Inaugural Poem

[gothicdruid]

So...if you're going to provide a poem for the inauguration of a new President renowned for his own flights of rhetoric, you'd better bring it.

Umm...Elizabeth Alexander? Not so much.

It wasn't just that her poem was so unmusical ("the figuring it out at kitchen tables," "with no need to preempt grievance") or syntactically klutzy (Do we really

Comments

YMMV

[joyful_storm]

I rather liked it, actually.

[romandruid]

I liked parts of it; other parts made me blink a bit in a "HUH?" moment. More importantly, it held the attention and dazzled a classroom full of 8th graders. They actually paid more attention to this than the acceptance speech... er, much to my dismay, actually. (I'll have to listen to it again because kids kept interrupting me to ask about their homework...)

[gothicdruid]

I'm both intrigued and saddened by your students' responses...intrigued that they responded favorably to what I'm 100% sure will not go down in literary annals as a memorable poem (which is to say, I'm heartened that they responded to poetry, period) and saddened that they didn't hang more carefully on Obama's words. By no means his best speech--not by a long shot--but there was a lot of rich and careful construction in there and his delivery was--as usual--equally rich.

Ms. Alexander's oral interpretation didn't even unlock what layers were there in her own composition. The room full of mostly young adults I watched with at work all seemed very underwhelmed by the poem. When you put it beside the complexity of composition and the virtuosity of performance of the musical offering, it was especially banal, I thought. Maya Angelou, this woman ain't.

[romandruid]

Maya Angelou, this woman ain't.

Right you are there.

(The fact that classes changed in the middle of Obama's speech may have had something to do with the inattentiveness, y'know...)