Sherry Chandler

The inaugural poet does Colbert

I didn’t really get a chance to watch the inauguration except in bits and pieces streaming. I did make a point to stream Elizabeth Alexander’s poem.

Here is her appearance on the Colbert Report:

Also, a nice article from the Independent on the not-very-old tradtion of inaugural poems in the U.S.:

Democracies tend to do the big words for big events rather badly � perhaps reassuringly so, if you trace the kinship of rhetorical grandeur and despotic terror from Caesar to Hitler. Yet, 48 years ago, president-elect John F Kennedy decided that a new phase of American liberty deserved to arrive garlanded not merely by bands and orations, but by poetry as well. He asked Robert Frost, by then 86 but still the craggy New England bard who had carved his homespun America in memorable verse for 60 years, to compose a poem for the Inauguration Day ceremonies in Washington. So Frost did � a dreadful patter of high-minded historical doggerel called “Dedication”, awash with sentimental aspirations for “A golden age of poetry and power/ Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour”.

Then fate, or Frost’s artistic unconscious, took a hand. The elderly poet found that, with the harsh glint of January sun on snow, he couldn’t read his script. So instead he recited his “The Gift Outright”, which begins: “The land was ours before we were the land’s”. It’s a terrific poem about the birth of national identity in hardship and conflict, but one that unselfconsciously takes Frost’s ancestry of Yankee pioneers as the folk whose story lies at America’s heart.

But the Inauguration Day poem did not find a fixed niche in the handover calendar. The custom lapsed until Bill Clinton revived it in 1993, and picked the antithesis of Frost: Maya Angelou, revered memoirist of harsh times and high hopes. Her poem, “On the Pulse of Morning”, saluted, ploddingly and with risky half-rhymes, a rainbow nation (“the Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek/ The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh”) as it made its peace with the ravaged and conquered American land: “History, despite its wrenching pain,/ Cannot be unlived, and if faced/ With courage, need not be lived again”.

For his second inauguration in 1997, Clinton unearthed a poet from his home state of Arkansas � Miller Williams � who also happened to be the father of a country-music legend, Lucinda Williams, a gifted lyricist herself. Williams’ “Of History and Hope” falls prey, like Angelou’s poem and Frost’s original text, to a kind of sonorous tautology: “We mean to be the people we meant to be/ to keep on going where we meant to go”.

Inaugural poetry

George Packer cants (on December 18):

Is it too late to convince the President-elect not to have a poem written for and read at his Inauguration? The event will be a great moment in the nation�s history. Three million people will be listening on the Mall. Many of them will be thinking of another great moment that took place forty-five years ago, at their backs, when Martin Luther King stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Such grandeur would seem to call for poetry. But in fact the opposite is true.

. . .

Two poets have been given the honor since Frost. Maya Angelou�s �On the Pulse of Morning,� read at Clinton�s first inaugural, was an overly long ode to multiculturalism whose elevated tone turned out to be badly out of sync with the early months of the Presidency it heralded. And I know you can�t name the poet who read at Clinton�s second inaugural (it was Miller Williams).

On all these occasions, the incoming President seemed to be claiming more for his arrival than he deserved, and to be doing it by pretending that poetry means more in American life than, alas, it does.

. . .

Obama�s Inauguration needs no heightening. It�ll be its own history, its own poetry.

And recants (on December 30):

Here�s my year-end mea culpa, so I can start 2009 with one sin fewer on my head: that post of mine was much too quick and ill-considered for the subject it took up. Contemporary American poetry has too many mansions to be summed up under a throwaway phrase like �private activity.� Its multitude of schools and forms is like the N.B.A. in the nineteen-seventies, when there was no dominant team but a confused contest of warring tribes. And I should have read more of Alexander�s work than appears on her Web site, and more carefully, before expressing skepticism that she�ll be equal to the occasion on January 20th. (But to say I was dismissing her as �a black woman in America� is unfair. I had unkind things to say about Robert Frost, too. My target was the possibility of a good inaugural poem.)

