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With most Americans, I watched the inauguration ceremonies of President Barack Obama last Tuesday. At times I wept. At others, grinned like the Cheshire cat. And, being a poet, I paid attention to Elizabeth Alexander as she recited her poem "Praise Song for the Day," written for the inauguration. I paid attention, but knew I'd have to find the video and text, sit somewhere, and be still before forming an opinion.
Preparing to write this post, I sifted through critiques of the poem, most of them so negative that I considered entitling this post, "Why Y'all Be Hatin' on a Sister?" The content of the post would have been a list of review links with notations beside each link: He a hater; She a hater; Not a hater; Idiot; Look, it's a suck-up! (the last designation reserved for gushers who say things like, "It's a masterpiece, the best poem I've ever read in my life!")
In addition, I procrastinated on reading the reviews for a few days after I saw some of the firsts. I dreaded knowing too much because I'd want to tell it all, which is why I'm glad to have come across Joel Dias-Porter's blog. After you finish this post, if you want to dive deeper, he's your man.
Here's a taste of the kind of detailed analysis you'll find there.
Being familiar with her work, I know that Alexander is a poet of both great skill and care, thus it was not surprising to note that the poem is comprised of forty-three lines, loosely in iambic pentameter (mostly 9, 10, and 11 syllables) and arranged into 14 tercets, plus one final orphan line. That the body of the poem is 43 lines is no coincidence, since Alexander is smart enough to know that while Obama is the 44th President of these United States, he is the 43rd person to serve as such. This is due to Grover Cleveland serving two non-consecutive terms as the 22nd and 24th Presidents. (Joel Dias-Porter)
This kind of detail fascinates me, but I know most people don't care about form, meter, couplets or tercets, significance of line count. While poets and critics debate whether "Praise Song for the Day" is a poem or prose, the average person is screaming from the corner, "Yeah, but what the hell did she mean?"
At Slate, Salon, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, I've read comments like, "WTF?" or "That was not a poem." and "What was that, an Affirmative Action poem?" "Walt Whitman, she ain't."
Regina Hackett, art critic for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote:
The daily-life banality of her poem was disheartening, but that's not the real problem. Her delivery was flat. She sounded as if she were ordering pizza on the phone.
But that's not the problem either.
The problem is, by no stretch is her poem a poem at all. While as a stilted monologue it had a suggestion of lean appeal, far better than the greeting card goo Maya Angelou cranks out and insists on calling poetry, Alexander's effort is the product of a limited imagination, an academic approach to rhythm and an anorexic understanding of imagery. (Regina Hackett at SeattlePI.com)
Hackett's so wrong, but I applaud her for posting with her critique an example of what she considers to be a good poem, Rita Dove's "Exit," chosen at random, says Hackett. Critics quickly will tell you something is bad, but move as arthritic old men giving examples of what they call good.
Hackett voices a common complaint about Alexander's poem, its delivery. I think some people thought she should speak like Maya Angelou or be more like the poets at poetry slams, the kind you see on HBO's Def Jam. Some folks think a poet is only one thing, a spoken word performer like Sandra Kay, for instance, entertaining with mad dramatic skillz. Others think a poet is a British-sounding man in a coffee house, bemoaning lost love with lofty words.
And then there's the rhyming thing. Hackett understands poems can be poems and not rhyme, but many Americans still believe words are only poetry if they fall within the definition of poetry learned in elementary school--pretty turns of phrase in near-even lines, ending in rhyme.
Others, taking pride in being poetry connoisseurs, don't necessarily believe poems must rhyme, but still call Alexander a hack who writes not only poetry poorly but prose badly as well.
No Social Function:
I didn’t
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