A funny thing happened on the way to President Obama’s second inauguration Monday. The president’s speech and Richard Blanco’s poem got reversed.
Broadly speaking, one’s expectations of political rhetoric is that, at its worst, it reduces complex argument to slogans and platitudes or, at its best, that it singles out constituencies and individual citizens in order to focus on the day-to-day concerns that society can address. I’m speaking of political rhetoric that highlights contemporary American stories that are, on the one hand, connected to the stories of Americans throughout our history and that, on the other hand, inspire and inform and lead to the making of improved public policy.
And, again broadly speaking, I suppose one’s expectations of a poem in a public space is that it mythologizes experience and transforms ideas into metaphor, at its best, or that it transforms the ambitions of the one as representative of the many. This second characterization has certainly been the story of American poetry ever since Walt Whitman (another gay poet associated with a president from Illinois) wrote the following:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
But those two expectations — generalizations as they are — got flipped. The president’s speech was the poetry of connection and “consent,” as in Jefferson’s idea of the “consent of the governed.” It was a poetry of connection in terms of Whitman’s idea of “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” in which Obama ties his ambitions to those of everyday citizens (for a great take on this thinking, read Wendy Willis’s “Throwing Down the Gauntlet for Citizenship”). In the president’s speech, he leads us back to the founding document favored by Abraham Lincoln — the Declaration of Independence as opposed to the Constitution. Obama connects our contemporary lives as individuals with the “self-evident” truths that we are not only equal but that, as Whitman will say in his elegy for Lincoln, we are also “companions.”
On the other hand, Richard Blanco’s poem was the poetry of private lives, a catalogue of existences in which the politically-charged myth of his private story is individuated and highlighted (my father, my mother) and concludes with a platitude, a slogan: “hope — a new constellation / waiting for us to map it, / waiting for us to name it — together.”
Others have weighed in on the merits of Blanco’s poem. I’m really not game to do that. It’s not like Beyonce had to write a new song for the inauguration. She got to sing one everybody already knows by heart. It was a big-hearted poem. But, fair to say, “One Today” is not a a public poem. It’s a poem of private experiences spoken in a public forum. Carol Rumens at The Guardian calls it, at best, “valiant.”
Over on the Daily Beast, Andrew Sullivan brings some across-the-pond enthusiasm for Blanco’s poem. Except for Sullivan’s embarrassing bed-wetting after the debate in Denver during the 2012 general election, Sullivan is usually an accurate and compelling thinker. His September 2012 piece on Obama’s transformative presidency is thoughtful. He’s certainly prolific.
But that fecundity sometimes leads him off course because in cheering Blanco’s poem as Whitmanesque, he misses the essential difference between the passage he quotes by Blanco and the one by Whitman.
Blanco:
One ground. Our ground, rooting us to every stalk
of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat
and hands, hands gleaning coal or planting windmills
in deserts and hilltops that keep us warm, hands
digging trenches, routing pipes and cables, hands
as worn as my father’s cutting sugarcane
so my brother and I could have books and shoes.
Whitman:
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand
singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or
at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of
the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows,
robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
In Blanco’s passage, his focus is on the hands that belong to individuals, hands that glean and dig and are worn. The hands are symbols for the Americans who go about their daily jobs. These depictions are isolated, individual dramas, such as the one Blanco mythologizes about his father’s hands and how his fathered wonderfully cared for his children. This is a singular, private, standard sort of contemporary American poetry of the self.
In the Whitman passage, everyone is singing individual songs. But, here’s the important fact, they are singing them together. That’s what Whitman hears when hears “America singing.” I mean, he doesn’t hear “Americans singing.” It’s e pluribus unum. That’s the essential difference Sullivan misses.
And that’s what Obama also understood and accomplished in his speech as well. He both hears and sings with America. He does not separate himself from us. His is a poem to an America that includes both him and us. It’s a hymn to the collective, the “you and I.” Americans together. Not separate. For this reason, among others, Obama’s 2nd inaugural may well be remembered and recalled by Democrats for generations. It’s a clarion defense of the legacy of the New Deal and the New Frontier. It’s the poetry of democratic liberal governance.
But I’ve got to ask: Are we American poets ever going to unsnap our art from the self? I’m not saying we should. Just wondering if we are able to. I’ve got to believe the answer is yes. (And, don’t get me wrong: I believe too that every poet should write whatever kind of poem he or she wants. It’s none of my business. But when a poet writes a poem for the nation, well…then it is my business to have an opinion.) Given the opportunity, our Inaugural Poets (save Frost’s recitation of “The Gift Outright”) have lugged the individual onto the west side of the Capitol and trotted out their catalogues of selves. Even they’ve misread Whitman.
I want to give voice too to a nagging question from the quarter of poets who believe no poet should participate in public rituals like inaugurations when the government is involved in war, drone attacks, torture, and other like acts. They ask: Are these poems simply propaganda in service of immoral government? I’m not of this opinion. I think poets should be included in public ceremonies and ought to figure out how to do it better, do it in a way that honors both the public and the poem.
Finally, John F. Kennedy, who inaugurated the custom of inviting a poet to read at presidential inaugurations, once said, “When power leads man to arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence.” Two days ago, not literally but largely, it seemed to me like it went the other way around.
12 responses
You’re really holding back this time, Biespiel. Richard Blanco had no business reading a poem on inauguration day any more than any other poet. Poets shouldn’t be shills to presidents. Poets should write from the self’s deepest place and that place has no place on a dias with the President of the United States. He should have read his poem while standing hipdeep in the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial where a poet of the people should stand.
To be honest, what I longed for from the poem was not only Whitman, but Hopkins: “My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, —the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!” But, am grateful for the mastery of our POTUS. A-fine analysis of the mediocre poem and why, and the soaring Obama speech, and why. What one lacked, the other one gave. Maybe a bargain. Thanks. A-men. A-woman. A-poet.
Blanco’s poem is Whitmanesque. We love the Whitmanesque because we can look under the lid to see what we’re getting.
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.
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?
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.
Private experiences, spoken in public, are often the most moving.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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