Posted on 01/20/2009 12:58:24 PM PST by TheBlueMax
Barack Obama has undercut any claims of meritocracy with at least one choice: the woman who will delivering his inaugural poem. Aside from the fact that she has known Obama since they worked together at the University of Chicago, one is hard-pressed to find a rationale for this honor. Only the fourth poet to participate in a presidential inauguration, Elizabeth Alexander is no Robert Frost, nor even Maya Angelou. Alexander is an unpoet who arranges words into impenetrable jumbles flecked with juvenile imagery, inappropriate word choice, an obsessive PC view of race and "gender," a dubious take on miscegenation, and an occasional desire to kill whitey.
Perhaps she will regale her national audience with her observations on motherhood, which she writes:
Is funky, is leaky, is a soggy, bloody crotch, is sharp jets of breast milk shot straight across the room, is gaudy, mustard-colored poop...
She proceeds to display a fascination with bodily fluids and functions consistent with an eighth grade locker room:
the baby farts, we laugh. The baby burps, we smile, say “Yes.” The baby poops, his whole body stiffens, then steam heat floods the pipes....
The spirit lives in your squirts and coos. Your noises and fluids are what you do.
She questions the baby's feeding patterns with adolescent non-language. ("Three feedings? Hunh.") Then she turns her attention to her discarded placenta, calling it a "mammoth giblet":
The midwife presents it on a platter. We do not eat, have no Tupperware to take it home and sanctify a tree.
Instead, we marvel at my cast-off meat, the almost-pulsing slab, bloody mesa, what lived moments ago, and now has died.
Eventually, she writes of the tenderness of motherhood, addressing her beloved child as:
my whelp, my cub, my seapup. In the days before you smile at me or call me Mama or love me, love is all tit, all wheat-smelling milk, humid crook of the arm
Alexander includes dream sequences of her obstetrician spending the night before the birth with her family, writing the doctor "looks like a loaf of whole wheat bread." She dreams her child's head pops off and she has to put it back on. Then she sees:
All of my aunties chatting like crows on a line, all of my aunties on electric breast pumps, the double kind, one for each exhausted tit.
She uses the word "tit" only twice in this poem but employs "funky" three times; she could write lyrics for Lipps Inc.
For a profession so dependent on the use of language, Alexander is notable for her inappropriate use of same. David Horowitz has written about her misuse of the Greek word "chroma." She also misuses "caesuras" and confuses the medical discipline of "Neonatology" with new motherhood. Such confusion is not limited to the written word; the golden-tongued poet told an unflinching audience at the Cambridge Forum, "I first read Jet Magazine...before I could read."
More concerning than her transgressions against the English (and Greek and Latin) language(s) is Alexander's all-encompassing focus on race, though so often drowned in pretentious doublespeak. She told the Cambridge Forum she sees poetry as a means to help blacks "envision what we are not meant to envision," such as "real and enactable black power." Her body of work reflects her choice to "meditate" on "a new-fashioned race pride." Alexander insisted in her prose anthology The Black Interior, "black thought and life rarely go uninterrupted by the violent gougings of racism."
The title poem in her first, celebrated book The Venus Hottentot discusses the case of Saartjie Baartman, an African slave put on display in Europe in the early nineteenth century (as the "Hottentot Venus," not the "Venus Hottentot"). It contains Alexander's familiar, juvenile banality:
Monsieur Cuvier investigates between my legs, poking, prodding, sure of his hypothesis. I half expect him to pull silk scarves from inside me, paper poppies, then a rabbit! He complains at my scent
However, the poem concludes with a violent fantasy response to a white onlooker:
If he were to let me rise up from this table, I’d spirit his knives and cut out his black heart, seal it with science fluid inside a bell jar, place it on a low shelf in a white man’s museum so the whole world could see it was shriveled and hard, geometric, deformed, unnatural.
Way to bridge the racial divide, Liz.
One can hardly believe this exhortation to violence is being rewarded by our president-elect. It is also hard to imagine our "first post-racial president" would showcase one so obsessed with defining "blackness." One can see this in her many academic discussions of the matter. One can also read it in her poem "Race," which discusses a biracial great-uncle who "became fundamentally white for the rest of his life," and his relationship with his family back East, "just as pale-skinned, as straight-haired, as blue-eyed as Paul, and black":
The siblings in Harlem each morning ensured no one confused them for anything other than what they were, black. They were black! Brown-skinned spouses reduced confusion...
