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CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 1 TOM PUTNAM: Good afternoon. I'm Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and on behalf of Tom McNaught, Executive Director of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and all of my Library and Foundation colleagues, I thank you all for joining us on this beautiful spring day, the type of day that the poet Rumi may have had in mind when writing – page 18 of the new book – "Come to the orchard in spring. There is light and wine and sweethearts in the pomegranate flowers." Let me begin by acknowledging the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums, including lead sponsor Bank of America, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, Raytheon, the Boston Foundation, and our media partners, The Boston Globe, WBUR and NECN. Our time is short and we want to leave time for all of you to get your book signed, but we're thrilled to have with us today Caroline Kennedy to introduce her poetry anthology, She Walks in Beauty: A Woman's Journey Through Poems. We are joined by two of the poets whose work is featured in the book, Elizabeth Alexander and Naomi Shibab Nye, who I will introduce after Caroline speaks. Of the many remarkable documents in this Library, one of my favorites is on the back of page four of a speech that then-Senator John F. Kennedy gave in Washington State on June 21st, 1959. One senses that he had read the speech and decided it needed a stronger ending, so he leans over to his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, and scribbles, "Give me the last lines from 'Ulysses'." And he begins to write them for her, "Come my friends," and then you see in her writing, "Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Sitting well in order, let us smite the sounding furrow." It goes on for eight lines until the conclusion, "That which we are, we are; one equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 2 She has it memorized by heart and quickly jots it down, making a few corrections along the way for him to use as he sees fit. Then on the last page of the typewritten text, we see JFK's handwriting with a new conclusion that he has crafted for his address. He writes, "In the poem 'Ulysses,' Tennyson the poet tells us how Ulysses in his old age decides to set out once again on a last adventure." And then one assumes he reads the final lines to the poem that his wife has provided to him, though he crosses out the line, "made weak by time and fate," not wanting to imply that notion to his audience, and inserts, "dealt harshly perhaps by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." I was saying to Naomi Shibab Nye the fact that he had the audacity to correct Tennyson shows a certain level of confidence. [Laughter] The document is a testament to the partnership between John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy, to their own appreciation of poetry and their belief in the power of words, all of which has been passed on to their daughter. And though we won't put her to the test and see how much Tennyson she can recite from memory, we are always honored to have her here at the Kennedy Library. Please join me in welcoming Caroline Kennedy. [Applause] CAROLINE KENNEDY: Thank you, Tom. That was a wonderful introduction. He hasn't shared that document with anyone else, but it's interesting that you did bring it up, because my mother started memorizing poetry with her grandfather. She used to go and see him on Wednesday afternoons after dancing class, and they would memorize poems together. That was a poem that she memorized with her grandfather. I've talked about this with my other poetry anthologies. She always had us collect and give her a poem for a birthday or Mother's Day or Christmas, and she saved them all in a scrapbook that I have, where she put all the ones that my brother and I chose. I've continued to do that with my own children. CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 3 "Ulysses" starts it out, and she wrote in the front, "This is a poem that I memorized with my grandfather." So it's really nice to bring that full circle because she is one of the main inspirations for this new book that I've put together, called She Walks in Beauty, which is obviously the line from the famous poem by Lord Byron, who was a favorite of her and my father's because he was a man of action as well as a man of ideas and a great writer. Actually, my father bought her a mirror that had once belonged to Lord Byron, so that's one of the reasons why I chose that title for the book, as well as the fact that I think all of us would like to be described that way, as walking in beauty. Or we try. I wanted to welcome all of you today to the Kennedy Library and to tell you how much it means that you've come. I hope you've had a wonderful day. I've heard about it and I know that a lot of great ideas and understanding has been exchanged. I'm very happy to launch my book here in Boston because a love of language and words and ideas was something that my parents shared. They really believed that America should lead with our spirit, not just our economy or our military power. On a personal level, they were each shaped by the things that they loved to read. My father read oratory and history, and my mother poetry and memoir and novels. For me, it's a special thrill to be here with two of the poets that I most admire and have gotten to know during the process of writing these books, Elizabeth Alexander and Naomi Shibab Nye. As we all know, one of my father's most important and symbolic acts was to invite Robert Frost to read at his Inauguration, which elevated that event and placed it in the continuum of state ceremonial occasions that goes back to Classical times. We're so lucky to have Elizabeth here, who read at