The 86-year-old Yankee bard wrote “Dedication” for the special occasion, but he couldn’t read the copy of the poem due to the harsh glint of the January sun on snow. Instead, he recited an earlier work, the much shorter “Gift Outright,” which begins: “The land was ours before we were the land’s.”
Thirty-two years later, another young Democrat was sworn in as president, and Bill Clinton decided that he, too, must have a poet on his inauguration day. He chose Maya Angelou, described by a British newspaper as Frost’s “anti-thesis,” and she is, about which, more later.
For his second inauguration, Bubba asked fellow Arkansan Miller Williams — the dad of country-music legend Lucinda Williams — to read a poem, which was as forgettable as Angelou’s.
Last month, America’s new president revived this poetic tradition and invited Yale University professor Elizabeth Alexander to the world’s “grandest poetry gig.”
I was perhaps the only person on island — or on the planet — who didn’t give a hoot about all that hoopla on the Washington Mall. But I wanted to see and hear Alexander read her poem, which I finally did eight days after the inauguration (thank you, MCV).
It was, as I suspected it would be, a letdown, like Obama’s cliché-ridden speech. Like Angelou’s and Williams’, Alexander’s verse was flat — it was too prosy. And prose is not poetry. These lines from Alexander are not poetry: “Someone is stitching up a hem, darning/ a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,/ repairing the things in need of repair.” Compare that with Angelou’s “You may have the grace to look up and out/ And into your sister’s eyes,/ Into your brother’s face, your country/ And say simply/ Very simply/ With hope/ Good morning.” Here’s Williams: “We mean to be the people we meant to be,/ to keep on going where we meant to go.”
If you read these sentences without the line breaks they’re exactly what they’re trying not to be: plain sentences.
Here’s Frost: “Such as we were we gave ourselves outright/ (The deed of gift was many deeds of war)/ To the land vaguely realizing westward,/ But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,/ Such as she was, such as she would become.”
Notice the rhythm, the charged language, the profundity lurking between the lines…
JFK picked a poet. Clinton and Obama picked politically correct writers of what now passes for verse.
Obama’s choice for a poet may be surprising to those who know that the new president reads major leaguers like Derek Walcott. It turns out that Alexander is Obama’s friend. They were colleagues at the University of Chicago in the early 1990s.
Nine years ago, the American poet Joan Houlihan blamed William Carlos Williams’ very popular “verse” for blurring the distinction between poetry and prose. “As James Dickey puts it,” Houlihan said, “ ‘ How many beginning writers took Williams as their model: were encouraged to write because…well, if that’s poetry, I believe I might be able to write it too!’ ”
And so now, said Houlihan, “we have reached the point where we are being asked to believe that a text block, chopped randomly into flat, declarative lines, is a poem. We are told to kneel and stare at this specimen of dead lines laid out in its little coffin on the page, and declare it alive. What do we say?”
We say with Jose Garcia Villa that “[t]he Poetic Process is not the Prose Process…. The seeking of prose values in poetry…will not serve the purposes of poetry. A knowledge of prose is not a knowledge of poetry; there is no congruence, the two disciplines are as antipodal as night and day — in genesis, in language, craft and all.”
The “excuse” of those who tolerate what cranky Villa once described as “subliterate verse” is that they’re merely trying to “popularize” poetry. But what they popularizing is mediocrity not poetry.
Poetry must be accessible, they say. But it is — if you have the patience for it and if you care for beautiful, significant and moving language.
Ballet is “hard,” too, like poetry. But you don’t hear about people who want to dumb it down and do away with the fouette, the jette, the plie, etc. while insisting that what will be left is still ballet.
If you can’t appreciate poetry because it’s “difficult,” then go read something else, like the funnies. But don’t chop up sentences and tell me that these should be “poems,” too. They’re not.
Here’s hoping that the next American president who will invite a poet to his — or her — inauguration will choose someone who will read an actual poem.
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