Pompous Packer Picked on a Peck of Presidential Poets

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2008/12/presidential-po.html
December 18, 2008
Presidential Poetry
by George Packer

Is it too late to convince the President-elect not to have a poem written for and read at his Inauguration? The event will be a great moment in the nation’s history. Three million people will be listening on the Mall. Many of them will be thinking of another great moment that took place forty-five years ago, at their backs, when Martin Luther King stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Such grandeur would seem to call for poetry. But in fact the opposite is true.

For many decades American poetry has been a private activity, written by few people and read by few people, lacking the language, rhythm, emotion, and thought that could move large numbers of people in large public settings. In response to the news about Obama’s inaugural, Derek Walcott, who is about the only poet I can think of who might have pulled it off, but wasn’t selected, said, “There have been great occasional poets—poets who write on occasion. Tennyson was one. I think Pope was another. Frost also.” It’s not an accident that Walcott couldn’t name a poet born after 1874. And even Frost, who was chosen by J.F.K. to read the first inaugural poem in American history, botched the job, composing a piece of triumphalist doggerel that compared Kennedy to the Roman emperor Augustus. The eighty-six-year-old Frost kept losing his place in the winter sun’s glare, the wind whipped his pages around on the podium, and finally he abandoned the effort, as if he’d never really had much conviction in it, and instead read from memory an earlier and better poem, “The Gift Outright.”

Two poets have been given the honor since Frost. Maya Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning,” read at Clinton’s first inaugural, was an overly long ode to multiculturalism whose elevated tone turned out to be badly out of sync with the early months of the Presidency it heralded. And I know you can’t name the poet who read at Clinton’s second inaugural (it was Miller Williams).

On all these occasions, the incoming President seemed to be claiming more for his arrival than he deserved, and to be doing it by pretending that poetry means more in American life than, alas, it does.

A forty-six-year-old professor of African-American studies at Yale named Elizabeth Alexander has been chosen to write a poem for Obama’s swearing-in. She is a friend and former neighbor of Obama’s in Chicago, and her brother worked on the campaign and the transition. These alone seem like the kind of qualifications that entitle Caroline Kennedy to a Senate seat. Judging from the work posted on her Web site, Alexander writes with a fine, angry irony, in vividly concrete images, but her poems have the qualities of most contemporary American poetry—a specificity that’s personal and unsuggestive, with moves toward the general that are self-consciously academic. They are not poems that would read well before an audience of millions.

Obama’s Inauguration needs no heightening. It’ll be its own history, its own poetry.

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Oh pleeeze. History, the very thing that provokes feelings about the March on Washington and other great events, tells us a little poetry can be a very good thing when it comes to the leader of the free world.

Kennedy said in 1963:

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concerns, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

Arrogance, corruption, narrowing of concerns? Sounds like an Administration we know too well.

Packer writes:

Three million people will be listening on the Mall. Many of them will be thinking of another great moment that took place forty-five years ago, at their backs, when Martin Luther King stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Such grandeur would seem to call for poetry. But in fact the opposite is true.

Elizabeth Alexander will also be thinking of that other great moment forty-five years ago because she was there, taken as a little girl by her parents to the Washington Mall to hear King. And whoever said Martin Luther King wasn't a poet in his own right? Just as Barack Obama is.

Finally, Packer writes that designating a poet to write a poem and read it for the inauguration is "pretending that poetry means more in American life than, alas, it does."

Alas, dude, that's the whole point. If a President believes in the importance of words as Obama does, enough to have poetry as part of his inauguration, than he's sending the message that poetry and all the arts are an important part of life.

Maybe Packer can't relate, but America is made up of millions of ordinary people who find poetry in their daily lives. Whether it is rap music or a passage in the Bible or a protest song or an afternoon fly fishing, it surrounds us. If Packer was able to pull his head out from his ass he might even notice it himself.

As Elizabeth Alexander wrote in Ars Poetica #100:

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)
is not all love, love, love,
and I'm sorry the dog died.
Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,
and are we not of interest to each other?