Dorothy Alexander, February 4

Oklahoma is not a place I ever thought I would get to know & love, but I did. First brought there by poet Jeanetta Calhoun Mish in 2010 for a 3 Guys from Albany tour with Charlie Rossiter that brought us to Albany, Oklahoma. The trip was timed so that we could participate in the Oklahoma Labor Fest celebrating the words & history of the State. There I met Ken Hada, among many other poets, & I returned the next year on my own to attend the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival at East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, an annual event that Ken still runs to this day. I returned every-other year until 2019, a couple times in the company of Albany poet Sally Rhoades.

I actually met Dorothy Alexander on that first trip in 2010 & looked forward to seeing her each time I returned to the Scissortail Festival, & to hearing her read her poetry & stories. One of the many great things about Scissortail is that the poets hang out at the others’ readings, & one could always find Dorothy in the audience with her partner Devey & their little white dog who was always well-behaved.

Dorothy is a poet, activist, lawyer & publisher of others through her Village Books Press. She is feisty, tough, funny & fun to be with. This reading on Zoom was part of the Mark Allen Everett Poetry Series at the University of Oklahoma College of Arts & Sciences, Department of English.

There were 51 Zoom “participants,” & there was an open mic with 12 readers, including myself & Sally Rhoades, & former New Yorker Paul Austin, who now lives in Oklahoma.

Dorothy Alexander read poems of memory & elegy, beginning appropriately enough with “The Memory Keeper” & “Where Poems Come From.” There were, among others, poems for her father (“Forgiven”), poems for brothers (“Brother” & “A Man with No Enemies”), a sister (“Real Live Girls Dancing in the Rain”), & for her son (“The Promise 1953 - 1989”). I was personally touched by her elegy to one of my favorite Oklahoma poets, Jim Spurr, “Poets in the Hereafter.” Dorothy now lives in Santa Fe & concluded her set with “Letter to Oklahoma,” clearly a place where her heart is. 

There was a brief Q&A, then she tacked on one more poem, a fitting end, “Honest Work.” With the cold here in upstate New York, snow on the ground, I think I would’ve preferred being in Norman, Oklahoma at OU, but at least I got to hear once again, in her own voice, the poems of the warm Dorothy Alexander.