How to Be a Poet: Elizabeth Alexander on the Yin-Yang of Connection and Contradiction

“The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us,” James Baldwin wrote. “Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.” No matter how slant they may tell it, that truth tells us back to ourselves, helps us tell each other what it is like to be alive. It is not simple work, for its raw material is complexity. It is n