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| Hearsay: |
I’m just saying. Despite the rousing speech, and the competent poem, I was a little disappointed to see everyone getting up to leave and lines of people streaming away as the inaugural poet took the stand. That’s got to be tough. I’m used to seeing people sneak out of poetry readings, but not in the thousands.
[I'm updating this with some comments I made below, qualifying my use of the word "competent" as well as a link to the text of the poem for those who missed it. That it's presented here as prose says much.]
The poem was competent in that it was a daunting task with far too much riding on it. I give her competent because a journal would have published it and no one would have blinked, but in the face of the history she was part of, it wasn’t really up to the task. But who really could have nailed it? We’re short on Robert Frosts these days. At least it wasn’t a Hallmark moment from Angelou. Had I been in her shoes, I likely couldn’t have written myself past the first line with all the weight of expectation on me, so bravo for the effort. But I can’t decide if it’s a sad or happy day when a poet following the president pales in comparison.
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January 20th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
I heard he’s got arrest warrants out for Malcom X and King and that the troops are getting ready to invade the Canadian arctic, Pakistan and California. The dollar will be backed by bad cheques, rhetoric and prison cells. I have no faith at all. Sharks eat, that’s what they do. If you’re looking for nice polite Canadians – they sent me instead. Have a moderate day.
January 20th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Pretty cold in DC today. Those people had been out there for hours, and were probably figuring they could catch the poem on youtube if it was interesting…
January 20th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Not a decent poem. I even found myself walking to the kitchen as she read it.
January 20th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
I was unable to catch the poem, unfortunately. I’ve looked online for a copy, but I can’t even find the title or a quote, let alone the full text.
In the defense of the people leaving as Alexander read, it was quite cold, and they’d been waiting for many hours. They ought to’ve had her read before Obama gave his speech, not after.
January 20th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
She spoke. Like. An elementary. School. Teacher. Everyone follow? I’ll repeat for those in the class with ADD.
January 20th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
If the poem had been set to music and sung by Britney Spears, they would have stayed. If the poem (even if not set to music) had been read by Angelina Jolie, they would have stayed. The medium is the message, and all that.
January 20th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
The poem was competent in that it was a daunting task with far too much riding on it. I give her competent because a journal would have published it and no one would have blinked, but in the face of the history she was part of, it wasn’t really up to the task. But who really could have nailed it? We’re short on Robert Frosts these days. At least it wasn’t a Hallmark moment from Angelou. Had I been in her shoes, I likely couldn’t have written myself past the first line with all the weight of expectation on me, so bravo for the effort. But I can’t decide if it’s a sad or happy day when a poet following the president pales in comparison.
January 20th, 2009 at 2:25 pm
I must confess that I wasn’t impressed with the poem either. And I noticed all the people leaving, and felt kinda sad. I can’t imagine how she must have felt – to have to speak to so many people, and to have to FOLLOW Obama’s speech on a freezing cold day? That’s tough.
January 20th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
I think the poem goes a step beyond competent. It’s reaching toward the Whitman-esque, and if not quite there, it did make me choke up with its evocation of the huge everydayness of American life, those ordinary people who run the country. But I choke up easy, and we’re all pretty emotional already. =)
That said, we were screening the inauguration in the bookstore, and everyone got up and left during the poem here, too. And it’s not that cold. The swearing-in was so clearly the climax that people couldn’t keep still. I agree, it would have been nice to have her read before the swearing-in.
There’s a transcript on the NYT site, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/us/politics/20text-poem.html?ref=books. And I just got an email from Graywolf, which is publishing a chapbook of the piece here in the U.S. in February.
January 20th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
I thought the poem was starchy, mundane and, at times, incoherent. Even Angelou’s inaugural poem was more lyrically inspired, which is a terrible thing to say about a poem.
January 20th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
I thought it smelled like buttered cat.
January 20th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Ninjistas,
My favourite moment was “spiny or smooth.” I kept thinking of the age old arguments like: is a man a breast man, or an ass man?
Does one prefer crunchy or smooth peanut butter? Stick shift or automatic? Saturdays or Sundays? Shaken or stirred?
Me, spiny.
Shane
January 20th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
I like it more now that I’ve read it a few times, and I thought she performed very well, but the business about crossing the road and needing to see what is on the other side is pretty clunky stuff.
Shouldn’t be a contest, of course, and I guess it wouldn’t be right for the inauguration, but Derek Walcott’s poem for the Telegraph rules:
Derek Walcott
Forty Acres
Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving —
a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls,
an emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd
dividing like the furrow which a mule has ploughed,
parting for their president: a field of snow-flecked
cotton
forty acres wide, of crows with predictable omens
that the young ploughman ignores for his unforgotten
cotton-haired ancestors, while lined on one branch, is
a tense
court of bespectacled owls and, on the field’s
receding rim —
a gesticulating scarecrow stamping with rage at him.
The small plough continues on this lined page
beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado’s
black vengeance,
and the young ploughman feels the change in his veins,
heart, muscles, tendons,
till the land lies open like a flag as dawn’s sure
light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower.
January 20th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Meanwhile, over at the National Post, Robert Fulford provides a thoughtful appreciation of Elizabeth Alexander’s life and literary career. (See “She Speaks in the Language of History.”)
January 20th, 2009 at 6:40 pm
Wow. That Walcott poem is the f’n business!
January 20th, 2009 at 6:56 pm
To me there’s something about Alexander’s poem (and her presentation of it, too) as too private, too subdued, not rhetorically ambitious enough for the moment. Next to an orator like PRESIDENT Obama, I guess she just thought she should lay low and be thoughtful, but the one thing that the awful Angelou poem had going for it was the sweeping ambition of its voice. The Walcott, too, while more of a parable, is definitively a _public_ poem. It seems to me that Alexander never decided how to address the crowd in a voice big enough for it to hear.
