University Diaries » Adam Kirsch on the Inaugural Poem

… Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem, “Praise Song for the Day,” …failed to live up to the standard of public, official verse. … The contemporary poet who set[s] out to write an official occasional poem … gives up the privacy in which modern poetry is born, without gaining the authority and currency that used to be the advantages of the poet laureate in Rome or England. Her verse is not public but bureaucratic–that is to say, spoken by no one and addressed to no one…

“Praise Song for the Day,” the poem Elizabeth Alexander read this afternoon, was a perfect specimen of this kind of bureaucratic verse. … [The] weakness of Alexander’s work is precisely its consciousness of obligation. Her poetic superego leads her to affirm piously, rather than question or challenge. … [Her poetry is] public in the worst sense–inauthentic, bureaucratic, rhetorical. So it was no surprise to hear Alexander begin her poem … with a cliché (“Each day we go about our business”), before going on to tell the nation “I know there’s something better down the road”; and pose the knotty question, “What if the mightiest word is ‘love’?”; and conclude with a classic instance of elegant variation: “on the brink, on the brim, on the cusp.” The poem’s argument was as hard to remember as its language; it dissolved at once into the circumambient solemnity…

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Sherman Dorn Says:
January 21st, 2009 at 10:42AM

… and her delivery fit with the etherized, bureaucratic trait Kirsch pointed out.

Jonathan Says:
January 21st, 2009 at 10:48AM

She used dreaded "poet voice," where you go up to the same pitch on every accented syllable, and accent words that don’t need to be:

ALL aBOUT US is NOISE

It was painful to listen to.

Mr Punch Says:
January 21st, 2009 at 5:49PM

Inaugural poetry has not been a success — we’re. what oh-for-four, counting Frost’s problems. There must be a better way. Maybe we should just go with the bureaucratic approach, and have the incumbent poet laureate do it.

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