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The Venus Hottentot: Poems

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"All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born." --W.B. Yeats, "Easter 1916"

"a terrible beau- ty a terrible beauty a terrible beauty a horn" --Elizabeth Alexander, "John Col"

The parallel of Ireland's War for Independence to John Coltrane's jazz at first may strike some readers as a stretch. However, through the pen of Elizabeth Alexander, an African-American poet who manages to discuss at once important issues of race and myriad topics within history, art and music, any connection is elucidated with eloquence and power. In "The Venus Hottentot," Alexander's first book of poems, the subjects range from personal memory to entire cultural memories to human subjects: John Coltrane, Romare Bearden, Claude Monet, a rare black cowboy. In the fourth section of her book, Alexander's essential message is one of unity in difference. "I could go to any city/ and write a poem" she states in "Miami Footnote." And she does, writing out of Boston, Philadelphia, Brooklyn. Her subjects are black, Hispanic, and the eye with which she paints them has its own form of the Monet's xanthopsia in "Monet at Giverny." Colors fade from the black and vivid blue of Bearden's collages into "yellow freesia," "red notes." In "Today's News", she states that "blackness is" is a poem she does not want to write, because "we are not one or ten or ten thousand things." The reader stands looking up and around at the montage, a Diego Rivera mural surrounding one with "walls and walls of scenes of work." The "Painting" is effusive, so why not include the Irish? Out of the clashes of culture, the curious, though ignorant, manipulation of a race in "The Venus Hottentot," a "terrible beauty is born." Alexander sees this beauty in all its colors and musical shadings, none of which alone can describe a situation. Shading her vision with Irish green or Monet's blue, she lives true to the words of "Today's News": "Elizabeth,/ this is your life. Get up and look for color,/ look for color everywhere." Perceptive readers would do well to join Alexander in her search; they just might find something unexpected and lovely.

If you're looking for an energetic, political, feminist poet who calls it like it is - you've got to read this book. It is beautifully provocative, and tightly written - very exciting stuff.

Elizabeth Alexander, The Venus Hottentot (University Press of Virginia, 1990)

I started a number of poetry volumes over the weekend, including a much-anticipated one from one of my favorite poets, and none of them captured me the way The Venus Hottentot did. Elizabeth Alexander has a wonderful voice, and she knows how to craft it into strong, yet delicate, poems:

"I half expect him to pull silk
scarves from inside me, paper poppies,
then a rabbit! He complains
at my scent and does not think
I comprehend, but I speak

English. I speak Dutch. I speak
a little French as well, and
languages Monseiur Cuvier
will never know have names."
("The Venus Hottentot")

Wonderful stuff indeed.

The entire collection is not as strong as this opening salvo; Alexander does devolve into polemic now and again, but usually manages to snap out of it within a few lines. This one goes on the "highly recommended" shelf. *** ½

We do well now to examine the first works, and every work, by our new inaugural poet, including her specially commissioned piece presented so thoughtfully, so inclusively, on Tuesday, January 20, 2009.

Here we find her at her primal best.

Any poetry collection may be called uneven, but read this one and discovre who this was reporting to the nation on Inaugural Day; you will know her and you will love and you will see her voice of America, her all-American voice, her reason and right to be there that historic day ringing in the new.

Read this book. And then read again, and again Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration. Come to know that important poem better, fully. YOu can hear her read it on various internet sites, but read it with your own inner voice, and your own pace, and feel the flowing of America, the growing of our people into this paradigm shift.

You will love her here in Venus Hottentot. You will respect her now, after the Inaugural.

And see everything which has come in between: American Sublime and The Black Interior and Antebellum Dream Book and Body of Life, all the great body of work which needs to be known, which yearns to be known, which expresses our own experience, that for which we have not the words until we have read well Elizabeth Alexander.

Websearch Elizabeth Alexander. Study her life, and read her work apart from her life, for it is our own life.

I remember of course, the mighty Robert Frost, deep into his great and grand old age, arising to read a section of a selection at the Inaugural Celebration of our greatest President, who later awarded him a Congressional Medal, the first civilian. I had hoped, with Oprah involved, that our great Maya Angelou would read I Rise at this present Inaugural (as if I had not cried enough at seeing and hearing Ms. Franklin) but I guess Ms. Angelou had already once done that chore. Still I would love to see her great, beaming, heavy-lidded face smiling us through the misery like a grandmother singing a strong lullaby of comfort with words of great pain and terrible beauty.

But we received Elizabeth Alexander. Please receive our new national poet, and read her well. Hear her now, and let us as a nation and as one people move on.

Read this book, and all you may find of her. Put away that remote control and pick up this book, please, and all of her, why not take all of her, please, for our nation, for our world, for our soul, for yourself.

If you're looking for an energetic, political, feminist poet who calls it like it is - you've got to read this book. It is beautifully provocative, and tightly written - very exciting stuff.

The book, the Venus Hottentot, by Elizabeth Alexander, is a powerful conflation of what it means to be an african-american woman artist in a space that is dominated by the aestheticized science of the white male patriarchy. Within her writing, Alexander combines beautiful imagery with potent politics. Much of Alexander's poetry involves a renaming. The poems titled with names involve an elaboration of those names into a series of images, a collage of interconnected senses, places and objects. The poet's active role as historian reawakens the components of history, allowing them to shape and be shaped by the poetic encounter. Through the restructuring of names within history, Alexander renames herself. History becomes a menagerie of colors rather than the juxtaposition of black lettering on blank paper, making her poetry a sensual compilation of rhythms, colors and rescripted historical themes.