Quoting Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]>:

> Another take, with responses:
> 
> http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2009/01/20/adam-kirsch-on-
elizabeth-alexander-s-bureaucratic-verse.aspx
> 
> Doug
 
Thanks, Doug. Kirsch is brilliant.
Max

I also liked the comment someone posted to that blog in response:

bcarr said:
I'm interested in a subtextual current here. Now that we have a president "of 
culture" who exudes rhetorical ability, artistic appreciation, and education, it 
looks as though the media's out to talk about poetry and culture as much as 
possible. Maybe, the thinking goes, if we talk about it enough--just maybe--
people will start caring enough to keep reading after optimism's uproar. Keep 
the poets on the radar, and we'll jump start a sort of revolution. My apologies 
for sounding so jaded, but if one watches the crowd during Alexander's reading, 
one will see very few rapt audience members. I don't mean ones carried away by 
the sublimity and song of poetry (of which, in my opinion, there were only 
scraps); few even knew how to listen: distracted by greater things or dissolved 
into the effects of the crowd, most of the people took in Alexander's poem like 
a lukewarm glass of milk.

Maybe it WAS the poet's fault: her verse sounded just like verse from a thousand 
other American poets knocked off the dies of University English and MFA 
programs. Bland cadences guided ideas about the grandeur of everyday man only to 
disappear into other cycles of disjunction. Here a bus; here a farmer; here a 
dirt road.

But--and here's another maybe--maybe we're all just so buzzed on expectation 
that damn near any modern poem would have failed? Obama needed a Pindar or 
Petrarch to speak alongside his own inaugural power. Better still, he needed a 
Whitman.

(from Song of Myself)

I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the 
end,

But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now,

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge and urge and urge,

Always the procreant urge of the world.

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, 
always sex,

Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.

To elaborate is no avail, learn’d and unlearn’d feel that it is so.

Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in 
the beams,

Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,

I and this mystery here we stand.

Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.



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