Elizabeth Alexander on Teaching and Learning Poetry | Big Think

Elizabeth Alexander on Teaching and Learning Poetry

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The poet covers poetry’s dynamics, from graduate to grade school.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elizabeth Alexander:

Elizabeth Alexander – poet, educator, memoirist, scholar, and arts activist – is president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the nation's largest funder in arts and culture, and humanities in higher education. Dr. Alexander has held distinguished professorships at Smith College, Columbia University, and Yale University, where she taught for 15 years and chaired the African American Studies Department.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What should poets consider when thinking about an MFA?

Alexander: Well, I think to each our own. I really do think it’s not the answer for everyone and I don’t like to think that people, you know, to make that choice because of the career. I think it’s not… it doesn’t really guarantee you anything. So I wouldn’t want people to put all their eggs in that basket for the career. On the other hand, to hear someone who is a passionate and committed writer say, “You know what? This gives me time to do some writing. This gives me time to work on a manuscript and that’s how I’m thinking about the year.” I think that that’s a wonderful and sensible thing to do. It’s great if you can get a fellowship to do that and, you know, used to be when there are fewer of them that a fellowship, you know, paid year in graduate school made a tremendous amount of sense, made more sense than anything else in a way, as a way to try to get a first book done. I think study is good, I think community is good. Do I think that there are positive, creative communities in all MFA programs? No; in some? Absolutely, absolutely. And so you see people who make their communities of readers for life or who are able to apprentice themselves with a teacher who changes their life, that was certainly the case for me studying with Derek Walcott, he was the only poetry teacher I ever had and he was the teacher who changed my life and that… and that was that. So, if you’re lucky enough to make that connection and absolutely of course, it’s worth it. I think also, you know, for MFA programs that have a classroom component that’s not just the creative writing workshop? So then in other words designate some time in your life to, you know, really, really, really read and soak up a lot, I think that’s great. Although I also think for any artist and for any poet, there is no substitute for autodidacticism, you know, that you have to have a reading hunger that leads you on your own path, that that’s a very, very, very important part to my mind of being an artist.

Question: How can success be measured in poetry?

Alexander: There are so many poets who make a life in the work and do their work but that’s not necessarily measurable in conventionally successful ways. You look at… there’s a very great poet who died about a year ago named Christopher Gilbert who wrote a book called across the mutual landscape and he published this book about 25 years ago, it was a book… a kind of an underground hit with… I know many poets for whom this is a secret, special book for them and he was a practicing, I think, psychotherapist? He had another professional life, apparently, he was writing poems and kept writing poems but the legacy as we know it now is that one book but it was a very beautiful and important book. So, you know, how do you put that against the career of someone like an Adrienne Rich right? Who publishes her first book of poems in the Yale series of younger poets when she’s in college, you know, she’s 20 or 21 or something when… on picks that book. And now as an elder, she’s had a whole steady productive… I mean, that, that’s a life in the arts. That’s another kind of success and so eventhough, you know, poem for poem there, there are many rich poems that are indelible and incredibly important to me. But I also learned so much from the whole career, the whole life. So there’s so many different ways that it plays out, you see? And in different ways that I would think of… of success so I think that it’s mysterious perseverance that keeps you going.

Question: How do you get your students to write?

Read the full transcript at