PrintDecember 19, 2008
Obama's Poet
Our soon to be president has chosen Elizabeth Alexander to write and read a poem for the inauguration. Alexander is a professor of African American studies at Yale.
Her poetry is as lightweight as her scholarship. Her poems fluctuate between maudlin ramblings about being a woman -- like these opening lines from "Neonatology":
Isfunky, isleaky, isa soggy, bloody crotch, issharp jets of breast milk shot straight across the room,is gaudy, mustard-colored poop, ispostpartum tears that soak the baby's lovely head.Then everything dries and disappearsThen everything dries and disappears
To race baiting whining -- like these stanzas from "Race":
Sometimes I think about Great-Uncle Paul who left Tuskeegee,Alabama to become a forester in Oregon and in so doingbecame fundamentally white for the rest of his life, exceptwhen he travelled without his white wife to visit his siblings -now in New York, now in Harlem, USA - just as pale-skinned,as straight-haired, as blue-eyed as Paul, and black. Paul never told anyonehe was white, he just didn't say that he was black, and who could imagine,an Oregon forester in 1930 as anything other than white?The siblings in Harlem each morning ensuredno one confused them for anything other than what they were, black.They were black! Brown-skinned spouses reduced confusion.Many others have told, and not told, this tale.When Paul came East alone he was as they were, their brother.
She might even be a worse poet than Obama. (Maybe that's why she was picked.) Here is one of the Messiah's poems:
Under water grottos, cavernsFilled with apesThat eat figs.Stepping on the figsThat the apesEat, they crunch.The apes howl, bareTheir fangs, dance,Tumble in theRushing water,Musty, wet peltsGlistening in the blue.
Forget the economic crisis, the continuing terrorist threat, crime, and our nutty judicial system. It is literature in America that is really in trouble.
Hat tip: Otis Glazebrook (IV)
