.,  Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, essayist, playwright, who now teaches in the Department African American Studies at Yale University.  Her “Praise Song for the Day,” composed and delivered for the inauguration of President Barack Obama, has recently been published as a small book from Graywolf Press. Among her other five books of poems are American Sublime (2005), which was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and was one of the American Library Association’s “Notable Books of the Year,” and Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color, Alexander’s first young adult collection (co-authored with Marilyn Nelson).

Below is one of the poems Ms. Alexander read Thursday night, “The Blue Whale,”  part of a larger series in American Sublime about the slave ship Amistad. It appears by permission of the author.

The Blue Whale

swam alongside the vessel for hours.
I saw her breach. The spray when she sounded
soaked me (the lookout) on deck. I was joyous.
There her oily, rainbowed, lingering wake,
ambergris print on the water’s sheer skin,
she skimmed and we skimmed and we sped
straight on towards home, on the glorious wind.

Then something told her, Turn (whales travel
in pods and will beach themselves rather than split)–
toward her pod?– and the way she split was not
our way. I begged and prayed and begged for her
companionship, the guide-light of her print,
North Star (I did imagine) of her spout.
But she had elsewhere to go. I watched
the blue whale’s silver spout. It disappeared.