Boom Box Lettuce: On the Inaugural Poem
One morning while rowing at Derby, I saw a nine-year-old boy shooting baskets. He lived on the river and there was a goal behind his house. It was about 7:30 and I assume he was waiting for his ride to school.
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When I heard about the poet that Obama had commissioned for the inauguration, it certainly caught my interest. I’m a writer and bookseller, I know a lot of poets, I went to Yale. I read a few things about her, how she was working. She spoke on NPR last week and Scott Simon asked if he could hear a little of it (joking, really). She declined but sounded confident. I started to get hopeful.
I think poets were anticipating the reading with a mix of boosterism and morbid fascination. I have to turn to a few sports analogies: those couple months she had to work seemed like the timeout you take to ice the kicker.
Or occasionally in baseball there’s a situation where the bases are loaded and the count is full in the ninth inning. If the pitcher doesn’t throw a strike the game is over. I think about performance, how to handle that, psychologically. I envision myself on the mound, regressing through all my mechanical development until I’m a two-year-old with no ability or knowledge of how to throw at all. What comes first? Do I kick my leg? When do I release?
Elizabeth Alexander went back to beginnings. “Say it plain.” What do words do if they don’t connect with others? Can they connect with the cosmos or be self-reflective, be musical, like playing an oil drum, cello or a boom box? (The last one a little nod to our first Gen-X president.)
She used simple language, at times monosyllabic and halting, evocative of Obama himself in the debates. It was a poem about work, hard work long done by slaves and soldiers, the peaceful work of students and seamstresses. Work and relationships, between the worker and the world (“A farmer considers the changing sky”) between the leader and the follower (“Take out your pencils, begin.”)
It was a poem about work from the only ordinary person up there on the steps, the one who was doing her job, showing the fruits of her labor. I assume a lot of people think of poets as not ordinary and peripheral to the big economic issue of the day. Poets don’t (necessarily) string power lines, milk cows, or trade derivatives of sub-prime mortgages. (For what it’s worth I know some who work as publicists and teachers and doctors and underwriters.) And anyway the economy is a funny combination of the very real and the completely intangible. We have plenty of food to eat and sheetrock to house us, the ups and downturns are a matter of relationships and confidences, understanding and misunderstandings. “Catching each other’s eyes or not.”
Alexander is saying that when times are bad, when words don’t connect us with others, we have to praise song for itself, praise song for the sake of praising and connect with something greater, a love not merely about our treatment of each other: not just the golden rule or the Hippocratic oath, but a love beyond: “with no need to preempt grievance.”
The top Google hit for Elizabeth Alexander right now is something from a British paper about the poem being “too prosy.” This was an American poem: no ideas but in things. Our business is business. An American poem praises pedestrian things like waiting for buses and crunching numbers at kitchen tables.
My fear was that she would choke up there on the mound, but I was also afraid that she’d write something that would get me all excited and then eventually fade. And I don’t know, maybe it won’t last. It was a poem of the moment and this week, for me, it worked very well. It got me working.
As for that little boy shooting baskets along the river, I’ve never figured out why that image tattooed itself in my memory so long ago, as I sat in a narrow boat with low gunnels. I guess it was because I never remember having calm mornings before school, it was always rush, rush: cold cereal, darkness, long bus rides.
But then again, maybe if he’d seen me, sitting with the oar handle in my lap, my body warm, with miles yet to row, maybe I would have seemed at peace as well.
