Live in the Along*

By Cathy N. Davidson

Like anyone who has been given the incredible honor of delivering a commencement address at a university they love deeply, I’ve spent the last weeks listening to other graduation speeches–by Maggie Rogers, Henry “the Fonz” Winkler, Usher, Jane Fonda, and even Kermit the Frog. It is a genre full of rituals, aspirations, and expectations as momentous as this day itself.

As I listened to speech after speech, I imagined you all sitting here in Lincoln Center in your 12th century regalia and thought about the commencement speakers who moved me the most. Invariably, they recounted a personal story, typically from their own student days, and made a connection from their past to your future.

So here’s my story. Unlike most of you, I was a terrible student. I’m dyslexic–although it wasn’t really a “thing” yet when I was young. I went through elementary and high school with lousy grades and a lot of anger. I skipped school whenever I could, was insolent, was suspended a few times, and boasted defiantly about my astonishingly low SAT scores. But I lucked out. I won a national writing competition and that earned me a scholarship to a small liberal arts college outside Chicago, Elmhurst (not Amherst) College. And there, I got very lucky again. It turned out that a number of Chicago writers and artists, musicians and philosophers–including my brilliant machine learning prof–picked up extra work teaching as adjuncts at Elmhurst. My sophomore year, I was even able to enroll in a poetry class taught by one of America’s greatest poets, the dazzling, fierce, incredible genius Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize. She was an amazing and demanding teacher. She knew I was a budding playwright. She even came to one of my plays. No one could have wanted to please their teacher more than I did. And I was bombing in her poetry class. She believed in formalism so she had us read dozens of gorgeous sonnets and villanelles and haikus and Horatian odes and limericks–and then we had to write a poem in each of those forms. The harder I tried, the worse were the poems I produced.

Now, in the tradition of graduation speeches, this is supposed to turn into a story of failure overcome by hard work, and eventually of triumph over adversity. Right? It’s supposed to be an allegory that you can apply to your own life, a story of how you, too, can succeed against odds.

Well, that’s not how my story went–and it’s not a moral you need.

You are graduate students–all of you, with degrees from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, the nation’s largest urban public university, and, in my humble opinion, the greatest. A graduate student. That means you’re a glutton for punishment, a devotee of sacrifice. You not only earned one degree but you knowingly came back for another! You don’t need a story about succeeding against odds. You have succeeded against odds. Fewer than 15% of Americans have earned a post-baccalaureate degree. Fewer than 2% hold a doctorate.Two percent!  You are superstars. No matter what lies ahead, you have within you the certitude that you can do what you need to do to get to your goal, against odds, because… you are here.

So back to my poetry class taught by one of America’s greatest poets. With each new form, I wrote more clichés, more clunky words, more verses that were supposed to rhyme and didn’t or weren’t supposed to rhyme and did. I became more and more frustrated. And then one day Professor Brooks said to me flat out, no sugar coating: 

“Cat, you are not a poet.”

I was offended, but before I could protest, she asked me a question: “Do you like writing poetry?” and, exasperated, I reverted to my old defiant high school persona and blurted out, “No, I hate it.”

She let my words hover there, then gave me her Buddha smile and said, in her deep, low voice: “There’s enough bad in the world. Why would you want to work this hard at something you hate? Why not work at what you love, why not fight for your passion?”

To be fair, Professor Brooks also invited me to prove her wrong … but she warned me not to spend too much time doing something only to prove her wrong. I needed to focus on what was right for me, not only what was “assigned” to me.

She had a favorite expression. She said it often and it became the final line in one of her most famous poems–and it’s the title of my commencement address today:  “Live in the Along.”  It was a characteristically cryptic, impish expression, a provocation. “Live in the along”:  Along with… along side… come along and go along…run along and string along. Sing along! By “live in the along” she urged us to live in the journey, not in false expectations; live in the present, not in nostalgia or utopias; and live in deep connection to others. You’re not alone in the world. You’re always along-side someone and something. It’s never just you.

And because she was an activist as well as a poet, she insisted that doing what we love is a form of resistance. She urged us to never let the powerful deprive us of joy. “Don’t let them take away your agency–that’s what they’re trying to steal,” she would say. Stay present. Smell the flowers along the way. Live in the along.  

This was her message to me and my classmates. It is as relevant and urgent a message now as it was then. And it was deeply political. You see, I took Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Introduction to Poetry” class in Fall of 1968. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had just been assassinated that April, Robert F. Kennedy that June. For extra credit we tutored in a preschool inspired by Black Panther Fred Hampton. He was assassinated by the Chicago police and the FBI in 1969. It was the height of the Vietnam War that would result in 1.3 million deaths. Two of the boys I’d tutored in high school algebra had been drafted and were killed or disabled for life in that hideous war. It was the worst of times. Like now. Heinous violence was televised on the nightly news then just as it’s livestreamed now. But for Professor Brooks  “living in the along,” in 1968, also meant paying attention, being aware. It meant organizing, protesting. It meant activism: Students for a Democratic Society, the anti-war movement, the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, reproductive rights, gay rights, voting rights, the environmental movement, the open education movement, all of which yielded the hard-won victories that they are trying to take away from us now, five decades later: “Live in the Along.”

Today, I am addressing you at the end of my own long career and as you are beginning the next phase of your own. I cannot think of a better gift than passing on to you what my famous teacher gave to me: permission to do what you love, to do it courageously, and to fight honorably to preserve the values that mean the most to you. History needs you. We need your training, your perseverance, your hard work, your brilliance, your special gifts.

And by the way, Professor Brooks was right. I’m not a poet. I’ve written a lot of books since 1968 but no poems. So I’m going to end, full circle, by reading you one of hers. 49 powerful words.

It’s called

*“Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward” (Among them Nora and Henry III)”  [her two children]

Say to them,

say to the down-keepers,

the sun-slappers,

the self-soilers,

the harmony-hushers,

“Even if you are not ready for day

it cannot always be night.”

You will be right.

For that is the hard home-run.

Live not for battles won.

Live not for the-end-of-the-song.

Live in the along.

Thank you. Good luck to you. Thank you for spending these important years of your life learning, achieving, succeeding, graduating. Our society needs you. There is so much work for all of us to do. You are graduating. You are ready. Everything up to this day has prepared you for what comes after, for your fierce and joyous future. May you always live in the along.

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*”Speech to the Young” by Gwendolyn Brooks, from BLACKS (Chicago, IL: Third World Press, 1991). Copyright © 1991 by Gwendolyn Brooks Blakely.

*You can watch on YouTube here, at 46:55. 

Here’s the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGjG_v6tYPk