President Obama's Inauguration, and her wonderful poem "Praise Song for the Day," which brings the traditions of Whitman and Frost and others and makes it personal and contemporary and feminine and maternal in a wonderful way. So it's a great honor to have her here. CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 4 And I would like to thank my friend, Naomi Shibab Nye, who brings the entire world into her work. We corresponded when I was putting together Family of Poems for children, and we met when I visited San Antonio during the 2008 Presidential campaign. Since then, she has come to the Bronx, where I work at an afterschool program, and spent a day with the kids up there and has continued to be a great friend and supporter. When I was working on this book, I was having trouble with a couple of the sections. I couldn't find poems about friendship, and I couldn't understand why poets didn't seem to have any friends [laughter], and that everyone else seemed to write and talk and chatter and share and talk about their friends and their female friends, and women are always talking about their friends, except there was not one poem that I could find about poets having a friend. And so I said, "Am I wrong? Or am I missing something out here? Could you help me?" Naomi was incredibly generous and reached out to her poetic friends and it turns out that there are many, many wonderful poems about friendship between women and many of them are in this book, and it's largely thanks to her. So I'm very grateful to you for helping me out. One of the things she told the students the day she came up was that in a world of words and language, we can never really feel alone. That struck me because many people think of poetry as a solitary art form: one poet writing for one reader who's reading somewhere else. But I think this afternoon and this conversation will show that poetry can really be a way of creating community. Poems are meant to be heard, and reading poems and sharing them starts a conversation. Poetry is the oldest art form and the way generations passed down social ideals and values and personal truths. That was all done through the spoken word. Today, in our interconnected world, when the most important things happen between people, I think poetry has a renewed importance and a renewed role to play. CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 5 Throughout history, women have been the weavers of the world. We are the ones that weave people together. We weave our experience of life into patterns and our stories into words. Poems are one of the ways that we do this. They distill our emotions in very few words that we can carry with us and share as we talk and weave the cloth of our lives. She Walks in Beauty is the fourth poetry anthology that I've put together, and it grew out of two sort of related developments in my life. For the past eight years, I've been working in the New York City public schools and raising my own three children, the youngest of whom is going off to college this fall. Education has been my focus, both at home and at work; soon the homeschooling will come to an end. But amidst all the debate about education today, I don't think that children often hear adults talk enough about what they're reading and how they're reading it and why it matters. I really have appreciated how fortunate I am to have grown up in a world of language and ideas, because more than anything else those are what we need to change the world. We see it everywhere. There are revolutions of ideas happening around the world, and here at home we're engaged in deep debates about what kind of society we want to have. It may be true that if you turn on the TV no one is talking about poetry. But in fact, I think poetry does have a role to play. It's the essence of language and the purest expression of ideas and emotions. Poems are short, they're intense, they give us a new way of looking at things. They can bring us up short and they can remind us of what's really important, and once we know ourselves and what we believe in, we can use that power to build a better world. William Carlos Williams said it best in his poem, "Asphodel," in which he wrote, "It's difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 6 A few years ago, I turned 50 -- not that many years ago -- and I know it makes people feel really old when I say that. [Laughter] But you look great. [Laughter] A couple of my friends gave me poems that seemed to capture this time in my life. One of them is here, one of the people who started this book off is sitting here today, paying some attention, not all attention. I looked at them every so often, but I was working on other poetry anthologies for kids at the time. The first poem was from a woman at the desk next to me, "Poems of Our Climate," by Wallace Stevens, which contains the line, "the imperfect is our paradise," which resonated deeply with me as it elevated what I had thought was just compromise and frustration into the essence of being human. The second was "Leap Before You Look," by W. H. Auden, which is such an exciting poem and some people think is a good summary of my foray into politics. [Laughter] The third was "To Be of Use" by Marge Piercy. I tried to include these in the kids' anthologies, but they didn't really fit. I accumulated more poems from friends and family, and then the poems seemed to want a book of their own, so I went to my editor and I said, "I have this great idea. I want to do a book of poems for middleaged women." She looked at me like I was completely crazy and tried to pretend she wasn't approaching middle age herself. [Laughter] Then she said, "Okay, see what you can come up with." So I tried to round out the picture of a woman's life experience through poems and along the way, I found poems that evoked memories of my own life as well as poems that