Jazz Poetry - “Billy Strayhorn Writes ‘Lush Life’”

Billy Strayhorn Writes “Lush Life” by Elizabeth Alexander

Empty ice-cream carton

in a kitchen garbage can.

Up all night with your mother.

He beat her again. Up all night

eating ice-cream, you made your mother laugh.

                   ly

Life   is lone

Duke’s hands on your shoulders,

you play it again. Cancer

eats moth holes through

you and you and you.

                   ly

Life   is lone

Speeding upstate in the backseat,

on the Taconic, cocktail

in one hand, book in another

as autumn leaves blur by.

This life, New York, piano,

love, then lonely, this life, love.

--From American Sublime (Graywolf Press, 2005)

Note: Elizabeth Alexander was born in Harlem in 1962 and grew up in Washington D.C. She is the daughter of former U.S. Secretary of the Army Clifford Alexander, Jr. In 1963, her parents brought her to Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, where he gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. She graduated from Yale University, and then studied with poet Derek Walcott at Boston University, where she earned her master’s degree. She later earned her doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania. She was briefly a reporter for the Washington Post but then turned to teaching English at the University of Chicago in the early 1990s, where she met a charismatic young law lecturer named Barack Obama. She recited a poem at his presidential inauguration that she had composed for the occasion. Her published work includes Body of Life, American Sublime (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), and a verse play, Diva Studies. She currently teaches at Yale.