Coates, in proposing some hip-hop singers as inaugural performers, gets closer to the point I didn�t make very well. There is good poetry being written in America, and bad poetry being written. But little contemporary poetry aspires to speak to, of, and even, in some way, for the country as a whole. In America today, popular music is a likelier vehicle for such things. My post was unnecessarily caustic, but in the argument that poetry has become too marginalized in America to find language for such a historic public occasion, at least one half of my point seems obvious enough, and an obvious shame. We would all be better off if it were otherwise.

Perhaps the grand gesture is not the task of an inaugural poem; perhaps it could achieve its purpose best by aiming for something smaller than a reflection on the occasion and the age. But the poets Alexander told Dwight Garner of the Times that she�s been reading in preparation for her task�Virgil, Auden, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks�suggest that she has certain aspirations in mind: linguistic clarity, moral intensity, historical resonance, intellectual power. If she can even approach this standard, Elizabeth Alexander will prove once again that Obama is smarter than most of his critics, including this one.

Ta-Nehisi Coates rebuts (on December 19) and is worth a read. I like her closing argument:

Look, I’m not sure having Alexander read in front of an audience of millions is the greatest idea. I frankly hate ceremonies. They’re too long and people talk too much. But I’m sure that of the many awful and mind-numbling boring things that will happen on that day, Alexander’s piece–whatever it is–will be a highlight. I’m going out on faith. To paraphrase one of the great poets of our era, I got five on it.

Not fair to post clips. Read the whole of all three arguments.

For me, I’m not sure a poetry is possible that speaks to the country as a whole, we’re so fragmented. The world is fragmented. Balkanization has been the story of the last thirty years.

I’m pretty sure Alexander’s poem will speak to me far better than Rick Warren’s prayer.
__________

Tagged on: Why are we so fragmented. Read Paul Krugman for part of the answer: it’s been Republican strategy to divide and conquer.

Elizabeth Alexander, inaugural poet

From The Guardian:

Barack Obama, perhaps the most literary president-elect of recent years, has chosen his friend, the poet Elizabeth Alexander, to read at his inauguration on 20 January.

Obama had been spotted carrying what appeared to be a book of the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott’s poetry last month, but it is Alexander, a professor of African American studies at Yale University, who will compose a poem to be read at his swearing in as president. She will perform alongside Aretha Franklin, Itzak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma. The participants were chosen based on requests from Obama and from vice-president-elect Joe Biden.

Alexander, who has published four collections of poems, most recently the 2005 Pulitzer prize finalist American Sublime, will be only the fourth poet to have read at a presidential inauguration. A tradition eschewed by current incumbent George W Bush, Bill Clinton invited poets to both of his inaugurations, with Miller Williams reading in 1997, and Maya Angelou in 1993. The only other poet to have read at an inauguration was Robert Frost, who recited The Gift Outright for John F Kennedy in 1961.

. . .

She said the challenge would be to write a poem which “speaks to the occasion [and] has its own integrity”. “But it’s a good challenge”, she added. “It’s the balance between listening to the muse and speaking to many many people.” A personal friend of the Obama family, Alexander said the friendship made the opportunity “all the sweeter”.

She will be contending with the spectres of Angelou’s On the Pulse of Morning (“today I call you to my riverside, / If you will study war no more”), Williams’s Of History and Hope (“We have memorized America, / how it was born and who we have been and where”) and Frost’s The Gift Outright (“Summoning artists to participate / In the august occasions of the state / Seems something artists ought to celebrate. / Today is for my cause a day of days. / And his be poetry’s old-fashioned praise / Who was the first to think of such a thing.”).

“A lot of her poems explore the history of slavery, civil rights and women’s rights,” said Alexander’s UK editor Neil Astley at Bloodaxe Books. “She’s very much someone who’s engaged with issues such as race, gender and politics, which she invokes in a compelling way as a poet.”

Click through to the article to read Alexander’s poem “Ars Poetica # 100,” a poem that I like quite well.

Another article at the Washington Post.

AND a wider sampling of Alexander’s poems at her website with some audio files.