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.