enriched my daily life. The poem that Seamus Heaney wrote about his mother, for example, and the closeness of the time they spent together when the rest of the family was off at church and he got the chance to stay home and peel potatoes with her, deepened my own experience of being a mother, CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 7 as well as bringing back the feeling that you have when you're a child sharing a special time with an older person. There are poems in the book that my husband read to me, that my children gave me, that my mother loved, as well as ones that were new to me. There are, of course, many poems about love and solitude, but I had to look harder than I expected to find poems about modern kinds of work, other than writing. But most of the poems that had been written, particularly by women poets, have in the past obviously dealt with more traditional forms of work. So I predict that will be a growing area, as well as female friendship. I tried to choose poems that transform ordinary moments into extraordinary ones, poems that made me laugh as well as those I have returned to often for inspiration. I hope there's something here for everyone and that people will use this book as a starting point for thinking about the extraordinary moments in their own lives and the poems that describe those. So thank you so much, and now we're going to get a treat. [Applause] TOM PUTNAM: So just a couple of logistical matters before we hear from the two poets. The book signing will follow immediately. It'll be out in this hallway. The book is on sale in our museum store, so you need to go to the store first to buy the book before you get in the line. We're going to take some written questions after we hear from the poets, and my colleague Amy Macdonald has index cards, so if you'd like to ask a question, just put it on that index card and she'll bring them up to me. I can't top the introductions that Caroline did to our two poets, so we'll hear from them in this order: first Naomi Shibab Nye and then Elizabeth Alexander. [Applause] CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 8 NAOMI SHIBAB NYE: Thank you all for being here. Welcome. Thank you, Caroline, for those wonderful words, and congratulations. Creating an anthology is truly an act of labor and devotion, and you've done an amazing job. I have to say that the section introductions and the introduction to the whole book are so compelling. I think I would love the book even without the poems, just with your introductions, because they speak what so many of us have been feeling about why we need poetry all these years. And they're really eloquent, so thank you so much for what you did with them. I think poetry could not have a better advocate than Caroline Kennedy, and I know that all of us feel extremely happy to read the book, to be in the book, to be able to share the book with people we love, and to know that Caroline's out there talking about something that matters to all of us, a humanizing act. So gratitude from many. I'd like to read two poems, besides my own: one by a poet whose work I had never read, but the pleasure of an anthology is that it makes you want to go track down this poet. You have to be a detective to begin with to put a book together, and then as readers we have the great pleasure of following up on finding more work by the person we've discovered in the book. So this is a poem by Mary Ursula Bethell called "Time." I think I was attracted to it because every time a gardener comes to my house, he looks at my raggedy yard and says, "Long overdue." [Laughter] "Established" is a good word, much used in garden books, "The plant, when established" . . . Oh, become established quickly, quickly, garden! For I am fugitive, I am very fugitive– Those that come after me will gather these roses, And watch, as I do now, the white wisteria CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 9 Burst, in the sunshine, from its pale green sheath. Planned. Planted. Established. Then neglected, Till at last the loiterer by the gate will wonder At the old, old cottage, the old wooden cottage, And say, "One might build here, the view is glorious; This must have been a pretty garden once." "Time, by Mary Ursula Bethell The other poem is by a poet I loved a lot when I was a child, but I've never seen this poem of hers before, so what fun to discover it in your book. Amy Lowell, "September 1918" This afternoon was the color of water falling through sunlight; The trees glittered with the tumbling of leaves; The sidewalks shone like alleys of dropped maple leaves, And the houses ran along them laughing out of square, open windows. Under a tree in the park, Two little boys, lying flat on their faces, Were carefully gathering red berries To put in a pasteboard box. Some day there will be no war, Then I shall take out this afternoon And turn it in my fingers, CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 10 And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate, And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves. Today I can only gather it And put it into my lunch-box, For I have time for nothing But the endeavor to balance myself Upon a broken world. And my humble poem is called "My Friend's Divorce." I want her To dig up every plant in her garden, the pansies, the penta, roses, rununculas, thyme and the lilies, the thing nobody knows the name of, unwind the morning glories from the wire windows of the fence, CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 11 take the blooming and the almost-blooming and the dormant, especially the dormant, and then and then plant them in her new yard on the other side of town and see how they breathe! Thank you. [Applause] ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Hello, everybody. I'm really happy to be in this beautiful book. It's a beautiful