Robert Burns, poet of the downtrodden, once considered moving to the West Indies to be a plantation overseer (of slaves) and later worked as an exciseman, a job much condemned as oppressive of the poor.  Joe Phelan comments:

The negotiation of such contradictions is one of the severest tests imposed on the working-class writer.

The near-miss on the overseer job

serves as a stark reminder of the moral compromises forced on people in Burns’s social position by the overriding need to make a living.

Forced?  No one in Burns’s social position ever refused such a compromise?

This is hardly to blame Burns.  The first stone finds few to cast it.  But the reviewer oughtn’t do such excusing.  This is in Times (of London) Literary Supplement, whose strength lies in its analysis on literary and scholarship grounds, not in lecturing readers on the human condition as seen from a strongly class-conscious point of view.

Here we go with the inaugural address, spotlighting passages that are overwritten:

Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath. The words have been spoken during rising tides of prosperity and the still waters of peace.

Come on.  This is schoolboy stuff.  So is this:

Yet, every so often the oath is taken amidst gathering clouds and raging storms.

I’m offended.

At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.

Ditto.

More to come . . .

For a thoughtful assessment, this commentary got off to a fatuous start? I think so.

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.

It’s about the dumbbell poem read at the grand event by Yalie Elizabeth Alexander, who is black, says Adam Kirsch in The New Republic blog, “The Plank.”  She is?  Could have fooled me.

Her best poems–especially in her first, reputation-making book, The Venus Hottentot–do not accept that there is an antagonism between African-American “folk” culture and “high” culture.

Reminds me of the woman sitting next to Winston Churchill at dinner who said she had decided to accept the universe.  “By God, you’d better,” fumed Winnie.  But this woman would rather not, apparently.

Kirsch likes her, but she

suffers . . . from excessive self-consciousness about her role as spokesman and example. As she writes in “Ars Poetica #92: Marcus Garvey on Elocution”:

To realize I was trained for this,

Expected to speak out, to speak well.

To realize, my family believed

I would have words for others.

Go, girl, they said, as families do.  But why is she so pedestrian about it?

This is the problem.  Wordsworth and friends walked away from the oh-so-poetic and found beauty in everyday matters, like daffodils and skylarks.  But this lady reads like a telegram.

Kirsch says her weakness lies in her “consciousness of obligation,” in her “poetic superego” that

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.

She’s ceremonial, period, producing “inspirational banalities”:

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 . . .

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.

What, no irony?  Does she really want to go that far, with that people-are-violent stuff?

But Kirsch has choice words for her 1/20/09 offering:

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.

Knotty question, yes.  Kirsch is too kind, handling her as someone with something to say, trapped by a situation:

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.

I’d say, rather, that she exposed herself, as her fellow poets expose themselves in today’s poetry-society readings coast to coast probably but definitely in Chicago, celebrating the everyday in terms that require little imagination and less cerebration.