Obamas poet will make history

Summoning artists to participate
In the august occasions of the state
Seems something artists ought to celebrate.

Those are pleasant thoughts, but awful poetry - probably the worst three lines Robert Frost ever put to paper. Tellingly, it was work for hire: the opening lines of "Dedication," the poem Frost composed for John F. Kennedy's 1961 inauguration.

Famously, and perhaps blessedly, Frost never had the chance to declaim them. The high wind and strong sun that day conspired to make his typescript unreadable. Unruffled, he pulled a mighty poem from memory, his own "Gift Outright" with its ringing first line: "The land was ours before we were the land's."

Frost was the first poet to read at a presidential inauguration, and there have been only two others in the almost five decades since: Maya Angelou, at Bill Clinton's first inauguration in 1993, and Miller Williams, at Clinton's second, in 1997. (Some would include, with an asterisk, James Dickey, who composed a poem that he read at Jimmy Carter's inaugural gala but not at the inauguration itself.) Now America is about to meet its fourth inaugural poet, a 46-year-old Yale professor named Elizabeth Alexander.

Thus far America's inaugural poems have been a mixed, motley bunch. Frost's "Dedication" was stiff and dutiful. (Another sample rhyme: "Heroic deeds were done./Elizabeth the First and England won.") Angelou's "On the Pulse of Morning" was touchy-feely, multi-culti and crammed with shout-outs:

So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African, the Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek,
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The Privileged, the Homeless, the Teacher.

Miller Williams seemed to get it about right. His inaugural poem, "Of History and Hope," was dignified, with a weather-beaten resonance. It began:

We have memorized America,
how it was born and who we have been and where.
In ceremonies and silence we say the words,
telling the stories, singing the old songs.

"To have great poetry there must be great audiences, too," Walt Whitman said. He was talking about the quality of a poet's readers. But there is little doubt, given the intense global interest in President-elect Barack Obama, that Alexander's verse will be broadcast to more people at one time than any poem ever composed. This may not be American poetry's Academy Award moment. But it is, for Alexander, an outsize platform.

What the world will hear at Obama's inauguration is the work of a woman whose verse makes a sharply different kind of music from that of any of the inaugural poets who have preceded her. The principal obsessions in her four books of verse - race and history, love and family - are played out in poems that can buzz with an electric and angular ellipticity, as in "Emancipation," printed here in its entirety:

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."

At other times her voice is calm and plain-spoken, as in this snippet from the poem "Smile":

When I see a black man smiling
like that, nodding and smiling
with both hands visible, mouthing
"Yes, Officer," across the street,
I think of my father, who taught us
the words "cooperate," "officer,"
to memorize badge numbers,
who has seen black men shot at
from behind in the warm months north.

Alexander, who was born in Harlem in New York City and raised in Washington, has been on fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Over a recent lunch of shrimp and grits on a snowy day in downtown Cambridge, Mass., she talked about how surprised and flattered she was to be asked to compose a poem, particularly by this president-elect.

"His own use of language, and his respect for it, is so evident," she said. "He is aware of the kind of power language has, and aware of the kind of care with which we ought to try to speak to each other with as we move forward."

She is going about making a poem for Obama, she said, by casting an eye back. "

I have read the previous inaugural poems, as well as many others," she said. "The ones that appeal to me have a sense of focus and a kind of gravitas, an ability to appeal to larger issues without getting corny."

One thing Alexander wants to do, she said, is speak clearly but artfully.

"I don't want the poem to talk down to some imagined audience," she said.

Among the poets she has been reading for guidance are Virgil, W.H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Is she prepared, I asked, for a Robert Frost moment? What if her manuscript catches fire or blows away?

"I am going to have many copies of the poem tucked away," she replied, laughing. "I really am. In a boot. I'm serious. I will have backups. I'm a mom."

Alexander is not a stranger to politics. Her father, Clifford, was a presidential civil rights adviser to President Lyndon B. Johnson and secretary of the Army during the Carter administration. Her mother, Adele, teaches African-American women's history at George Washington University.

Alexander became friendly with Barack and Michelle Obama when both she and Obama were teaching at the University of Chicago in the 1990s. Her younger brother, Mark, was a senior adviser to Obama's presidential campaign and is working on the Obama transition team.

Alexander's first book of poems, "The Venus Hottentot," was published in 1990. Her other books of poetry are "Body of Life" (1996), "Antebellum Dream Book" (2001) and "American Sublime" (2005), one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has also published two books of essays, "The Black Interior" (2003) and "Power & Possibility" (2007).

If there is anything critics and readers get wrong about her poetry, and that of her African-American contemporaries, it is that they "focus on content but forget about form and craft," Alexander said.

"And to a certain extent that's OK. I'm happy if people find something of interest contained in my poems. But they are not just documentaries. It's been a problem through the ages. African-American poetry has been read sociologically."

Alexander is not overly nervous, she said, about performing her inaugural poem. She enjoys reading her work.

"By the time you are reading a poem, the real work has been done," she said. "If I ever get nervous before getting up to read, I look at the poem and say: 'You're done. All I have to do is let you out.'"

The poetry world will be listening intently.

"After eight years of mangled and manipulated language, and the palpable effects of that in the real world, it seems like any gesture toward clarity of expression and dignity of life is welcome," Christian Wiman, the editor of Poetry magazine, said in an e-mail message.

"In a way, the poem itself is not the point," Wiman added. "I would guess that a president-elect decides to have an inaugural poem in the first place not in the hope of commissioning some eternal work of art, but in order to acknowledge that there is an intimate, inevitable connection between a culture's language and its political life. That Obama wants to make such a gesture seems to me a pure good - for poetry, yes, but also for the country."

Republican presidents-elect, it might be worth noting, have thus far been poet-phobic.

A few years after Frost recited "The Gift Outright" at Kennedy's inauguration, the president had the chance to speak some public words about Frost, who died in 1963 at 88. Less than a month before his own death Kennedy appeared at the groundbreaking of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College.

"When power corrupts, poetry cleanses," Kennedy said. "When power leads man towards his arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence."

A little corny? Definitely. But like the best public oration, genuine truth and beauty are packed in there as well.

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