It may not be the most obvious combination, but Elizabeth Alexander and Lloyd Schwartz served up sonnets and sestinas while readers sipped beer in the basement of the Anchor Bar on College Street Tuesday night. Their readings were the latest fare in the year-old Ordinary Evening Reading Series at the downtown watering hole.
Alexander, a poet and tenured professor of African American Studies at Yale, read primarily from her forthcoming book of poetry, Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color. Along with Marilyn Nelson, Alexander wrote the book of sonnets to dramatize the experiences at the schoolhouse where 19th Century Connecticut resident Prudence Crandall educated black girls in Canterbury despite violent attacks and even arson.
The book, to be released this summer, is a vividly illustrated volume primarily for young adults. Alexander noted impishly, “Marilyn persuaded me to join this project because writing poems for young adults, you get a little more money, and you write the same poems you would anyway.”
Taken together, the sonnets offer a formidable introduction to a particularly brutal but also inspiring slice of history. Alexander’s subtle development of themes and issues is approachable and appropriate for younger audiences, but sufficiently rich to engage even the most sophisticated adult readers, as well.
For instance, even as she develops the crucial role that religion played in the life of Prudence Crandall and her students, she also reveals that religion may have been subsumed at times by an even deeper faith in literacy. When the windows of the schoolhouse were smashed and the building torched, Crandall reflects “Strangely it is not God’s words that ring in my head but the words from a charred schoolbook.” She notes that although these words were not spiritual, they nevertheless calmed her spiritually.
Alexander’s reading style emphasizes precise intonation and a deliberate staccato rhythm that highlights the formal elements of the sonnets. Her voice exaggerated the rhythm of each line: “It WA-sn’t AS if WE knew NO-thing BE-fore.” This effect was amplified by effective repetition and a series of dramatic pairings, for instance, “Poetry, I said, poetry, I screamed,” and “Call and response,” and “Jalapeno and scotch bonnet,” among others.
Lloyd Schwartz (pictured) offered a similarly engaging, perhaps even more animated presentation of poems from his books Cairo Traffic and Goodnight Gracie. With almost implausibly bushy eyebrows and a snowy cloud for a beard, he was a dramatic presence. His hands bobbed alternately and his fingers seemed to squeeze ripened words from the air as if they were pieces of fruit.
His writing is similarly arresting, presenting sharp flashes of ordinary life, including a conversation with his mother about a poem he was attempting to write about her. Helpfully, she offers, “I should dig up more of my memories.”
Like any child, Schwartz is both grateful and slightly uncomfortable with the idea of being helped. And he astutely captures the awkwardness of having to account for unfinished work: “I’m still working on it,” he explains. Schwartz echoes the mother’s reply with self-effacing humor, “You mean, you’re correcting it with commas and semi-colons?” Among the poetry set, this line was good for a belly laugh.
Schwartz concluded his reading with another poem about poetry. This particular venture into the world of metadiscourse was more haunting. His final poem outlined a disturbing nightmare that wrenched him from sleep, “Still shaky, I switch on the light and stumble to my desk.” Somewhat unsurprisingly, Alexander’s pieces, too, find solace and solutions in the process of poetic expression: “Poetry is the human voice, and are we not interesting to each other?”
Although the organizers rather appropriately lifted the title of the reading series from Wallace Stevens’ “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” future events in the series will include prose writing as well as poetry. The next Ordinary Evening Reading is scheduled to take place at the Anchor Bar on Sep. 18 at 7 p.m.
