blueprints

72 | elizabeth alexander
Something shifted for me in the wake of the death of the painter
Romare Bearden. His work had been deeply meaningful to me my whole
life, and I had written poems in response to that work while studying with
Walcott. I made a pilgrimage from Philadelphia to the service at the Cathedral
of St. John the Divine. A grand service it was—I remember the vibrant
Bearden works lining the walls of the cathedral, the Alvin Ailey dancer who
offered a solo, the pianist Jackie McLean, the eulogies by Ralph Ellison and
by my own beloved teacher and Bearden’s great friend, Derek Walcott.
Afterward I went out to eat with Derek and a large group of black visual
and literary artists. I was the youngest at the table, the proverbial jug with
big ears listening to the fabulous grown-ups tell stories and carry on, watching
them drink their liquor and put hot sauce on their food.
Everyone at the table was brilliant and black.
i knew that at the center of that vision were two pillars:
unending discipline and the fertile soil of black history
and creativity as source and sustenance.
Everyone at the table was brilliant and black and had made a commitment
to a life in the arts. Everyone understood the one-foot-in-front-ofthe-other
aspects of making creative work, the discipline, the joy, the privilege,
the struggle. That table of vibrant black people telling stories and
eating food and sharing precious bits of black cultural history that would be
otherwise lost was a dream come true for me. I had never been in such
company with as clear a taste of my own life to come, a life I was committed
to and would build. I wanted that world to be my home; I knew I must
build and cultivate that home. And I knew that at the center of that vision
were two pillars: unending discipline and the fertile soil of black history and
creativity as source and sustenance. I also understood that I did not need
rhetoric or declaration of anything about “blackness” as such from Derek
because he made as much sense at that table as he did at the tables of Frost
and Heaney and Lowell and Brodsky.
I became a poet before Internet communities, still doing it as Sylvia
Plath compellingly chronicled the process of becoming a working poet in