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Inaugural poem

 
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Anybody here qualified to offer a scholarly discourse on that inaugural poem? Was the poet just, maybe, not personally good at reading poetry out loud? Or was the poem... not the high point of the ceremony?
 
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Unqualified for most things, but ready to dispense opinion! :-)

I had trouble discerning the meaning because the reading was so odd. But then, I wasn't quite sure if it was intended that way or not. So I switched the cnn.com livestream to the background during that part, and checked out the new http://www.whitehouse.gov/ ...

People are already analyzing every language bit of it: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1038 and http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1039
 
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I listened to it in the car and scratched my head since it seemed to be random. My wife thought the same thing.

Eric
 
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I feel I'm qualified to appreciate only poems in my area of university specialization: flower couplets (four line poems beginning "Roses are red, violets are blue...) and limericks about girls from Nantucket.
 
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Ulf: People are already analyzing every language bit of it:

And here is Salon's contribution:
How to write a poem for the president

 
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Ernest Friedman-Hill wrote:Anybody here qualified to offer a scholarly discourse on that inaugural poem?



Yes, I am. The poem in question has no rhythm or rhyme, and the contents are reminiscent of what my 8 year old son would write (if I had one). It would be much more interesting to have an inaugural poem contest and pick the winner for the ceremonial reading.
 
High Plains Drifter
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Mm, if by "qualified" you mean schooled in the subject, then yes.

And if I had heard or read the whole thing, which I haven't. She read a few pieces on NPR a couple weeks back; I did not imagine she'd have an inspiring piece for the inauguration. I can read the thing through and tell you what I think if you want.

On the main, however: this is not an age for poetry. Best not to get your hopes up. We haven't had an authentic, still-vital voice at an inauguration since Robert Frost (yes, I'm including Maya Angelou in this). The kinds of people I would love to hear speak lyrically for The People today aren't icons, but they do have some greater national credibility -- Adrienne Rich, Gary Soto, Robert Hass, Gary Snyder (maybe), Toi Derricotte -- and are doing something beyond this slideshow in words. That form was co-opted to its death by advertisers in the 80's, and there's just no way it's time to bring it back. You can't do anything with it that someone doesn't think of an AT&T or Beatrice commercial that sounds just like it.

Come to think of it, I don't want to read it if I don't have to.
 
Ernest Friedman-Hill
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Hey ME, I was hoping you'd drop by this thread!

"Slideshow in words" is a very good term for what she did. The projector was running much too fast: four, five words per slide, not enough time to catch what was on most of them, and I suspect some of the slides were upside down or jammed, because you couldn't see anything at all. I heard that NPR piece too, and the finished product wasn't a surprise. I frankly think she choked.

I am not an expert in any sense, but every morning Garrison Keillor's "Writer's Almanac" comes on my clock radio, and the contemporary poems he reads are almost always more thought-provoking, more creative, and more memorable.
 
Michael Ernest
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I have a quite particular idea of what ought to be written for an inaugural address. My gut says Alexander had that idea in mind, and either didn't know how to get there and decided to go for something else, or I don't know what.

You've got to so much background thinking to get it right, in my opinion, and I got the idea that she was fitting it in along with her usual work. If it were me? Cripes, I'd take the month, listen to the president-elect's most important speeches, listen to and read Martin Luther King Jr, and most important get to some raw, genuine American place and listen to it and feel it for a day, two days.

I bring up Frost because he was prophetic. Even though he modified a poem he written years before, it was in retrospect on key with that time, that president, that president's ambitions. At the same time, it was a primal, idealized theme that made no mention of politics or the condition of people. It didn't have to. Inaugurations are about coming into one's grasp of what is possible next. We have no visions about what it right now; why envision it?
 
She's brilliant. She can see what can be and is not limited to what is. And she knows this tiny ad:
a bit of art, as a gift, that will fit in a stocking
https://gardener-gift.com
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