I have to ask: what did you think of the inaugural poem “Praise Song for the Day” by Yale professor and poet Elizabeth Alexander?
We’ve been arguing about it most of the day, and I want to throw the question out there even though it makes me a little nervous.
From what I’ve been hearing in the hallways and reading on various Web sites, there is a wide divide between those who found it to be an appropriate, original, complex and moving piece of poetry and those who regarded it as trite, tedious, uninspiring, and barely even a poem.
Interestingly enough, the aesthetic assessments of Alexander’s work appeared to have little connection to the political leaning of the person responding. Does art, or the attempt to make art, transcend politics?
I have deeply conservative friends who said that Alexander’s reading of the poem was the only humble, sincere, acceptable part of the ceremony, “Since she didn’t come off like she was royalty. She spoke like a normal human being.” I also have passionately leftist friends who said they left the screen after hearing the opening lines because they could tell, even from the start, that they could do nothing but judge it harshly. As one put it “It was such a lovely day, I didn’t want to ruin it by being a scholar of English literature.”
Yikes.
Are we looking for a fight so soon after the election? Are we going to the mattresses over a poem?
And if we are, is that a good sign or a bad one?
Your thoughts? You start. I’ll follow up.
