So Rick Warren is going to give the invocation. Who cares? I want to know about the poet! You see, for the first time since Bill Clinton, we have a poet reading. You'll recall that Maya Angelou read in 1993, and fewer of you will recall that Miller Williams (Arkansas poet and father of alt-country rocker Lucinda Williams) read in 1997. George W? No poets.
Elizabeth Alexander will be reading at the Obama inauguration. She's a great choice: an accessible poet who has academic respect. I've followed her since her first book, The Venus Hottentot (recently republished by Graywolf).
She's a funny, wise, critical poet. Consider this, from her 2005 collection American Sublime:
Emancipation
Corncob constellation,
oyster shell, drawstring pouch, dry bones.
Gris gris in the rafters.
Hoodoo in the sleeping nook.
Mojo in Linda Brent’s crawlspace.
Nineteenth century corncob cosmogram
set on the dirt floor, beneath the slant roof,
left intact the afternoon
that someone came and told those slaves
"We’re free."
I feel confident that Elizabeth Alexander is going to write an ass-kicking inaugural poem, one that will set us on fire while also (as Angelou, to be frank, did not) pleasing the poetry critics.
Shelley called poets
the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
The American poet George Oppen, more of a realist, said poets were really
the legislators of the unacknowledged world
If the Obama inauguration has a symbolic meaning, it is that the unacknowledged world is starting to come into view, gloriously, multifariously. Elizabeth Alexander is a great choice: she's been seeing that world for decades.