The one time Great-Uncle Paul brought his wife to New York he asked his siblings not to bring their spouses, and that is where the story ends: ivory siblings who would not see their brother without their telltale spouses.
If Alexander believes brown-skinned spouses dispel confusion about "race," is she implying they are a prerequisite for "blackness"? Or are they merely a prerequisite for light-skinned blacks? Is she saying miscegenation with "ivory" people is wrong, at least insofar as children of its union will be lighter still? Isn't this a great deal of wasted concern over a non-entity such as race? Yet on she goes, with characteristic portrayals of whites consumed with racism. For instance, one of her newest poems discusses a black female pilot who steers a crashing plane to safety:
All the white passengers bailed out before impact, so certain a sister
couldn’t navigate the crash. O gender. O race. O ye of little faith.
O please.
If these tangled thoughts seem infected with the typical outlook of academic leftism, it's because they are. Alexander is a fellow at Radcliffe, though she usually teaches African American Studies at Yale. Her odes to the downtrodden aside, she hails from a left-wing privileged background. As a youngster, she left Harlem for Washington's Sidwell Friends School, then Yale. Elizabeth is a second generation shiller, speaking in less understandable but equally aggrieved tones as her mother, Adele Logan Alexander, who is also a professor of African American Studies. Adele confessed she uses her academic pulpit at George Washington University to emphasize the illusion and failed promise of the United States:
I try to stress in my teaching, is the enormous divergence between the American dream - the remarkable American dream as epitomized in the Constitution - and the reality for people who were and are not of the more educated classes and who are immigrants, who are religious minorities, who are Native Americans, even women, but especially those who were and are African Americans. For African Americans there has always been a wide a divergence between the dream and the reality.
Elizabeth's father served in more exalted capacities: an adviser to Lyndon Johnson before being named chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and ultimately Secretary of the Army under Jimmy Carter. His service in the latter capacity notwithstanding, he undermined troop morale in a 2005 interview with Tavis Smiley, in which he inferred our current president is a a deceiver who sent American soldiers into Iraq based on a lie:
You have a president who has used an improper reason for entering into a war -- the Weapons of Mass Destruction -- you now have a president who comes up with a reason a day for why we are in Iraq...I think this president and vice president need to sort of hurry up and get on the truthful train, because what they've not done is given us the real reasons why we are in Iraq and the real reasons why we should stay there.
Elizabeth is not the only sibling doing well. Her brother Mark, a professor at Yale Law School, worked for Bill Bradley, Ted Kennedy, and Howard Metzenbaum before becoming an adviser on Obama's transition team.
This privileged background has not aided Alexander in conveying a coherent or factual narrative in her work. She told the New York Times her poetry “attends to history,” including “sometimes thorny and difficult American history.” Presumably she meant "difficult" in the academic sense, as she boasted to a radio interviewer of something she considered one of Barack Obama's singular accomplishments: "Certainly we haven't had a president who 's been a professor, um, that is to say, someone who spends at least a part of his professional life thinking about complicated ideas and trying to make them comprehensible and working them through with students." Of course, Woodrow Wilson was not only a professor but president of Princeton, where he denied blacks' applications. (He screened The Birth of a Nation in the White House.) Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe founded the University of Virginia. One might be forgiven for thinking George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and others entertained complicated ideas. Even Bill Clinton spent a year as a law professor at the University of Arkansas.
I still believe in a place called remedial education.
She could begin by learning poetry. "The Venus Hottentot," she notes incredulously, "was rejected for years. I'm not going to speculate why; I don't know why." Perhaps its distinctly unpoetic imagery and bloodlust? The first is a staple of hers. In another poem, she looks at a picture of a cancer-stricken friend and states, "I imagine [the virus] as a single, swimming paisley, a sardine with serrated fins and a neon spine." As evidenced above, much of her poetry is surreal for a reason: Alexander is inspired by “the fabulously logical illogic of nighttime dreams.” A note in a news story produced by Harvard calls into question exactly what kind of poem she may recite today. According to the report, Alexander says she "has been listening to sad stories this year, and to the great blues singers, 'and longing to sing myself.'" Obama's may be the first inauguration to have a twelve-bar ditty about infant excrement or submerging racists's internal organs in formaldehyde.
