“The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us,” James Baldwin wrote. “Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.” No matter how slant they may tell it, that truth tells us back to ourselves, helps us tell each other what it is like to be alive. It is not simple work, for its raw material is complexity. It is not easy work, for it demands a constant balancing act between passion and precision. Like most labors of the disciplined imagination we call creativity, it may not look like work at all. But it is the kind of work that helps us see the world and ourselves more clearly so we can love it and each other more deeply.

Elizabeth Alexander — the fourth poet in history to read at a U.S. presidential inauguration when she welcomed Barack Obama to the White House with her eternal poem “Praise Song for the Day” — takes up the question of what it means and what it takes to be a poet in Signals Across Vast Distances: Essays and Tales (public library). She writes:

I am a poet, having lived my life by and through the word. To me, being a poet not only means making poems. It also means being attuned and reverent to the power of distilled, precise words in the form of poems but also as carriers of souls… Being a poet means I believe in patterns, in serendipity. I follow the logic of Muriel Rukeyser when she says, describing islands, “O for God’s sake / they are connected / underneath.”

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Poets — if we live up to our calling — are guided by a strange courage that takes us into thickets of self and society without fully knowing the answers, to bring into form what we see and seek to understand. We offer what we find to community, for the poem does not live until it has been set forth to be taken in by others.

If the pattern of revelation is woven on the enchanted loom of the poet’s imagination, its weft and warp are connection and contradiction: The poet’s job is to “make community through our words, and through listening”; it is also “to ask the mind to embrace paradox.” With an eye to Baldwin, she observes that great writing — truly transformative writing — “haunts you and makes you change your mind, and then change it again,” leaving you “multidimensional and enlarged.” Echoing Baldwin’s own insistence that “talent is insignificant [for] beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance,” she attests that such potency is achieved only through “discipline, without which there is no art” — something she first learned in her fourteen years of classical training as a dancer. (Lest we forget, writers can learn a great deal from dancers.)

A great poem, in the end, is a scale model of the world-building we do with language, whether we scaffold it with verses or with sentences. She offers a miniature manifesto for the great power and great responsibility of our words:

We live in language and it gives us the power to reach across the void between human beings. We live in sentence upon sentence. We speak and write millions of sentences in a year, crafting and refining what we think and know and believe and wonder about. Language is how we will most primarily offer ourselves to others, and that we will do mostly in sentences. Let them be sentences that are precise, that hold paradox and human complication and do not falsely resolve. Let them be sentences that always bear the truth.

Couple these fragments of the wholly wonderful Signals Across Vast Distances with Lucille Clifton on how to be a living poem, then revisit Wendell Berry on how to be a poet and a complete human being.