Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Oy, what a crappy poem

And an even worse reading. What's with the e-qual em-pha-sis on ev-er-y syl-la-ble? We speak a stress-timed language, fer christ's sake! Contrasted to the speeches and speaking of Obama and the preacher who delivered the benediction, Elizabeth Alexander looked worse yet. Would have been interesting to see what, say, Martin Espada would have done with such a commission...

UPDATE: A pretty incisive critique of just what's substandard about Alexander's poem.

UPDATE 2: Adam Kirsch on why Alexander's poem sucks. Which seems another good argument for someone like Espada, someone who is not an establishment figure, someone who actually has a lot of firsthand experience of disenfranchisement, who has lived in Hell's Kitchen instead of just knowing about/having ancestors who picked cotton. But let's face it, Obama's way more about assimilation than protest. As such, Alexander was, as Kirsch puts it, a "too perfect" choice.


4 comments:

Rob Taylor said...

I was fine with the poem - I understand the pressures on her to produce something accessible and inoffensive. You're right, though, that the delivery was terrible - terrible for the delivery of any poem, but especially terrible for a poem like this.

You could drive a truck (loaded with any momentum the poem had built) between the words "praise" and "song". Last I checked, that wasn't exactly what "praise songs" were all about...

But it's a hell of a task she had in front of her - I'm sure most poets would fail to rise to the challenge. Still, its sad to think of the potential interest in poetry this could have generated. We can probably kiss that goodbye (or should I say "good... bye"?).

Megan said...

Yeah, I thought the same thing. I don't even know if it was a GOOD poem: I was so put off by the delivery, I couldn't listen to the words.

Zachariah Wells said...

Maybe that was the intent: hide the banalities and cliches with a stilted reading...

Pearl said...

There was something of Canada in her delivery i.e. channeling Bill Shatner.