Site Presented By
Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Elizabeth Alexander has been commissioned to write a poem for Inauguration Day. But the checkered history of the form suggests it's an almost impossible task.
By Jim Fisher
Read more: Books, Poetry, Books Features, Barack Obama
Jan. 15, 2009 | When I first heard a poet would read at Obama's inauguration, I was driving through Oakland, Calif., kid in the back seat, on my way to a cafe with Wi-Fi and a jungle gym. I had a poem to e-mail to a journal and a play date at noon. Melissa Block of NPR's "All Things Considered" began her story as I pulled into a parking spot, and I idled there for five minutes, passing raisins to my daughter, as poet Elizabeth Alexander spoke about the honor and her plans for the ceremony. How much better can things get? First I get a leader, now I get a poet? Not only a poet, but a poet I recognize and like? Is free daycare next?
Then Melissa Block mentioned that as a 1-year-old Alexander had been carried to see Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered in 1963 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and in a head rush of gratitude I nearly laid my forehead on the horn.
Since that broadcast, I've been thinking about the kind of work Alexander's been asked to compose -- an "occasional poem," meaning verse produced for a special event -- and discovered an anxiety it seems other poet friends share.
As a genre, occasional poetry originated with classical Latin poets, who used it to honor leaders and commemorate ceremonies of home and state. Since then it's become less common, though it enjoyed flashes of favor in the 17th and 18th centuries. These days, in the United States at least, poems are still commissioned for the incidental donor gala or somber anniversary, though the practice is by no means a convention.
There's no starker demonstration of our culture's separation of poetry and state than the fact that our nation's poet laureate, a consultant post to the Library of Congress filled on an annual basis since 1937, is not expected to produce verse for government events. It's easy to see why: What poet today would allow his or her voice to be yoked to the policy of a presidential administration, even one as popular as Obama's? At what point would the poetry become propaganda?
If the post was on the hook for occasional verse, as it was in England before Wordsworth resisted in 1843, America's current poet laureate, Californian Kay Ryan, would be writing and delivering the inaugural poem. With no disrespect to Alexander, that's something I'd have given my book budget to see. In addition to being a fluid, lucid poet, Ryan is a lesbian, who lived with her partner of 30 years in Fairfax, Calif., until her partner died on Jan. 3, 2009. Four years ago, in February 2004, they were married in San Francisco's City Hall. How's that for a voice to follow the invocation of Rick Warren, the anti-gay evangelical preacher who supported California's divisive Proposition 8 in November?
But if the poet laureate doesn't write poems for the state, why should other poets? That depends on the poet and the public event, and goes a long way to explaining why so many of my peers freeze up at the challenge of occasional verse. For what's being asked of us is not necessarily a great poem (though a great poem would be a triumph), and not at all the kind of poem we're practiced at composing.
What's being asked is the fulfillment of a ceremonial role, something many Americans only experience in the one familiar ceremony where poems are routinely recited: the wedding. Not uncommonly, poets asked to choose a marriage poem (as most poets over 30 will tell you) give up the hunt for material both suitable and inspiring, thinking they'll try to write the thing themselves. Next comes the panic: I have no idea how to write an occasional poem! For my own wedding, what I finally did was rework one of my existing poems; I did the same thing for the recent union of some close friends.
Did the revised poems suffer as stand-alone verse? Of course. Stanzas were tweaked to personalize the themes and ensure no lines risked being misconstrued, given the focal story of that day's bride and groom. But whatever the poems lost in independence they gained in ritual and sentiment, and the affection of the moment still attaches to the poems for many who were there to receive them. This is probably why Goethe, an overwhelmingly social poet who was also a public official, asserted that "occasional poetry is the highest kind."
A provocative claim, but I like my poetry on the page: solitary, unscheduled, perhaps talking to me personally but by no means shouting so all can hear.
This isn't to say a poem can't be written in response to a public event. On the contrary, poems often wrongly described as "occasional" -- Yeats' "Easter, 1916" and Auden's "September 1, 1939" are two prominent examples -- were written after the occasion they commemorate, both of them rising above the moment to give meaning over time. Auden certainly didn't write his poem in anticipation of the invasion of Poland and the outbreak of World War II; the shock of the event conceived the poem, which was written in the days following the war declarations. Further, it was not only a great poem in 1939, it was a great poem in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks cast the stanzas in a new twilight, at the end of one era and the menace of the next.
An old poem was similarly reclaimed at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961 by Robert Frost, the first poet in America's history included in the ceremony. (Alexander is only the fourth.) After faltering with the beginning of a week-old original poem he had decided to write at the last minute, he finally said, "This was to be a preface to the poem I can say to you without seeing it." On familiar ground now, his voice boomed as he recited his own 20-year-old poem beloved by JFK and first printed in "The Witness Tree" (1942). This was "The Gift Outright," with its stunning invocation,
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
a line reborn at that instant to signify the promise of the Kennedy presidency. Like the Americans of the poem, who hold themselves back from their country until they find "salvation in surrender" and "give [themselves] outright" to the land, Frost gave in to the greater poem, which became its own gift. The poem thus rewrote its own title and theme in ways impossible before JFK's inauguration. In fact, Frost's delivery was powerful enough that most Americans, reporters included, forgot the uncomfortable few minutes that preceded it. "Frost's Poem Wins Hearts at Inaugural" read the headline in the next morning's Washington Post.
Next page: How will Elizabeth Alexander commemorate the election of the first African-American president?
How was the poem?
Sleepwalking toward Baghdad
Poison Valley
Poison PCs
Submit