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INAUGURAL POETRY IS A CORNY, SENTIMENTAL BUSINESS

My inauguration flu has finally faded (having paid my tribute in the cold). Every last port-a-potty has long been removed from the Mall. Still, I want to talk about the inaugural poem,
Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day". It is only now that I know what I think about it.

An inaugural poem is a curious thing. Our national character is rarely celebrated or defined by poets, and little of the American experience has been etched in verse lately. Our poet laureate, Kay Ryan, doesn't read at the start of a new congressional session. I bet few people even know who she is.

Poems are usually enjoyed in small gatherings, or beneath the fluorescent lights of a university library. We experience them personally, by and for ourselves. As Jim Fischer said in Salon:

When we read poetry to ourselves, the occasion of a great poem is an internal event, organizing the perceptions and determining the material. When that occasion is a point in time and place, the work is more likely to be...partial, responsible, contemporary, rarely timeless.

Poets rarely read at inaugurations. Elizabeth Alexander was only the fourth given the task of creating a work that speaks to America, a poem that reflects the national soul with images sharp and simple. I looked forward to it much like an over-anxious, hyper-conscious parent might anticipate a child's school play. Excited by America's new president and anxious to see poetry re-enter the national spotlight at the hands of someone so capable, I was tense with expectation.

So how did Alexander do? After the highs and lows of the ceremony, I'm afraid the poem left me disappointed, even ashamed. Her reading sounded awkward and halting, booming out over the emptying mall, barely audible over the crowd. I grew angry at the sight of everyone filing out as she spoke. I felt guilty for making my shivering friends stay in the cold so that I could take in her words. Most of all, I was let down by the poem, which seemed contrived, stilted, nervously delivered and without lines that stuck. At least that's what I heard over the din of the penned-up masses.

So I went home, ate Chinese food and struggled to regain feeling in my limbs. I read critics who loved the poem and others who weren't impressed. (Some commenters and bloggers have been especially virulent, writing response poems of their own). I polled my friends. "You stayed for that part?" was the usual reply.

And then I realised that my initial reaction to the poem had been wrong. In the strange business of public oratory this wasn't a failure, not by a long shot.

Certainly it was delivered at the worst time in the ceremony, like singing the Star-spangled Banner after the 9th inning of a baseball game. No act should ever have to follow Barack Obama. Our 44th president is a preacher whose fire and brimstone cadences have a poetic sensibility all their own. In the wake of such eloquent prose, Alexander's prose poem simply sounded too much like a wolf in sheep's clothing: poetry masquerading as prose, or the other way around (the Guardian's Carol Rumens articulated this slippery idea first). Her lines, delivered in fits and starts, came across as less lyrical than the president's.

Alexander arguably squandered an opportunity to read a more tightly lyrical, inventive poem. Had she offered something formally different, she might have showcased what poetry is capable of: formal control that is tight yet relentless, emotional but rhythmically interesting. Still, the more I read the text of "Praise Song for the Day", the more I understand its musicality and intensity:

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.

Her pacing, her sing-song words and repetitions capture a poetic musicality. It puts to words the hardships black Americans experienced, and looks towards a future weighty and worthy. It's about the language we use to tell and retell our stories, unflinchingly, repetitively, so that we can keep our history while moving forward.

Sure, the language is sentimental, but what inaugural poem hasn't been? Angelou's certainly was. And the one Frost didn't read at Kennedy's inauguration (blinded by the sun, he delivered a poem he had memorised) wasn't exactly sugar-free. Inaugural poetry is a corny, sentimental business. Transforming an inaccessible medium into a popular declaration of collective will is no easy task.

Alexander's form, a praise song, is unifying by nature. Sure, I cringe over the weaker lines of her poem, such as "the mightiest word is love" (which echoed tinnily over the emptying mall). But the poem is good. Many sections match the taut explorative quality I've admired in her work, in poems such as "Ladders".

...Girl?"
Had they lost her, missed her?
This is not the question.

This must not be my aunt.
Jemima? Pays the rent.
Family mirrors haunt
their own reflections.

Its musicality comes from within the words, the harsh 't' end-stopped sentences and slant rhymes that both push the poem forward and pull it back, creating a probing mental tension. It illustrates the way poetry is different from prose, how it can do something more.

After these weeks of wrestling, I am proud of our inaugural poet, just as I am proud of the occasion on which she spoke. I know I will revisit "Praise Song for the Day" and feel some nostalgia for the day and the time and the cold and the immense challenge of trying to capture it all in words that last.

Picture Credit: shashiBellamkonda (via Flickr)