Poetry at the Inauguration

Over at The New Yorker, George Packer is being kind of cranky about poetry at the inauguration.

"Is it too late to convince the President-elect not to have a poem written for and read at his Inauguration? The event will be a great moment in the nation’s history. Three million people will be listening on the Mall. Many of them will be thinking of another great moment that took place forty-five years ago, at their backs, when Martin Luther King stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Such grandeur would seem to call for poetry. But in fact the opposite is true."

He explains, "For many decades American poetry has been a private activity, written by few people and read by few people, lacking the language, rhythm, emotion, and thought that could move large numbers of people in large public settings."

That is, I think, a definite overgeneralization about American poetry. Beyond that, it's faulty logic: since Frost, Angelou, and the rest wrote less-than-inspiring poems, then Alexander will do the same? Why not give the poet the benefit of the doubt? Also, what's with his claim that only Derek Walcott is up to the challenge? What a jerky claim to make. Plus, Walcott isn't even American...

At the very least, making poetry a part of the inauguration will remind us all how very important poetry is to our lives. Besides, we have a poetry-reading, poetry-quoting President-elect...