Comments on: David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: A Poet and a President

By: Christy George

Christy George — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 19:57:02 +0000

I’m not a poet, which might explain why listening to Richard Blanco’s poem reminded me not of Walt Whitman but of Carl Sandburg. As a child of Chicagoland, I was raised on “Hog Butcher to the World,” so to me, Blanco’s poem sounded like a less muscular imitation written for another Illini.

I reread “Chicago” and discovered wonderful lines I’d forgotten that cop to a city that is defiantly confident despite being “crooked,” “wicked,” and “brutal.”

“Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities…”

I wish both Blanco and Obama could’ve included and decoded the dark side of America as well as the noble, but yes, Obama’s America seemed more accurate.

By: Marsha Browning

Marsha Browning — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 19:26:28 +0000

This president has reduced the population of this country to a mass, a gel that moves when one moves, when tilted is governed by gravity, nothing else. And his choice of a gel substance provides enough antagonism to prevent a new solution to be created. He has lit no fire to unite the molecules of this great country.

By: Carol Ellis

Carol Ellis — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 19:42:43 +0000

Yet the poem remains important because it is basically saying that poetry – even in the midst of politics – is important enough to have its own voice that can say this is my culture, this is my life.

By: Greg Chaimov

Greg Chaimov — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 20:52:35 +0000

“Are we American poets ever going to unsnap our art from the self?” I don’t think so, nor do I think untethering a poem from the self will advance the quality or compassion of a poem for a public and political purpose. Where I see the problem lying–to the extent there is a problem–is in the failure of poets to expand the self into the universal. Part of Whitman’s genius and popularity appears to flow from his ability to make the self universal. I becomes we. Myself becomes ourselves. To the extent Blanco failed–and I don’t think he did (occasional poems will frequently fall short of greatness)–that failure came in keeping the hands separate instead of linked.

By: Ken Arnold

Ken Arnold — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 01:43:53 +0000

I wonder about the poetry of rhetoric (Obama) vs. the rhetoric of poetry (Blanco). The former is something we long for in public discourse; the latter can seem to be a betrayal of poetry’s essentially private language. We don’t have a tradition of public poetry in the US, although some poets have written public poems. Usually, though, such poems emphasize rhetoric over poetry, the statement over the metaphor. All speech is rhetoric, but what I am referring to is the rhetorical as an form of persuasion. Obama does it well; most poets don’t. Including a poet in the inaugural is a nice gesture, but I’ve always thought, since Frost failed to read his new poem at Kennedy’s inaugural, that every poet is, in effect, co-opted by the event. Say something significant is the order of the day, and it usually leads to lame poetry. Obama’s job was to say something significant and he succeeded by bringing poetry to the endeavor. In preferring the private, Blanco was attempting to keep to the poetry of poetry but, in the end, had to succumb to mere rhetoric.

By: Tricia Knoll

Tricia Knoll — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 23:58:48 +0000

Private experiences, spoken in public, are often the most moving.

By: Sharon Dolin

Sharon Dolin — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 23:06:07 +0000

Why should American poets, or any poets, “unsnap our art from the self”? The only reason Frost recited “The Gift Outright” was because he couldn’t read the poem he’d actually written for the day. Too much glare. Poems, if done well, can’t get personal enough. The best way to speak for a nation, if you’re a lyric poet, is to speak for yourself.

By: Catie Bull

Catie Bull — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 22:59:57 +0000

In some ways I feel like talking at length about Blanco’s poem itself is kind of like talking, the last inauguration, about Aretha Franklin’s hat, though what exactly that feeling means I’m not sure — something to do with the poem being a notable missed opportunity more than especially good or especially bad.

I wish it had been a stirring, memorable, grand or fine poem. (I also wish, by the way, that when Obama talks in his speeches about giving kids the opportunity and education to grow up to be doctors and scientists, that he would mention artists too). But he did only have about a month to write it, which seems an impossible task. (I’m assuming Whitman’s first draft of Leaves took more than a few weeks, before all the later reworking?). Maybe it’s the Inaugural committee (that’s who decides on the poet, right?) we should be taking to task.

I wish it had been a better poem, a much better poem, but the general sentiments, in the moment of hearing them on TV, struck me at the time as a nice balance with Obama’s speech and everyone else who said or sang something on stage. America’s a big messy place; doesn’t it take more than one person to tell it? (Are we just bummed because we wish it had been the poet instead of the politician who used the words we liked best?)

Re: the self issue, we’re Americans, so we are kind of all about the self most of the time, the self’s personal experience, aren’t we? (for better or worse.) It didn’t turn out to be a great poem, but as a poetic strategy, it’s not so wide of the mark as an attempt for an American event, is it? Or is it? What does a public American poem sound like?

By: Derk Wynand

Derk Wynand — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 21:55:38 +0000

A thoughtful, incisive analysis, David — takes me back to Joseph Tussman’s Obligation and the Body Politic, and away from the usual posturing and squabbling we (even in Canada) see too often on American news clips. Hope your president helps to get America singing again.

By: Daniel Bosch

Daniel Bosch — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 13:39:23 +0000

Blanco’s poem is Whitmanesque. We love the Whitmanesque because we can look under the lid to see what we’re getting.