← Previous Post: | Next Post:

 

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…

Margaret Soltan, January 21, 2009 10:39AM
Posted in: protect yourself from bad poetry

Trackback URL for this post:
https://www.margaretsoltan.com/wp-trackback.php?p=8233

4 Responses to “Adam Kirsch on the Inaugural Poem”

  1. Sherman Dorn Says:

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

  2. Jonathan Says:

    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.

  3. Mr Punch Says:

    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.

  4. Robert Crosman Says:

    In the New Yorker (2/9/15) Elizabeth Alexander has a moving account of her marriage to an Eritrean refugee, Ficre Gebreyesus, his sudden death of heart disease at fifty, and the ensuing grief of herself and their two sons. It’s moving, authentic, and not in the least bureaucratic. The happy fact of sun in his eyes led Frost to recite from memory at JFK’s inaugural, not the poem he had written for the occasion, but another poem, “The Gift Outright,” which is a fine poem, if somewhat, by today’s standards, imperialistic. “The land was ours, before we were the land’s”, it begins, raising the question of whose it was before it was “ours,” a question that would hardly occur to many European-Americans in 1961. But it accurately describes the psychological processes of taking over a new continent, while one is still as much at home mentally in the old country as in this new, still alien, land (with natives intermittently shooting at you). The difference between Frost and Alexander may be a matter of a greater versus a lesser talent (with which even she wd probably not disagree) But if Frost had been able to read the poem he made for the occasion, he might have fared no better than she did. An occasion can sometimes summon forth a good poem, but the problem is that whether it does so or not, you HAVE to recite it. She’d better, perhaps, have done what Frost was forced to do – read an older and better poem, even if it had no explicit connection to the occasion.

Comment on this Entry

UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog

University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University

The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog

Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway

From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law

University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog

I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes

As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls

Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical

University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life

[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada

If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte

Archives

Categories