Content area
Full Text
Mena Alexander was born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan. When she was eighteen she went to study in England, She now lives in New York City, where she is a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Her eight volumes of poetry include the collections, Illiterate Heart (2002), which won a 2002 PEN Open Book Award, and Raw Silk (2004).
Much of her work is concerned with migration and its impact on the writer's subjectivity, and with the sometimes violent events that compel people to cross borders, while a number of her recent poems, such as "Late, There Was an Island" and "Triptych in a Time of War," deal with the aftermath of the traumatic events of September 11, 2001.
Alexander has produced the acclaimed autobiography Fault Lines (1993), chosen as one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 1993, and revised in 2003 to incorporate significant new material. She has also published two novels, Nampally Road (1991) and Manhattan Music (1997); a book of poems and essays, The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience (1996); and two academic studies, which include Women in Romanticism: Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Mary Shelley (1989). She is currently at work on a new collection of poems and a volume of notes and essays on poetry, migration, and memory.
This interview took place at the Graduate Center, City University of New York on February 25 and 28, 2005.
Ruth Maxey: What do you see as the task of poetry?
Meena Alexander: In a time of violence, the task of poetry is in some way to reconcile us to our world and to allow us a measure of tenderness and grace with which to exist. I believe this very deeply and I see it as an effort to enter into the complications of the moment even if they are violent but through that, in some measure, the task of poetry is to reconcile us to the world-not to accept it at face value or to assent to things that are wrong, but to reconcile one in a larger sense. Camus says in The Myth of Sisyphus that there's only one philosophical question: whether to...