book. It's a handbook. So thank you so very, very much, and to read with Naomi is a joy. Poets do have friends and sometimes … we're all over the place [laughter] and we never get to see each other. And sometimes we feel like we're friends even if we don't really know each other, but we know each other through walking this strange path together. So that's a particular joy. And to be with all of you in this building, surrounded by all of this blue and filled with so much life and legacy is very extraordinary. CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 12 The first poem I want to read is by another poet. It's nice when we're asked to do that because then you get to have another poet's words in your mouth, rhythms in your body, and you get to pretend for about a minute that poem you admire is a poem that you actually wrote. This has been an anthem for me for a long time. "To Be of Use" by Marge Piercy. The people I love the best jump into work head first without dallying in the shallows and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight. They seem to become natives of that element, the black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half-submerged balls. I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again. I want to be with people who submerge into the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out. The work of the world is common as mud. CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 13 Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust. But the thing worth doing well done has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident. Greek amphoras for wine or oil, Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums but you know they were made to be used. The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real. What could be more true? This next poem, changing course in the middle, thinking again about friendship, is by Elizabeth Bishop, "Letter to N.Y.," thinking again of the far-flung friends. For Louise Crane In your next letter I wish you'd say where you are going and what you are doing; how are the plays, and after the plays what other pleasures you're pursuing: taking cabs in the middle of the night, driving as if to save your soul where the road goes round and round the park and the meter glares like a moral owl, and the trees look so queer and green CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 14 standing alone in big black caves and suddenly you're in a different place where everything seems to happen in waves, and most of the jokes you just can't catch, like dirty words rubbed off a slate, and the songs are loud but somehow dim and it gets so terribly late, and coming out of the brownstone house to the gray sidewalk, the watered street, one side of the buildings rises with the sun like a glistening field of wheat. –Wheat, not oats, dear. I’m afraid if it's wheat it's none of your sowing, nevertheless I'd like to know what you are doing and where you are going. "Letter to N.Y.," Elizabeth Bishop And now I'm going to read two poems of my own. This one is called "The End." It's in the "Heartbreak" section. But we move on. [Laughter] "The End" The last thing of you is a doll, velveteen and spangle, silk douponi trousers, Ali Baba slippers that curl up at the toes, CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 15 tinsel moustache, a doll we had made in your image for our wedding with one of me which you have. They sat atop our coconut cake. We cut it into snowy squares and fed each other, while God watched. All other things are gone now: the letters boxed, pajama-sized shirts bagged for Goodwill, odd utensils farmed to graduating students' first apartments (citrus zester, apple corer, rusting mandoline), childhood pictures returned to your mother, trinkets sorted real from fake and molten to a single bar of gold, untruths parsed, most things unsnarled, the rest let go save the doll, which I find in a closet, examine closely, then set into a hospitable tree which I drive past daily for weeks and see it still there, in the rain, in the wind, fading in the sun, no one will take it, it will not blow away, in the rain, in the wind, it holds tight to its branch, then one day, it is gone. CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 16 [Applause] Thank you. And then to end, this poem is called "The Dream That I Told My Mother-in-Law." [Laughter] It is a funny title. It's not a funny poem. "The Dream That I Told My Mother-in-Law" In the room almost filled with our bed, the small bedroom, the king-sized bed high up and on casters so sometimes we would roll, in the room in the corner of the corner apartment on top of a hill so the bed would roll, we felt as if we might break off and drift, float, become our own continent. When your mother first entered our apartment she went straight to that room and libated our bed with water from your homeland. Soon she saw in my cheeks the fire and poppy stain, and soon thereafter on that bed came the boy. Then months, then the morning I cracked first one then two then three eggs in a white bowl and all had double yolks, and your mother (now my mother) read the signs. Signs everywhere, signs rampant, a season of signs and a vial of white dirt brought across three continents CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 17 to the enormous white bed that rolled and now held three, and soon held four, four on the bed, two boys, one man, and me, our mother reading all signs and blessing our bed, blessing our bed filled with babies, blessing our bed through her frailty, blessing us and our bed, blessing us and our bed. She began to dream of childhood flowers, her long-gone parents. I told her my dream in a waiting room: a photographer photographed women, said her portraits revealed their truest selves. She snapped my picture, peeled back the paper, and there