The American Spectator : Inaugural Poetasters

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Inaugural Poetasters

By Anthony Paletta on 1.23.09 @ 6:06AM

Inaugural poetry augers in our aesthetic sensibilities.

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And the persistent rock, the river, and the tree keep coming back, no matter how many times they've appeared before, just like these inaugural poets.

Miller Williams' 1997 poem appears better on re-reading, a musing on American memory and the transmission of its values, yet seems unmistakably hobbled by its associations with public policy. How can a line such as "who dreamed for every child an even chance cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not" fail to be cheapened by thoughts of school lunch programs and midnight basketball.

Elizabeth Alexander's poem cited familiar maxims "first do no harm, or take no more than you need." That's all par for the course. Most interesting, perhaps, for a state ceremony, is that the speech didn't mention America, or anything so demotic as a bordered polity. In fact, she seemed to call for an explicit transcendence, wondering "what if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national." Music, no doubt, to those who rejoiced to "the world has changed and we must change with it" sentiments in Obama's own address.

All of it warm porridge for a left-minded audience, of little interest to anyone else. And can anyone seriously argue that it elevates poetry? No, it's not an occasion to glorify art, but one to glorify government. Frost wrote in "Dedication," the rather "meta" (and critically panned) panegyric he actually intended to deliver at the Kennedy inauguration, before being hindered by wind and poor sight, that "Summoning artists to participate in the august occasions of the state seems something for us all to celebrate." I doubt that; it seems mainly something for government to celebrate -- it is in fact another way for it to celebrate itself. Frost played the courtier at Camelot, not the other way around.

Frost's words actually buoyed Kennedy; it's difficult to register the insignificance of the other poems, because, to a large extent, their creators abandoned any sparks of poetic vitality to write these paeans to a new President. Remember when Laura Bush attempted to arrange a White House symposium on poetry? Invited participants launched Poets Against the War and inspired the eventual cancellation of the event. Funny, yes (how many divisions do the poets have), but it was an effort that actually embraced the political possibilities of verse, instead of putting it at the service of a mere date and occasion. The dreary January 20 liberal platitudes are nothing like that; they left any possible dynamism somewhere back along Massachusetts Avenue.

Yet that would be too much to hope for in a Democratic administration. You can engage in pop political psychologizing -- is it yet another play for the locked-up sympathy of Writer's Almanac-listening northeastern freelancers? Get them now, before you buy the anthologies that will inevitably savage these very poems. And, look, it took me about thirty seconds to find a stellar example of this phenomenon, in a Salon piece about inaugural poetry (which is pretty good, but follow my point):

recognize and like

Who knows! Maybe Adrienne Rich will run the day care?

It might seem a hopeful resurrection of the WPA Federal Writers Program Spirit, bringing government back into art, putting today's unemployed Cheevers and Hurstons to work in the national service. Yes. The reasons probably involve all of the above. Whatever the case, it's a strong argument for Republican rule. They don't do this.

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About the Author

Anthony Paletta is senior editor of MindingTheCampus.com, a web magazine sponsored by the Manhattan Institute's Center for the American University.

Letter to the Editor View all comments (22) | Leave a comment

frost| 1.23.09 @ 7:45AM

I forget who said 'em, but I recall two quotes...
kinda appropriate after that idiodic exhibition the other day:
“Free-Verse,” that “poetry” which does not rhyme, doeth remind me of playing tennis without a net.
And:
The demise of a Great America? Methinks it may have all started some years ago when the hapless (but best-selling) “poet” Rod McKuen was the Howard Cosell of verse, during the dawn of Political Correctness…
Then, a third, one of several "written" by Haunani-Kay Trask (with an assist from the National Endowment for the Arts) follows:
I could kick your face
Puncture both your eyes
You deserve this kind of violence
***
Just a knife slitting your tight
Little heart
***
A fist in your painted
Mouth
***
A sworn Black promise
To shadow your footsteps
Until the hearse of violence
Comes to get you.
----------------------------further questions, anyone?

Alan Brooks| 1.23.09 @ 8:34AM

good thing hispanics aren't as violent as, um, a Black promise, or we'd be done for.

Karsten Duncan| 1.23.09 @ 10:28AM

I think the idea of a poem at the inauguration isn't bad, it's just the actually poems that are bad. Kipling would probably provide something (I was tempted to quote one of his that seems apt, but then thought it might be tasteless).

ame| 1.23.09 @ 10:40AM

Inaugural poets except Frost offered inane pitter-patter garbage, not poetry. Angelou and Alexander epitomize is liberal collectivism educational philosophy that is destroying our students. Angelou and Alexander's poetry is the result of garbage in, garbage out. Fine Power Point skills, but no content. What makes me really angry as a former teacher of literature (I would not subscribe to the liberal philosophy of "good teachers HAVE students with good grades" and "education is a learning process that cannot be graded," is the degradation of poetry, the casting of it as pitter-patter sentimental trite inane collection of spittle. Amexander's poem reflects in perfect characterization the Obama Age - misplaced sentimental social engineering nope and dope Soros centered socialism in all its hollowness.

Alan Brooks| 1.23.09 @ 12:12PM

and too much smut, for me at least.
but for TV viewers n rappers? not enough.

ncatty| 1.23.09 @ 1:19PM

But you liked the quartet didn't you?

Michele San Pietro| 1.23.09 @ 3:13PM

Intellectualoids? No, thank you.

frost| 1.23.09 @ 3:26PM

ame -- good post

frost| 1.23.09 @ 3:28PM

And, yes, I know you were talking about another Frost, not moi...

Everly Waverly| 1.23.09 @ 3:33PM

Oh, the thought of you makes my heart twitch-
Shakespeare

Just part of a little poem I learned in H.S., there's more, but I want to post---
It's a poem and does it make me smile and at times bend over in laughter.
I do believe that "The Professor Irwin Corey" recites gibberish that's more understandable and sensible than the poo flung at Presidential Inaugurations.

Crescent moon adorned doors open to the sustenance of the purveyors of slippery rhetoric, oh forget the sense of reality, it's warm in there. Waverly

Alan Brooks| 1.23.09 @ 10:14PM

just as well poets dont say anything, we dont want to know what gays are thinking 'Deep Down', do we?
ignorance isnt bliss, not reading bad literature is bliss.

Alan Brooks| 1.24.09 @ 10:30AM

... best poetry is the sort that doesn't give you the dry heaves.

frost| 1.24.09 @ 11:10AM

Thanks, everly -- quoting "The World's Foremost Authority" Irwin Corey -- who speals off Thanatopsis....

Biwick| 1.27.09 @ 9:05AM

I forget who wrote it (I've been trying for years to track down the poem and the name of the poet), but in an anthology of political-oriented science-fiction that he edited, Jerry Pournelle included, by way of a preface, a poem that repeatedly asked the question, "Give Money to the Government?" One part of the poem that I do remember is:

"Give money to the government?
Whatever for?
"Give money to the government?
They'd only start another war!"

When President Palin takes the oath of office, she can have that poem read. The intellectualoids already hate her as a philistine, so she might as well make them mad.

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fatburningfurnace review| 11.28.09 @ 7:34AM

The real reason that inaugural poems fail is not because they're not written by Frost; it's because they're generally terrible. I do agree with this!

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Tony Gray| 12.30.09 @ 3:06AM

Anyone who sat through "Praise Song For the Day" on Tuesday has at least one reason to be thankful both for Republican rule and narrative efficiency.
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