Radio Derb In response to innumerable requests, I have dug out as many Radio Derb transcripts as I can find, and put them on my website here. I shall be diligent about posting future transcripts — diligent, but slow, as we’d really prefer you listen to the broadcasts for full mellifluous effect. There’ll probably be a lag of about a week before broadcast and posting, with occasional weeks when I just forget altogether. Nobody edits these transcripts, by the way, so they come with no guarantees as to spelling, grammar, usage, or punctuation.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ADVERTISEMENT
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Elizabeth Alexander Poetess Elizabeth Alexander has been tapped to read a poem at the upcoming presidential inauguration. I had never heard of the lady before this news came out. Taking a wild shot in the dark, I guessed her to be a whiny left-wing black feminist. Well, whaddya know.
What topics excite this poet? Let’s see. There’s the Middle Passage:
Barracoon, sarcophagus, indestructible grief
Nesting in the hollows of the abdomen.
The slave-ship empty, its cargo landed
And sold for twelve ounces of gold a-piece.
And then there’s the “Hottentot Venus”:
Monsieur Cuvier investigates
between my legs, poking, prodding,
sure of his hypothesis.
Not forgetting childbirth, of course, which is kind of like jazz:
Giving birth is like jazz, something from silence,
then all of it . . .
. . . and kind of like the Middle Passage:
. . . Long, elegant boats,
blood-boiling sunshine, human cargo,
a hand-made kite . . .
On the evidence of the poems Ms. Alexander has put on her website, you could sum up her thematic range as: “I’m black! Black black black! And I have a vagina!”
And then there are the essays, which are about — what else? — black poets . . . including herself, natch. Of her own poem “Amistad,” which is about, uh, the Middle Passage, she tells us:
I wanted to write a black history poem that was not just about stoicism. I also wanted to explore the past in the face of the aggressive ahistoricity that plagues and misnames this nation and is a tool for misleading the people.
In what way is our nation misnamed? Which part of the name does Ms. Alexander object to: the “United,” the “States,” or the “America”? Or is it perhaps the “of,” or the “the”? Hard to figure.
All this dreary solipsism and picking at historical scabs might be easier to take if it was delivered with any art or wit. No, there is nothing here but formless stream-of-consciousness driveling, padded out with feeble imagery and nonsensical similes.
I dream the OB-Gyn is here
to spend the night with us. He wears
his white coat and his stethescope [sic]
to bed, looks like a loaf
of whole wheat bread.
It goes without saying that nothing rhymes or scans here. I suppose that would be “acting white.” Nor are there any familiar forms to rest the eye on — a sonnet, straightforward quatrains, a villanelle. (In one of the interviews on her website, Ms. Alexander refers to having written formal verse, but I couldn’t find any examples.) Nothing worth remembering, nothing striking, nothing amusing, nothing of universal appeal, nothing that owes anything to the magnificent centuries-long tradition of English verse; only the monotonous, structureless, sub-literate whining of nursed and petted victimhood.