Or perhaps she will rise to the occasion and deliver something less offensive, even something inspiring. As Yogi Berra once said, "Predictions are hard, especially about the future." But predictions arise from assessments of observable data, and nothing in her career of affluent oppression, professional victimhood, obsessive racial self-analysis, or conjoining of redefined words masquerading as poetry indicates she will. She is not the voice of a nation's culture. She is a left-wing Floyd R. Turbo filtered through academia. She confuses loquacious self-absorption with sagacious eloquence.
In light of Obama's campaign, she may be the perfect choice after all.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ben Johnson is Managing Editor of FrontPage Magazine and co-author, with David Horowitz, of the book Party of Defeat. He is also the author of the book 57 Varieties of Radical Causes: Teresa Heinz Kerry's Charitable Giving.
Just be glad Obama’s not from Nantucket.
Poet Laureate Bart Simpson
I got a new tagline from it!
Yup.
Just because nobody understands you doesn’t mean you’re an artist.
Between his choice of poet and the Rev Lowry, I think that Obama is finally signaling what his agenda as president *gag* is going to be. He came out strong with it from the first, lost ground because of it, backtracked and lowered the key. Now that he’s actually in office, I expect to see more and more of this. He didn’t spend 20 years listening to the Rev Wright for nothing. I think his socialist tendencies are strictly based on redistributing to the black race, not a general socialism.
[snicker]
She didn’t use a single word above the third grade level. Her poem was devoid of anything poetic. She must of forgot about the poem and had an 8 year old scribble out something last-minute for her. She would have done better reciting Green Eggs and Ham.
now I know anyone can be a “poet”
wow, I do not have to worry about the tree thing, or the river..
“Elizabeth Alexander is no....Maya Angelou.”
####
Wow.
Then she really IS bad....
Obama’s choice? Obsessed with race?
Lemme guess .... she’s black ....
Her style is psychotic pentameter.
*splurp* spill
You owe me a new keyboard!
Not so very different from America's own John Updike.
Elizabeth's father served in more exalted capacities: an adviser to Lyndon Johnson before being named chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and ultimately Secretary of the Army under Jimmy Carter
*wipes eyes*
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Just the thing to inspire us in wartime.
LOL
Your comment was the only laugh I had all day.(Actually, 0 is lucky his name isn’t Alice.)
Modern poetry much like modern art is a haven for the untalented. Arteest wannabe’s.
He should have let Malia or Sasha do the poem. I think it would have been much better.
You get a class of expensively “educated” talentless fools.
Check our the Dalai Bama, EVERY member of the Black Congressional Caucus, and EVERY black Mayor of a predominately black city.....
I would be relieved if someone could point out an exception...
only a liberal could possibly write a poem praising their offspring’s bowel movements...
sheesh.. that is a Howard Stern line, in which he mocks American parents who so spoil their kids, that they worship their child’s bowel movements.
and here, this woman has gone and done that very thing..
hilarious.
Her style is psychotic pentameter.
Brilliant. Exactly. I’m going to borrow the description if you don’t mind.
Bad
Bad
Bad
Bad
Bad
poetry
Bad
I’ve written better, then put it in the shredder afraid someone would see it.
Bad
Bad
poetry.
Bad.
PUKE !
Is her magnum opus named “Leaves of Crass?”
GUILTY!!!!
Oh, sorry, I just got carried away.
Kill My Landlord-by Eddie Murphy:
Dark and lonely on a summer’s night.
Kill my landlord. Kill my landlord.
Watchdog barking. Do he bite?
Kill my landlord. Kill my landlord.
Slip in his window. Break his neck.
Then his house I start to wreck.
Got no reason. What the heck?
Kill my landlord. Kill my landlord.
C-I-L-L my land lord.
If....you....speak....haltingly.....it....must.....be....poetry
Mi psychasa, su psychasa.
"That was exquisitely bad."
Was this TELEVISED????
Praise song for the day.
Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.
Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”
We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, “I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.”
We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.
Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.
Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.
Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”
Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.
What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.
In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp — praise song for walking forward in that light.
Inaugural Poem
Maya Angelou
20 January 1993
A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon.
The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.
But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.
I will give you no more hiding place down here.
You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness,
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.
Your mouths spilling words
Armed for slaughter.
The Rock cries out today, you may stand on me,
But do not hide your face.
Across the wall of the world,
A River sings a beautiful song,
Come rest here by my side.
Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.
Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.
Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,
Clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the stone were one.
Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
Brow and when you yet knew you still
Knew nothing.
The River sings and sings on.
There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing River and the wise Rock.
So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African and Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.
Today, the first and last of every Tree
Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the River.
Plant yourself beside me, here beside the River.
Each of you, descendant of some passed
On traveller, has been paid for.
You, who gave me my first name, you
Pawnee, Apache and Seneca, you
Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then
Forced on bloody feet, left me to the employment of
Other seekers—desperate for gain,
Starving for gold.
You, the Turk, the Swede, the German, the Scot ...
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought
Sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare
Praying for a dream.
Here, root yourselves beside me.
I am the Tree planted by the River,
Which will not be moved.
I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree
I am yours—your Passages have been paid.
Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.
History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.
Lift up your eyes upon
The day breaking for you.
Give birth again
To the dream.
Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands.
Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For new beginnings.
Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.
The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out upon me, the
Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.
No less to Midas than the mendicant.
No less to you now than the mastodon then.
Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister’s eyes, into
Your brother’s face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning.
The Gift Outright
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.
— Robert Frost
Of History and Hope
We have memorized America,
how it was born and who we have been and where.
In ceremonies and silence we say the words,
telling the stories, singing the old songs.
We like the places they take us. Mostly we do.
The great and all the anonymous dead are there.
We know the sound of all the sounds we brought.
The rich taste of it is on our tongues.
But where are we going to be, and why, and who?
The disenfranchised dead want to know.
We mean to be the people we meant to be,
to keep on going where we meant to go.
But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how
except in the minds of those who will call it Now?
The children. The children. And how does our garden grow?
With waving hands — oh, rarely in a row —
and flowering faces. And brambles, that we can no longer allow.
Who were many people coming together
cannot become one people falling apart.
Who dreamed for every child an even chance
cannot let luck alone turn doorknobs or not.
Whose law was never so much of the hand as the head
cannot let chaos make its way to the heart.
Who have seen learning struggle from teacher to child
cannot let ignorance spread itself like rot.
We know what we have done and what we have said,
and how we have grown, degree by slow degree,
believing ourselves toward all we have tried to become —
just and compassionate, equal, able, and free.
All this in the hands of children, eyes already set
on a land we never can visit — it isn’t there yet —
but looking through their eyes, we can see
what our long gift to them may come to be.
If we can truly remember, they will not forget.
By Miller Williams President Clinton’s Inaugural Address 1997
I attended a poetry reading years ago at the Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NY. The poets included Czeslaw Milosz, Octavio Paz, and Derek Walcott. It also included one American, Clinton’s Poet Laureate, a black woman named Rita Dove (whose primary claim to fame was being black).
The first people read incredible stuff. She read a poem - well, actually a prose musing - about her vagina. And, of course, a few incoherent words about being black.
I was terribly embarrassed for the US.
“Just be glad Obama’s not from Nantucket”
Winner. The day’s only bright spot.
So...Bill...Shatner...is...a...poet...laureate???
/sarc
Anyone STILL believe all Cultures are Equal?
Anyone STILL believe that diversity is our strength?
Anyone STILL believe that Multi-Culturalism weaves improvement into our society?
Anyone STILL believe that Black Racism doesn’t exist?
Those who do, need to have their brain housing group recalibrated by a 2x4!
Of course none of those count because they weren't Democrats so they can't be considered brilliant intellectuals.
I saw no more than two minutes of the Coronation, fitfully , in three small doses....
Read something about another “Poem” being read, but no
mention of whom.
Having now read selected lines of Ms ALexander’s
, I think they should have
done something novel and had her recite every other line,
with Cornel West doing the same. They would’ve made a great duo. It just gets worse and worse my friend.
Which reminds me, did either of Bush’s inaugs feature a poet?
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