Contemporary Poetry

66 contemporary poetry

work songs; its focus is upon acts of mending broken communi-
ties. Alexander’s opening poses a caustic critique upon the failure
of the Bush administration, the breakdown of an American polity
and its dependence upon a language of mistrust, a failure to act in
the spirit of a central ‘good’: ‘Each day we go about our business /
walking past each other, catching each other’s / eyes or not, about
to speak or speaking’.
In her essay on June Jordan, Alexander states that Jordan’s
emphasis on linguistic innovation poses an instructive example to
her own work.^21 Alexander suggests that ‘For time immemorial
across geographies and peoples, poetry has taken as its subject poli-
tics, that is, the affairs of the polis, the community and its people’
(p. 116 ). Commenting on the interrelationship between poetic
form and politics she proposes that:

Poets do have responsibility to make images that compel, to

distil language, to write with model precision and specifi city,

that is what poetry has to offer to other genres. It makes

something happen with language that takes the breath away

or shifts the mind. For the poem, which is after all not the

newspaper, must move beyond the information it contains

while simultaneously imparting the information it contains.^22

In Alexander’s estimation the political poem refuses becoming
reportage. Images of mending, regrouping, artistic creation and
daily schedules become the loci of the poem. We are presented
with a ‘someone’ who is darning as well as people making music,
teaching, waiting for a bus and watching the weather. Far from
being a praise song of America, the poem focuses on the elements
within American society which fail to function – what Alexander
refers to as the ‘things in need of repair’. Importantly, the poem
frames the relationship between citizens as a linguistic bond giving
reference to the constitution as an ‘encounter’ in words. Whereas
Angelou’s poem stresses the importance of inclusion and multi-
plicity, Alexander’s poem stresses the importance of encountering
others through travel, and the curiosity to know what is beyond
one’s own community.
Alexander maps America through its highways, dirt tracks and