Recommended Listening

January 19, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under POTUSE | Leave a Comment 

The BBC’s excellent arts magazine radio program  The Strand invited several writers and poets to compose “open letters” to Barack Obama on the occasion of his inauguration.

The two that most impressed and moved me were those by journalist, author, broadcaster Aminatta Forna, and Nobel Laureate poet Derek Walcott.

 The Devil that Danced on the Water, Ms. Forna’s masterpiece of memoir cum history cum reportage, is riveting while you read it and haunting long after you’ve finished.  Three days after the election, POTUSE Obama was photographed carrying a copy of Derek Walcott’s collected poems.

All the “Open letters to a new president” may be heard here.

POTUSE’s Latest Brilliant Choice

December 21, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Culture, Obama administration, POTUSE, Presidents | Leave a Comment 

The POTUSE has named Elizabeth Alexander as the Poet Laureate of his Inauguration.  She will join the select company of poets —Robert Frost (JFK), Maya Angelou (Clinton ‘93), and Miller Williams (Clinton ‘97)— who have read the poems they wrote at the Inauguration of the President who invited them.

Ms. Alexander is the incoming Chair of the Department of  African-American Studies at Yale.  She met the Obamas when she was teaching at the University of Chicago. “We’re of the exact same generation.  They are people with whom I have a lot in common,” she said.

As The New York Times reports,

Mr. Obama’s inauguration, on Jan. 20, calls for an “occasional poem,” written to commemorate a specific event. This is not precisely what Ms. Alexander does, but she is preparing for the challenge.

“Writing an occasional poem has to attend to the moment itself,” she said in an interview, “but what you hope for, as an artist, is to create something that has integrity and life that goes beyond the moment.”

To prepare, she has delved into W. H. Auden, particularly his “Musée des Beaux Arts” (“About suffering they were never wrong/The Old Masters”), and the work of Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize, for poetry. Auden, she said, “asked very large questions about how we stand in history.” And Brooks has had a major influence on her work.

“She should have been the one, were she living, for this,” Ms. Alexander said of the honor bestowed by Mr. Obama. “The Bard of the South Side. She wrote from Obama’s neighborhood for so many years.” Here she recited Brooks’s familiar line: “Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.”

“Language like that,” Ms. Alexander said, “has eternal life.”

Ms. Alexander says that she doesn’t start writing with any message in mind; she likens her writing process to a radio antenna listening for the right language.  ”You’re always trying to catch a rhythm.  It’s something I will be chipping away at every day.”

Some of Ms. Alexander’s poems may be found on the excellent www.poets.org website, and even more on her own website (linked to her name above).

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic.  Poetry

is where we are oursleves,
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself the loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

First Outing

November 7, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under POTUSE | Leave a Comment 

The POTUSE has now held his first press conference.  He handled it with confidence, aplomb, and a suitable seriousness — no surprises there.  The substance is already undergoing deconstruction in the blogosphere.

Here are a few notes about the style.

He took questions from the following (it has already been noted that Fox News was not among the many called but few chosen):

Nedra Pickler (AP), Lee Cowan (NBC), Jake Tapper (ABC), Chip Reid (CBS), Karen Bohan (Reuters), John McCormick (Chicago Tribune), Lynn Sweet (Chicago Sun-Times), Candy Crowley (CNN), Jeff Zeleny (New York Times).

He answered the concluding question —about the pending acquisition of the First Puppy— with the same kind of seriousness and attention to detail as he did all the previous ones.  Whether this was a comment on all the previous ones or an early indication of presidential demeanor will remain to be seen.

He was backed up by a Mount Rushmore of economic solidity — the distinguished men and women of his Economic Advisory Board.  They had, earlier, sat around a Cabinet Room-like table for a meeting with the POTUSE.  In other circumstances it might have been distracting but in this case it succeeded in sending the message it was undoubtedly intended to convey in both venues.  (The only thing that was really distracting was Rahm Emanuel’s unbuttoned jacket.)