This morning Jeannette Cooperman, Stephen Schenkenberg and I were discussing Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem, "Praise Song for the Day." On Tuesday, the editorial staff (or some of us, anyway) dashed over to a sports bar across the street to watch the inauguration when we couldn't stream it properly on a co-worker's computer. Though I'd been reading tons arts coverage about how modern poets aren't really trained or equipped to write occasional poetry, how even Frost and Angelou bungled it, and how this poem would likely be underwhelming, I was still looking forward to hearing what Alexander came up with. (My training is not in journalism, but in poetry, and I will freely admit a lifelong, obsessive addiction to the stuff.)
And ... well ... I hate to admit it, but I was a little underwhelmed. Even though I can relate to how tough it is to write a poem in response to an occasion, much less a historically ground-shaking one being witnessed by millions of people, I was still a little disappointed. I'll admit that my expectations were probably too high; I went to Alexander's website before the inauguration and thought to myself, hey lady, I believe that you can show these critics wrong! But she's getting more flack than, well, praise songs. After the fact, Jon Stewart cracked that now we know what poetry is good for: quickly dispersing crowds of millions. Online, poetry-lovers and eggheads are debating not only the merits and demerits of Alexander's inaugural poem, but her delivery and her past ouvre.
I have to say, after reading her poem on the page, I think it's an okay poem. Not a great one, but a pretty good one (and poets will tell you even the masters only write a handful of great ones during their time on earth). It's not one of those poems that sends little electric shivers through my limbic system, but it is well-constructed and has a generous heart to it. The one criticism I've seen that seems entirely fair to me was that she ran into trouble by trying too hard to speak to everyone; she dialed down the poetry-ness of the poetry and set it too much in the workaday world. Though really, the only thing that really bothered me after reading the text was the presence of the boom-box (which kind of jarred me when she read it out loud, too). I guess that I saw this as a huge, historic archetypal event that required a huge, historic archetypal poem. And there is some of that there, but the extremely mundane stuff jangles next to it. You don't want to be changing the laundry, or a band-aid, or a light bulb when Uriel comes to call. Not that the archangel would mind - there is something jarring about juxaposing angels and band-aids (or a boom-boxes) and not in a good way.
But, as the linked essay in N+1 points out (it was written before the inauguration) past readings have been nigh-on disaster. The one poet who has really managed to really wow for the occasion thus far is Angelou. To my mind, Alexander's reading was not a disaster at all; her well-wrought but careful poem may not have been like fireworks, but I didn't find it embarassing, weird in a bad way or inappropriate; and frankly, I feel happy that Obama has made a point to find room in his new administration for poets at all... —Stefene Russell