was my son’s face, my first son, my self. Mamma loved that dream so I told it again. And soon she crossed over to her parents, sisters, one son (War took that son. We destroy one another), and women came by twos and tens wrapped in her same fine white bearing huge pans of stew, round breads, homemade wines, and men came in suits with their ravaged faces CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 18 and together they cried and cried and cried and keened and cried and the sound was a live hive swelling and growing, all the water in the world, all the salt, all the wails, and the sound grew too big for the building and finally lifted what needed to be lifted from the casket and we quieted and watched it waft up and away like feather, like ash. Daughter, she said, when her journey began, You are a mother now, and you have to take care of the world. Thank you. [Applause] TOM PUTNAM: So, Caroline, I thought I'd ask the first question to you. We'll do a few questions here before the book signing. And I agree with Naomi, that the introduction to the book and each introduction to each … CAROLINE KENNEDY: I was wondering when you wrote me an email about how you were reading my introductions. I said, why is he doing that? Now I realize. Okay, go ahead. TOM PUTNAM: And it's quite personal. We learn quite a bit about you. I marked a couple of things here: That when you were in convent school, you were in love with your pony. That in high school, you despaired of ever having a boyfriend. And that when you recently hit your 50th birthday, you felt the "tiny terror of sliding down the hill into a crumpled heap of old age." [Laughter] CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 19 You alluded to this already, but can you tell us a little bit more about not just picking the poems, but picking the themes. Obviously it was your decision to do the various themes. So what was that process like? CAROLINE KENNEDY: I started with the poems themselves, and then they kind of grouped themselves. I'm always torn because I also could see a book that you didn't know what was coming next. But I think people -- too many people -- are still intimidated by the idea of poetry. So I think that hopefully the sort of broad headings are maybe a little bit of a guide or break it down into a little bit of a more manageable thing. People really often, I think, use or turn to poetry when they're looking or feeling something specific. So in that way, I think the sections are roughly intended to follow the major milestones of our lives -- whether that's growing up, growing old, falling in love, or breaking up, or becoming a mother, or how to live, sort of words of wisdom. So they sort of organized themselves. Then there's a little bit of juggling. Many poems could go in any section, so it's intended to be a pretty loose thing. TOM PUTNAM: You said there were some poems that were new to you. There's this whole universe of poetry. How did you discover those new poems? Did friends send them to you? CAROLINE KENNEDY: Well, it was the process that Naomi described. Obviously, there were poems that people sent that were new to me, and obviously, I kind of grew up with a more traditional exposure to poetry, but then I would go looking for something. There's a section called "Beauty, Clothes and Things of this World." A lot of the poems I probably wouldn't have paid all that much attention to but when I knew that I got interested in that, there's a lot of great poems about how you see yourself and how you present yourself. And as Naomi said, one thing leads to another; one poet leads you to more of their work. That actually, for me, is the fun part of the project because it's this never-ending search with a little bit of focus. So it's fun. CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 20 TOM PUTNAM: So Naomi, it's interesting, I had prepared this question beforehand and then the Amy Lowell poem, the last lines of that are exactly the question I wanted to ask you, the last lines, "For I have time for nothing/but the endeavor to balance myself/ upon a broken world." As Caroline alluded, we had a conference here today for middle school teachers and librarians and educators and Naomi was one of the speakers. In the panel this morning, she stated that someone recently said to her that if she needed to compose herself, compose a poem, or if any of us need to compose ourselves, then you went on to say that sometimes when you're reading the paper or you see chaos around you, you have the inclination to write, to write a line, because that really helps you in the face of all the things that you can't fix. So I wondered if you could comment about the healing nature of poetry. NAOMI SHIBAB NYE: Thank you so much for that beautiful question. I think it's something that assails us all, that sense of the bigness of trouble and wanting to have something manageable in our hands. I loved when you described poetry as an immediate, usually short, shorter than other genres, and very personal, intimate experience. Sometimes we need just to find a line, a line in someone else's poem, or find a line that we can pull together out of the air, or any line to hold onto. In this poem, the lines "Some day there will be no war," followed a few lines down, "Today I can only gather it," the sweetness of this day, "and put it into my lunch-box." To me, it's the combination of those two lines being in this poem that make it a great handle, because it feels as if it connects to so many days we live now, although this is called "September 1918." There's that sense of timelessness and comfort and pause and also a sense that we're not the first people to experience this. It's always seemed to me that poems don't have to solve things. If they at least shine some light upon them or shine some light upon our own mood or calm or chaos within us, then they've done important work. CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 21 TOM PUTNAM: Elizabeth, we can't have you here without asking you about the ceremonial nature of poetry. As Caroline alluded, you were asked to write and compose a poem and read it at President Obama's Inaugural. What was that process like? And did you write that poem in a different way because you knew it was going to be part of a ceremony? Or did the words flow the way they do when you sit down and write a poem? ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Well, whenever I sit down to write a poem, it's always hard. And so, too, with the Inaugural poem; it was no exception. I didn't want to go about it in any way that was different from how I usually worked. I found out on December 18th that I was to do it. Christmas was right around the corner and there was a lot going on, and the Inaugural date wasn't going to change. It was a very, very focused time period. Of course, most of the time we don't write with an occasion in mind. We don't write with deadlines. Naomi can tell you as well that usually people are not waiting on the other end for us to give them their poems hot off the presses [laughter], blowing the ink. This was different, and the challenge was to stay cool and follow the same process as always. Which is to say, moving through the world with antenna, moving through the world with pores open, with ears open, jotting things down when they come, keeping track of things, not losing those things that slip away. And then when enough scraps are gathered, to find some quiet time to sit and put them together. I did think and I did read some of the poets who have written over the ages. I went back to the Inaugural poems, but there were other poets like Yeats, who was very important to look to. I looked at Heaney, Auden. I looked at poets who had a sense of moment. And also to remind myself that the poem had to have a life outside of the Inaugural, that I didn't want it to be a poem merely for the day. It wasn't going to have the word "Obama" in it. It was going to be something that had to stand along with other poems. CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 22 So intense immersion, but the same practice as usual, and trying also to write out of and serve the spirit of the moment and the spirit of all of those millions of people who worked – to harken back to the Marge Piercy – who worked because they wanted something to be different in their lives, and they felt that through this process they could contribute to change. That moved me deeply, so I had that with me all the time. TOM PUTNAM: So a few questions from the audience and we'll go to the book signing. I'll paraphrase the first one, but it's essentially asking this question: It's called A Woman's Journey Through Poems. In the conference we had this morning, there were authors who are sometimes put into the box of being multicultural authors. Are you put into a box sometimes that your poetry is more for women because you're women? How do we break out of those boxes? A general question about what are poems for women? To any of you. ELIZABETH ALEXANDER: Well, one thing I would just like to say about this particular book is that you might be surprised at how many American poetry anthologies are actually quite segregated. And this book really, really, really is not. And that is a wonderful and unusual thing. It's unfortunate that it's a bit unusual. I know for myself, I think everybody, not just women, or not just people of color, we are always writing out of our identities. We are always writing out of our experiences. We are always writing out of place and time. We are always writing out who we are. Hopefully what we do, then, is write something that lifts a little bit above the level of the individual and can speak to more folks. So I don't think there's anything contradictory with sort of a universal identity and a very, very particular identity. NAOMI SHIBAB NYE: I was exhilarated that this book contained so many poems by men. I was embarrassed that it surprised me. [Laughter] And they're wonderful poems. So I don't mind being placed in niches, any kind of niche, because I think they're all connected. CAROLINE KENNEDY SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY A WOMAN'S JOURNEY THROUGH POEMS APRIL 7, 2011 PAGE 23 TOM PUTNAM: Caroline, do you want to comment on that at all? CAROLINE KENNEDY: Actually, when I started out, I was embarrassed because there were more poems by men. And I was thinking, well, there's something really wrong with this. But of course, men worship women, so of course it's appropriate that they all be by men. [Laughter] And then as I read more and more, I think the women came forward. But I think it's important, obviously, to be as universal as possible. One of the poems that in a way I debated whether to keep in is a poem by Rupert Brooke about all the things he loved. And it's really about attachment and objects and how much they mean, and how you define yourself in a way, and so many memories are attached to different things that you might have if you're the kind of person who likes to collect things, and reminds you of people and exchange them. So there are poems about those kinds of things by women, also, but that one is particularly … He gives a great list of all the things that he loves. And so I thought that it doesn't matter that he's a man; he should be in there, too. TOM PUTNAM: Well, maybe I'll end with some words from Caroline's introduction which speak to this: Women have always been the weavers of the world, literally and figuratively. And poems distill our deepest emotions into a very few words – words that we can remember, carry with us, and share with others as we talk and weave the cloth of life. Thank you all for being here to share in those poems with us today. [Applause] THE END