Comments on: A Chapbook Is Preferrable to Chapped Lips

By: Book Blog - Likely Stories, by Keir Graff - Booklist Online » Blog Archive » Elizabeth Alexander Tells Stephen Colbert about the Truth

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:27:45 +0000

[...] a humorous segment on a waterskiing squirrel, but–in case you missed Stephen Colbert telling Elizabeth Alexander that he literally has a mountain in his [...]

By: Keir

Keir — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:32:50 +0000

What can I say? We’re critics, so we have to find something to criticize.

Alexander’s “everyday-ness” may strike just the right chord with many people (although video evidence suggests many ordinary Americans were underwhelmed)–but it reminds me of a lecture my advisor gave me in college. I was trying to write about a guy with a boring life, and my advisor told me I had made the writing boring, too (“mimetic fallacy,” she branded it). A great work of art can treat even mundane matters in inspiring fashion.

But let me say once again that Alexander had a tough act to follow. Why on earth did they make her go AFTER Obama?

By: wmr

wmr — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:29:40 +0000

I’m surprised at the criticism of Alexander’s poem. It seems to me that the plainness of the speech and the “everyday-ness” of the scenes she invokes is precisely the point: a hymn to lives of ordinary Americans.