January 20th, 2009 at 7:00 pm
I was pretty underwhelmed by the inauguration. Obama’s speech wasn’t that great, and I lost interest in the poet the minute she started reading. I enjoy poetry, but I shouldn’t focus on the WAY the poem is being read.
The funny part was Justice Roberts flubbing the oath. Which leaves me wondering: did Obama take the actual oath of office or not? It’s a solemn oath, as Obama said later. He gave Roberts a chance to correct himself, but Roberts soldiered on–probably because he was freezing his ass off.
January 20th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
Haven’t we excused mediocre literature for far too long? If this crap poem had appeared in a journal, I would have batted more than just an eye (and our journals are filled with this, so I bat eyes often). I would think, once again, this is why people don’t read poems. Because so many poems are about “me” and “I” and boring shit written in boring language. Poetry is about metaphor, sound, line. It is OBJECT not EGO. It is THING not IDEA. It is idea IN thing. “A woman and her son wait for a bus” is not poetry. It’s what we do everyday. It’s a journal entry with arbitrary line breaks. And poetry, like all art, needs to transcend the everyday, make the everyday beautiful. Wow us, and we will stay in our seats.
Competent? We’ve been listening to Obama’s rhetoric now for a few years. It was her job to translate this moment into a beautiful work of art. Walcott did it magnificently. Why couldn’t she?
January 20th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
Not to defend the poem or anything, but the phrase “a woman and her son wait for a bus” is not trite, not in the least. That is in fact a loaded reference in the US, where race has defined so much of who they are.
The image of a bus — espcially in the context of Obama’s victory — instantly evokes segregation, Selma, the civil rights movement. Barack is bi-racial
(he is NOT the “first black president,” no, it is much more momentous than that. He is the first president of mixed race, he blurs the black/white code). His mother was white.
In the South, when Barack was a boy, she would have had to ride in the front of the bus, he would have been forced to ride in the back. That’s what that line references.
There is a great deal of subtext and meaning and struggle buried in that line:
In fact, Obama alludes to this himself in his address.
A woman and her son wait for the bus . . .
I think its quite haunting, especially the use of the verb. They are waiting . . . Has the moment finally arrived tht they can board together?
January 21st, 2009 at 12:06 am
i agree with george – it wasn’t that bad. simple, austere, humble. but that walcott piece is gorgeous…
January 21st, 2009 at 10:59 am
sj, I’m not accusing the line of being trite. I’m accusing it of being boring. It’s so clang, bam hit you over the head obvious it’s unremarkable. Again, Walcott addressed the same themes as Alexander, but he used METAPHOR. He used BEAUTIFUL LANGUAGE. Writing in such an ordinary way about something historically important is boring and forgettable and in the end does that historical moment a disservice. ‘O Captain My Captian,’ Whitman’s poem about the civil war and the death of Lincoln is still studied (and not just because of Dead Poets Society). Alexander’s poem will be forgotten in a month.
January 21st, 2009 at 11:08 am
listening to Alexander’s psalm, I could not hear the song that I hear in every line of Walcott’s… impossible task? I don’t think so. perhaps the wrong singer (poet) for the occasion.
still, how wonderful to have a poet at an inaugural. at an anything.
January 21st, 2009 at 11:30 am
Tue enough Nicole, but the one thing Walcott did not use was CAPITAL LETTERS to make his POINT!! It’s the equivalent of trying to shout someone down.
Give it a rest. You’re not that outraged, you’re just pretending to be.
January 21st, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Little-known fact regarding George’s comment that we are “short on Robert Frosts these days.” Frost would have flubbed his big chance as well. The poem he actually wrote for the occasion, “Dedication,” was perhaps linguistically posher but just as feeble as Alexander’s. The sun keep him from reading it, so he recited from memory “The Gift Outright.”
January 21st, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Here’s the poem Frost was planning on reading:
“… The glory of a next Augustan age
Of a power leading from its strength and pride,
Of young amibition eager to be tried,
Firm in our free beliefs without dismay,
In any game the nations want to play.
A golden age of poetry and power
Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.”
Pretty awful, actually. “A golden age of poetry and power”? Yikes. “The Gift Outright” was a much better choice, even if Frost was forced to make the change:
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia.
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak.
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.
Apart from the dated Manifest Destine stuff in the last two lines, there’s something really powerful about this one, as a public, national claim with some religious overtones.
January 21st, 2009 at 10:27 pm
iF I cOUld have used italicS I wOUld haVe. My emotions are limited by FORMATTING!
January 21st, 2009 at 10:59 pm
A good summary of Frost’s inauguration blunder/success at the academy of American Poets site –
According to this “The Gift Outright” was always intended to be read with “Dedication” as a (rather long) preface.
January 22nd, 2009 at 2:54 am
The bluntest and least considered reaction of the group, among the mainstream press anyway, was John Stewart on last night’s The Daily Show. Folks can look it up on the Comedy Network Website.
January 25th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
People started leaving as soon as President Obama took the oath. I thought it was a shame because I liked Obama’s speech. But I did leave before the poetry started.
January 25th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
May I say again here that the Walcott poem is not ‘gorgeous’ as someone here says it is dreadfully arcane, dated. I prefer Alexander’s. Walcott is like a man standing in another era – that of the “negro” as he calls it. Phylis Wheatley could have written it. Alexander is at least here with us, in the small acts of existence. Again it is not a brilliant poem, it may only be a good poem but it is certainly not sitting on some colonial brow in 1900.