Meena Alexander

A Conversation with Meena Alexander: New York City, January 2002

profiling of immigrants and international students, as well as the antiwar organizing in New York City, suddenly brought a new layer of urgency and complexity to our thoughts about artistic creation and critical dissent. I had been exploring the postcolonial novel as a literary form engaged in social critique. Reading Meena Alexander’s Illiterate Heart in the months following the devastation made me reflect on the place of the lyric poem in the public sphere. What were the possibilities of this intensely private form to bear witness to history, to rely on the logic of images to press its point, free of the overarching frame of narrative? It was against this background that the following conversations with Meena Alexander took place, the first at the cafeteria of the CUNY Graduate Center and the second at Alexander’s home. We made written additions to the conversations after the initial meetings. Our informal, backand-forth discussions helped us to reflect on the recent traumatic events in the public sphere. It seemed to me that there was a relationship between places and histories we were forced to confront. This is visible in Alexander’s innovation of the lyric form, which grapples with multiple geographies and languages of migrancy and confronts the personal and public facets of dislocation and grief through the workings of memory.

Lyric in a Time of Violence

There is an uncommon light in the sky Pale petals are scored into stone. I want to write of the linden tree That stoops at the edge of the river But its leaves are filled with insects With wings the color of dry blood. At the far side of the river Hudson By the southern tip of our island A mountain soars, a torrent of sentences Syllables of flame stitch the rubble An eye, a lip, a cut hand blooms Sweet and bitter smoke stains the sky.

“Falling Fire”: The Negativity of Knowledge in the Poetry of William Blake

To mythologize consciousness is the poet’s privilege. For the Romantic poet such an act becomes primary to the task of poetry itself, for consciousness, crucial to the creation of poetic knowledge is itself raised to a fiction, one central to the poetic oeuvre. The status of consciousness can however differ. It might be Wordsworth’s almost naturalistic presentation, the “sad perplexity” of thought that he recreates, as close an approximation as possible to the quick complexities of reflection that struggles for the truth.2 Or it might be deliberately surreal, a Symbolist “dereglement” of all the senses, with the poet, as Rimbaud had him, cast as Other, witness of a divine madness — “C’est faux de dire: Je pense. On devait dire: On me pense.” As witness — “Car JE est un autre” — wrote Rimbaud — consciousness becomes a careful recorder of knowledge the ordinary world cannot easily harbor.3