Praise song for the day.
Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.
Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”
We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, “I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.”
We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.
Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.
Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.
Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”
Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.
What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.
In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp — praise song for walking forward in that light.
—Elizabeth Alexander
[NOTE: The following is taken from the letters thread on the poem on Salon.com]
inaugural poetry is a bad idea
Poetry is dead. If you gathered up every person in America capable of naming a living poet, you would have a crowd perhaps a tenth of the size as the one that attended the inauguration. It wasn’t helped by the inaugural poem itself, which was stilted, had no narrative or thematic momentum, and petered out so anticlimactically that the crowd seemed confused as to when it was over. She emphasized meter and reflective pauses in a venue where no one would be thinking about either, and seemed to give no thought as to how to actually get the crowd involved in her words.
Her poem, like a lot of modern poetry, seemed designed to say, “why am I pausing like this? Why have I chosen this meter? These words and images? Come. Examine me. Think about me. Sit. Reflect. Read *closely*. If you don’t do these things and find the poem wanting, this is your deficiency. If you are bored, then shame on you for looking to be entertained. If you are unmoved, then shame on you for demanding that my poem move you, rather than poring over it with a mind to be moved. Grabbing the audience, making them care, entertaining them, considering how best to reach them–these are tasks reserved for lesser arts, for prose and film and narrative. Poetry has the luxury of simply being, of awaiting an audience sophisticated enough to seek it out and appreciate it. Asking for and earning that appreciation is so plebian.”
What hubris. 2 million people have schlepped down to watch the event, ten times that have tuned in via television. If you are writing a poem for them, then *write a poem for them*. Give it narrative, give it momentum. Make it funny, or frightening, or loud, or all of those–but make sure it reaches out of the page and grabs the audience. Think of how long Obama must have spent, crafting just the right words to not only say what he meant but to engage his audience and make them care. And he’s the president. He’s earned the right to expect a captive and respectful audience. The poet who follows him, on the other hand, has never been voted for. None of the millions of viewers tuning in did so to watch her. So doesn’t she then have an even greater responsibility to win her audience over? Why of course not. She’s a poet. The audience should be grateful for the right to spend their valuable time parsing her meter for meaning.
— natethegreat
Wow, finally a president who can show up a poet.
Where’s Ginsberg when you need him? (Oh, yeah…) He could have played to that crowd.
I mean, other than slam poets, not many of whom I’ve heard would have been quite appropriate for that setting, are there any living poets really versed in how to play off a large crowd, to be exciting, loud, uplifting? Even that saddleback schmuck was a pretty good speaker.
I’m still not convinced poetry should be there anyway, could be there without putting a kink in the plans somehow. I mean, this whole event is about manipulative rhetoric designed for political aims (it was pretty sure, and not all of it shallow or untrue…some of it was quite amazing, rising above mere politics), but I’m not sure all the pomp and patriotism really fits poetry anymore. Maybe not since Tennyson. I don’t know who could have pulled it off.
But one thing is clear to me. That was a shitty poem today.
well, the sad thing is that — as the above comment shows — it really just confirms the distaste a lot of people have for poetry. i mean, what do you do with something like this? it starts out being a not altogether terrible poem, in a declarative high school poetry sort of way; then it totally shifts gears and starts trying to get all lofty and shit. it just doesn’t work on any level that i can see. you’re right, though; i don’t know who could’ve pulled it off. i like your original suggestion of amiri baraka. but obviously, we’d have to be on another planet for that to happen.
didn’t help, though, that obama threw her under the bus by making her read the poem after his address. no way you can follow something like that. someone else on the salon thread put it best: like trying to follow three hours of bruce springsteen and the e street band by jumping on stage with an acoustic guitar. not gonna work.
I should’ve just sent her my haiku to read. 🙁
Actually, a nice traditional Japanese Haiku would be interesting. Poet steps to mike after all the pomp and rhetoric and lofty prose and crowd roars….and then says like ten words, cryptically and clearly, and then walks away. I think it’s the only thing that would have worked, assuming we can’t get Robert Bly and Coleman Barks to read Rumi was a sitar playing. Ha…
In spite of what the Salon writer said, my guess is that the poem is bad partly BECAUSE the poet sought to reach out to the audience. It had the feeling of a pronouncement. Ginsberg would have used the opportunity to piss off people. not try to define “love” at an inauguration.
Steve–
Maybe that’s at the heart of why occasional poems are a bad idea. Consciousness of the occasion — whether it’s tempting you to make a statement, be funny, etc etc — contaminates the approach to the poem. Like a kid in a mall who becomes aware someone’s looking at him.
I’ve been spending too much time in malls lately.
Steve, poetry’s not supposed to piss anyone one. It’s supposed to nourish the soul. Geez, and they pay you.
David, “I’ve been spending too much time in malls” sounds like a nice beginning for a poem. Where are you Garcia Lorca? Did I spy you at the Gap, eyeing the five dollar shorts?