Elise Hu

That was Eileen Miles in 2017 reading the poem from my rampant muse for her from the book I Must Be Living Twice, New and Selected Poems.

Elizabeth Alexander is a celebrated poet as well as an essayist, memoirist, playwright, philanthropist, and academic.

In 2009, she read a poem she wrote for President Barack Obama at his first inauguration.

I spoke with her in 2017.

Now, I understand you also studied ballet.

I did.

So we must speak now of Adele, my mother, Adele Logan Alexander, who insisted that I take ballet.

And every time I wanted to quit, she had this amazing way, which I've not been able to master with my children who squandered all their talents.

To, you know, kind of keep me going to whatever the thing was that she thought that I should be doing.

And there was a moment where it clicked in and I'm so glad that she did because once I got good enough to be able to really dance, you know, you repeat and you repeat and you repeat and you practice and you do the same things over and over and over again.

But eventually you can put it together and make something beautiful and understand it as an expressive art.

Sort of like life.

Sort of like life.

Exactly.

So it was my serious thing, ballet and then modern dance, that I did outside of school.

It was what I loved very, very much.

And I was very good at it.

But being very good at it did not mean being good enough at it to do it.

You know, so to see that you can devote yourself so thoroughly to something and love something so thoroughly.

But what does it mean to really be an artist?