Elizabeth Alexander at the Cambridge Public Library

On the evening of April 30, Elizabeth Alexander—the 2009 inaugural poet, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and Yale professor—spoke at the Cambridge Public Library in an event sponsored by the Harvard Book Store. Alexander read from her latest work—a memoir titled “The Light of the World” about the passing of her late husband, the painter Ficre Ghebreyesus—and answered audience questions. Before the event began, she sat down with The Harvard Crimson to discuss her work.

THC: Why did you make the choice to write your recent memoir in prose instead of poetry?

EA: I didn’t really set out to write a memoir at all. I wrote it the same way that I always write poetry—which is to say word by word, sound by sound, image by image. Eventually, as that built up, I saw that what I had was not discrete poems but rather something that, while in distilled short bits, wanted to be longer.

THC: Do you feel that there are differences between what prose can do and what poetry can do?

EA: Poetry is always aspiring to the condition of music.… It needs to be [a] song that emanates from the body in some kind of way.… I hope that what I’ve written is something like a poet’s prose, which is to say it has those same concerns, but it has more of the kind of story and storytelling that we are accustomed to in either fiction or in narrative nonfiction.

THC: You move forward and backward in time and consider the same events from different angles in your memoir. Why is that?

EA: I think that time is never strictly linear. We have memory that intrudes, all the time.… I thought to write something that combined both the forward movement and propulsion of telling an urgent story…but that also was true to the way sensation and memory always make their way in and interrupt that kind of forward march.

THC: There were many references to other literary works in your memoir. How did you choose to integrate these allusions into the text, and what effect do you feel [they have]?

EA: That’s who I am! I am a poet and a literature professor, and I’ve done it for 30 years. So it would be strange for that not to be in something that I wrote.… There are also art forms in the book. There’s poetry, painting, music. I think that there’s an enactment of a life with art.… Making art was my way of moving through grief.… I continually engage with various art forms in the book because that’s how I know that I’m alive, and that’s what I care to live on.

THC: Why was your book mostly written in very short chapters?

EA: I write in concentration, in distillation.… I think that also because what I was writing about had a certain sort of intensity...that sometimes, perhaps, there was too much to bear. So if a reader could stop, in between these little chapters, and sort of catch her breath—there’s probably that idea in there as well.

THC: When you were setting out to write your memoir, did you have the idea of the four sections that it is organized into ahead of time?

EA: No, it was very organic…. No plan at first. Just writing to know that I was still on this earth, really, honestly. As I wrote more and more and more of these little snippets, I began to see that they were adding up to something. It was only after there was a large pile that the shaping began to emerge.

THC: What is it like to publish this memoir, putting out this intensely personal document?

EA: Poems are made from the self. Poems are true in some kind of way. But certainly this, the first-person, is the real me. The children are the actual children. Though it is obviously very carefully made—there’s no artifice to hide behind. So I think it's very interesting, actually, sharing and meeting other people with their stories in a quite more direct way than often happens with poems.