Reactions to Inaugural Poem

Much is being said about Elizabeth Alexander's poem, which I defended on a forum by saying it contains some qualities of the praise poetry tradition, with words that cut deep with their clarity. But some have begun to suggest that Obama's speech was more poetic than Alexander's poem. Jay Parini, for instance, wrote in the Guardian that "President Obama became a poet in his speech. He made the language itself resonate; and he did so not by fancy writing or superficially elevated diction or self-conscious parallelism in the syntax." Parini goes on to point out that the speech will resonate more with the people than Alexander's poem. Could it be, as Parini suggests, that in the context of an Obama speech, the poem (any poem) may not succeed in capturing the hearts of an audience? Is it the poem people didn't enjoy or its rendition, especially since it came right after the speech?

I have read the poem several times and have seen many good features, from the surprisingly ordinary beginning, "Each day we go about our business," to "All about us is noise", to "Say it plain: that many have died for this day" to "praise song for struggle, praise song for the day." It reads like a poem not willing to pretend to be what it isn't. Its confidence is in elevating what on the surface looks like common words, so that the moment you start accusing these words of being ordinary, they arrest you with their insistent simplicity.

But wait a minute: "What if the mightiest word is love?" And love is a common word, right? "Love beyond marital, filial, national;/love that casts a widening pool of light." If you see love in any word, that word gains might, and a mighty word resonates with you, and that's poetry.

"All about us is noise" has reminded me of a documentary on poetry that I reviewed last year, which covers performance poets who capture the urban static that we often ignore. In that urban static are messages that need to be decoded, in performance, in Gerald Manley Hopkins' "common language heightened". It seems Alexander's poem uses this idea of noise to show that while we must hear it, we must acknowledge that we are part of it in our search for "something better down the road." What we can't do is drown in this "everywhere" noise, but continue to walk "into that which we cannot yet see."

Standing alone, as far away as it can from an Obama speech, a poem like this has a strong message, which will resonate, like the speech it was meant to complement, with the people for many years.

A publisher is putting together a chapbook of the poem soon. Perhaps then, readers will have time to see the poem for what it is.