Photo courtesy of Elizabeth Alexander

May 12, 2009 | Elizabeth Alexander, who was invited by President Barack Obama to read a poem at his inauguration, talked with Faith & Leadership about her sense of the sacred and how she approached writing “Praise Song for the Day.”

Alexander, who teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Yale University, is a poet, essayist and playwright. In addition to “Praise Song for the Day, written for the January 2009 inauguration, she has published five books of poems, including “American Sublime,” which was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and was one of the American Library Association’s “Notable Books of the Year.”

Alexander spoke with Faith & Leadership in April 2009 when she visited Duke University for a poetry reading.

To hear Alexander reading the poems “Ars Poetica #2: Christening” and “Praise Song for the Day,” click the play button on the audio player at the right of this screen.

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Q: Did the church play a role in your imagination or your growing up, or do you look at your spirituality more broadly?

I look at my spirituality more broadly. It’s interesting -- I’m Episcopalian, I was raised Episcopalian -- and I was a very serious dancer growing up. My ballet school was in St. Mark’s Episcopal Church [in Washington, D.C.] and one of the ways that the dance school paid the rent to the church was by doing performances in church services. It was a very beautiful, very progressive church community, and the arts were a very integral part of it.

So I think that to have sacred spaces that saw art as sacred, too, was a very fundamental aspect of my growing up.

I have always found in art -- first in dance and then in poetry -- a way of listening to or communing with aspects of the spiritual. Again, rather than the religious per se, rather than following one doctrine, I think about the ways that the daily presence of the spiritual realm manifests itself. The aspiration to that manifestation is what artmaking, in part, is about.

Q: Did your experience in St. Mark's intersect with your churchgoing life, or was it primarily the notion of sacred space?

Sacred space. I was not a regular churchgoer growing up but went into that church building five days a week. So, you see, it was an interesting thing. Jim Adams, the minister, was very much a part of what we were doing in the dance school, and in fact Mary Craighill, who was the director of the St. Mark’s Dance School and dance company, was a very well-known modern dancer, especially for her work in liturgical dance. For all of us, it had different amounts of overlap with our spiritual and church lives.

Q: In an interview on your website, you said, “Besides making and raising children, the mystery of making art is the most spiritual zone of my life.” Has your work changed since you have become a mother?

Oh, profoundly, profoundly. With motherhood, everything is sacred and nothing is sacred. Which is to say, writing poetry exists in the day along with making school lunches and attending to the other duties of the day. And you just take the time for it. You don’t have the luxury of hours and hours unbroken, so you just take the time for it. I very much like the practicality that motherhood has brought to my artmaking.

Also, being pregnant -- which I’ve written about -- giving birth -- which I’ve written about -- and then raising children at various stages I find profoundly interesting. Literally, of interest. It’s something I want to write about. The language of it interests me, the revelations interest me, all of it interests me. So it certainly is subject matter.

And then I think, finally, just the amazing miracle of creation that starts from something so small...that starts from a blank page, that starts from two human beings. Creation from that...what an extraordinary, extraordinary thing.

Q: When you were called upon to perform a ceremonial role, how did you stay true to your art and your craft?

"Occasional" poems do have work to do. They have a job to do. Now I think there are a million different ways that that poem could have served that moment, served that occasion, served that day. And in fact I’ve thought about so many other American poets who I admire, and what they would have brought to the poem. They would all be different; they would all succeed in a million different ways.

So, yes, there’s the job. That is the very challenge: to stay true to your own sense of craft, your own sense of what a poem is, your own sense of voice, your own sense of having made something that in some small way transcends. Of meeting a creative challenge.

Q: In thinking about that ceremonial, “occasional” poem, did you find the tradition of writing such poetry limiting in a negative way, or were you happy to work within its confines?

In general, I think there is always artistic liberation to be found within confines. In that regard, that’s my approach to different ways of thinking about form, to the poem itself, which always has limitations, even if you put them there. Literally it is a framed thing, it is a made thing, it’s a structure, it has boundaries. That is always, always true. Once again, it was a very difficult exercise, but part of what made it interesting was thinking about its purpose.