Interviews & Poems





QUESTION TIME

I remember the scarred spine
Of mountains the moon slips through

Fox fire in a stump, bushes red with blisters
Her question, a woman in a sweatshirt

Hand raised in a crowded room --
What use is poetry?

Above us, lights flickered,
Something wrong with the wiring.

I turned and saw the moon whirl in water
The Rockies struck with a mauve light,

Sea creatures cut into sky foliage.
In the shadow of a shrub once you and I

Brushed lips and thighs,
Dreamt of a past that frees its prisoners.

Standing apart I looked at her and said:
We have poetry

So we do not die of history.
And I had no idea what I meant.

(Published in the journal Black Renaissance/Noire, 2010)

Interviews and Articles:

• Poem to Inspire Winning Composition - Impossible Grace (2012)
• Acqua Alta: Jan Sandström / Meena Alexander (2012)
• Questions of Faith: Meena Alexander, Poetry Society of America
• Fragile Places: A Poet's Notebook (pdf)
• Interview with the Kenyon Review (2005) by Ruth Maxey
• The Poet in the Public Sphere A Conversation with Meena Alexander by Lopamudra Basu (pdf)
• Profile of Meena Alexander on the Poetry International website
• Interview with The Writer Magazine (2009)
• Interview with Black Renaissance Magazine (2010) (pdf)
• BBC Radio: "The Poet's Indian, The Words are English" (2010) (mp3)

Poems:

• Jerusalem Poems: "Nocture," "Cobblestone and Heels," "Impossible Grace"
• Desire: A Poem Cycle
  
• Jerusalem Poems: "Garden in Nazareth"
  
• Jerusalem Poems: "Impossible Grace"
  
• Jerusalem Poems: "Nocture"
  
• Jerusalem Poems: "Indian Hospice" and "Mamilla Cemetery"
  
• Noctural with Ghostly Landscape on St. Lucy’s Day (In Memory of Grace Paley) (pdf)
  
• Letters to Gandhi: A Poem Cycle
  
• Listening to Lorca, and Other Poems
• Poems from River and Bridge (pdf)
  
• Poems from Illiterate Heart (pdf)
  
• Poems from Raw Silk (pdf)
  
• Poems from Quickly Changing River (pdf)
  
• Poems, Darfur Notebook - Seven Poems (pdf) Inspired by drawings from Darfur Drawn: The Conflict in Darfur through Children's Eyes (Human Rights Watch).
• Poem, Birthplace with Buried Stones (pdf)
• Question Time (pdf)