Elizabeth Alexander
Discuss.
Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.
Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer consider the changing sky; A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”
We encounter each other in words, Words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; Words to consider, reconsider.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, “I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.”
We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.
Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.
Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.
Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”
Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.
What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.
In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.
7 Comments:
The poem is only meager, vague prose brutally chopped into lines. There is no rhythm, formal or folksy, no rhyme in sound or image, nothing coherent in the parts or the whole. "All about us is noise" is correct indeed.
One of my favorite younger critics, Adam Kirsch, says more at the New Republic's blog, The Plank
More or less my thoughts. But, she's not Billy Collins.
Oh, good, I'm glad no one else liked it either. I vote Greg Brownderville for next Laureate.
I hate to sound like an ass, but this poem was so terrible that it's actually harmful. There've only been four poem readings at inaugurations in history. All those poems were middling to terrible. Why?
This country is full of poets who are very good. In fact, the country has a poet laureate who is at least decent. Why can't those people come up with some sort of competition for a bearable poem?
Because what this poem did, like so many others, is suggest to the general public that poetry is bad, boring, and irrelevant. Poetry can't afford that.
We might start with divesting from the idea that the most p.c. choice of candidate is also the best artistic one.
Anyone who disagrees should be forced to listen to this poem 300 million times, one time for each person in the U.S. it was afflicted on.
Honestly, I don't really like poetry, I never have.
However, I quite enjoyed John William's arrangement of "Simple Gifts."
I enjoyed the aged man's prayer at the end, especially with its litany of exhortations to the different races of the world.
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