Quoting sharon brogan <[log in to unmask]>:

 
> Here is a transcript of Alexander's poem, from the NYT:
> 
> ***************
> 
> Praise song for the day.
 etc... and here is a critique  by one Erica Wagner:

From Times Online
January 20, 2009
Critique of Elizabeth Alexander's presidential poem

Elizabeth Alexander had a tough act to follow
Erica Wagner

If you are a little-known poet – and perhaps, let’s be completely honest, maybe 
rightly so - being told you’re going to have to follow a speech by President 
Barack Obama is a very, very, very bad gig to pull.

Praise Song for the Day was unmemorable. How do I know that for sure? Why, 
because I can’t remember it. Two minutes after it was spoken I couldn’t remember 
it. Our columnist, David Baddiel, wondered whether he couldn’t spot the Secret 
Service agents hastily removing the bullet-proof screens as she spoke; oh, I 
suppose that’s going a little far. But only just.

If you listened to President Obama’s inaugural address, you would have been 
reminded of the remarkable ability of language to both be a part of what we are 
and yet also somehow to raise us above ourselves, to remind us - as he wished to 
remind us - that we are capable of greater things. He spoke of what the 
ancestors of today’s Americans had done: “For us, they packed up their few 
worldly possessions and travelled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, 
they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and 
plowed the hard earth. For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and 
Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.”

Mr Obama understands the music of cadence and beauty that simple repetition can 
bring; Professor Alexander, alas, sounded merely repetitious, or at the very 
least, confused: “All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of 
our ancestors on our tongues.” That tongue seems like a pretty crowded place to 
me. Ouch.

Alexander is clearly an admirable woman; it’s not hard to see why President 
Obama would admire what she stands for: as she tells us on her website, she is 
the first recipient of the Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship for work that 
“contributes to improving race relations in American society and furthers the 
broad social goals of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education 
decision of 1954.” Which is terrific. But this poem, alas, was not terrific. It 
was pedestrian and dull. It attempted to convey, in language much less skilled, 
some of the message which the President so ably conveyed in his inaugural 
address, his own language drawing on that of scripture and of past great 
Presidents and orators.

“Ordinary” speech – the rhythms and phrases on which Professor Alexander drew – 
can indeed, rightly used, be poetic. I was reminded of that possibility when 
listening to John Williams’ setting of the Shaker song, Simple Gifts, as played 
by Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma just a few moments before: “’Tis a gift to be 
simple, ’tis a gift to be free, ’tis a gift to come down where we ought to 
be...” That is indeed simple, and that is indeed poetry.

Never mind. Who cares? Not me. I just got to type the words “President Barack 
Obama” for the very first time; and listen to the new President’s words take us, 
we may all profoundly hope, once again towards – as someone once said – a new 
birth of freedom.





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