This Sunday night’s poet is Elizabeth Alexander. Her Antebellum Dream Book, like several of her other books, is practically a tour of American Black history, and contains a wonderful poem about one of my fellow Kentuckians, “Narrative: Ali.” It’s too long to include here, and I don’t want to excerpt it, so instead here’s “Elegy,” another poem about an American original:
Motherless, fatherless, born of no one and everything, Sun Ra touched down in Birmingham, The Magic City, city of smokestacks and tin. He would glitter. Began departure from Philly, which is Saturn, in a way. Said he was no age, never was born. He’s not from no Mars, his sister Mary said. I peeped through the keyhole. I saw that boy born. The spaceship left from Birmingham, city the color of lead, city of trains, of metal, city of black, black coal.
If you’d like to read more
- Poetry Foundation: A biography of and selected poems by Elizabeth Alexander.
- Internet Archive:
- Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010, by Elizabeth Alexander. The best single introduction to Alexander’s poetry.
- Antebellum Dream Book, by Elizabeth Alexander. I’m including this for sentimental reasons, because it was the first book of hers I read.
- Bookshop.org:
- Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010, by Elizabeth Alexander.
- Antebellum Dream Book, by Elizabeth Alexander.
- Other:
- The Bandcamp service has an incredible number of Sun Ra releases, and a guide to help you sort through them.
- It was a quarter-century too late for him, but the county in which I live built (and I documented the creation of) a “spaceship” worthy of Sun Ra. The Sun Ra Arkestra played the venue in 2017 (shown below).
