The Innauguration Poetry, or I will now read my poem in the style of a filibuster

This past Tuesday, I found myself where I find myself every weekday: manning the phone at the front desk on the industrial side of a staffing agency (I will write more on the joys of this soon). No one had come in to apply, which I attributed to people staying home to watch inauguration, but I had given up hope on seeing it. The streaming video coverage was lagging terribly, probably a by-product of everyone else trying to watch the event while at work. Then one of my co-workers turned on the TV that we normally use to screen videos instructing applicants not to stick their hands into machines, let hazardous chemicals touch their skin, grope co-workers, or make quid pro quo remarks ("This is a Latin phrase meaning 'This for that'.") I'd get to see the inauguration, after all.

Then, just after Biden was sworn in, people being confronted with the horror of life by Biden's hair-plugs decided they needed to get a job. The lobby was suddenly full, and I found myself scuttling back and forth to the copy machine, copying IDS and handing out applications. I was only able to hear a minute or two of Obama's speech, and then I had to go back to work. By the time the crowd dissipated and I could return to watching the innauguration, Elizabeth Alexander was reading her poem, "Praise Song for the Day." I hadn't read her poetry, but I recognized her from the inside cover of The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, which she edited for the Library of America. (I smugly noted this fact to a co-worker, who obviously didn't care.) Here's the video of Alexander reading the poem:



My excitement at seeing poetry read to millions of people and broadcast to hundreds of millions more soon dissipated. I noticed a few things:
1) The poem is pretty mediocre, at best.
2) The reading of the poem is poor...even unpleasant.
3) CNN, probably in an effort to lend Alexander credibility, has labeled her as "Yale Professor" instead of "Poet."

Over at the New Republic, Adam Kirsch has a very insightful analysis of why Alexander's poem was bad, and more so, why, unlike the Romans, modern poets can't write official poetry. Some excerpts:

In our democratic age, however, poets have always had scruples about exalting leaders in verse. Since the French Revolution, there have been great public poems in English, but almost no great official poems. For modern lyric poets, whose first obligation is to the truth of their own experience, it has only been possible to write well on public themes when the public intersects, or interferes, with that experience--when history usurps privacy.

....

The contemporary poet who set out to write an official occasional poem...gives up the privacy in which modern poetry is born, without gaining the authority and currency that used to be the advantages of the poet laureate in Rome or England. Her verse is not public but bureaucratic--that is to say, spoken by no one and addressed to no one.

"Praise Song for the Day," the poem Elizabeth Alexander read this afternoon, was a perfect specimen of this kind of bureaucratic verse. There was an extraordinary burden of expectation attached to Alexander's poem; I don't recall Maya Angelou or Miller Williams, the poets who read at Bill Clinton's inaugurations, getting the kind of attention that Alexander received in the last few weeks. The reason, I think, is that Obama's inauguration was just the kind of event that might inspire genuine poetry: it was that rare moment when the public intersected with the private for good instead of evil. And of course, Obama himself has often been cast as a "poetic" figure, thanks to his eloquence and the appeal of his image. Last January, E.J. Dionne wrote that Obama represented poetry to Hillary Clinton's prose, a contrast that became a standard trope of the campaign.

....

[P]oetry is a matter of having your own words, not of having words for others; and the weakness of Alexander's work is precisely its consciousness of obligation. Her poetic superego leads her to affirm piously, rather than question or challenge. This weakness is precisely what made her a perfect, an all too perfect, choice for inaugural poet. Indeed, in "Ars Poetica #1,002: Rally," published in 2005 when Barack Obama was still just a first-year Senator from Illinois, she already imagines herself lecturing a crowd with inspirational banalities:

I dreamed a pronouncement

about poetry and peace.

"People are violent,"

I said through the megaphone

on the quintessentially

frigid Saturday

to the rabble stretching

all the way up First.

"People do violence

unto each other

and unto the earth

and unto its creatures.

Poetry," I shouted, "Poetry,"

I screamed, "Poetry

changes none of that

by what it says

or how it says, none.

But a poem is a living thing

made by living creatures...

and as life

it is all that can stand

up to violence."

This poem, written for a book and not for an inauguration, is already public in the worst sense--inauthentic, bureaucratic, rhetorical. So it was no surprise to hear Alexander begin her poem today with a cliché ("Each day we go about our business"), before going on to tell the nation "I know there's something better down the road"; and pose the knotty question, "What if the mightiest word is ‘love'?"; and conclude with a classic instance of elegant variation: "on the brink, on the brim, on the cusp." The poem's argument was as hard to remember as its language; it dissolved at once into the circumambient solemnity. Alexander has reminded us of what Angelou's, Williams's, and even Robert Frost's inauguration poems already proved: that the poet's place is not on the platform but in the crowd, that she should speak not for the people but to them.

But perhaps we shouldn't be too hard on Alexander. If Robert Frost couldn't do it...well, good luck.



update: Apparently you can already order the poem from Amazon. They sent me an email about it today: "As someone who has purchased or rated books by Gwendolyn Brooks, you might like to know that Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration will be released on February 6, 2009." No thank you.