Published: January 03, 2009 07:00 pm      

On Poetry: Inaugural poems

In honor of the inauguration of Barack Obama, I offer this poem I wrote when President Clinton took office in 1997. Miller Williams -- the poet Clinton chose to give the inaugural poem -- had been one of my professors at the University of Arkansas. In the poem, I jokingly pout because Clinton didn't ask me, instead.

Actually, if he had, I would have been terrified. I think no poem is harder to write than a "public" poem, especially one written on demand. Robert Frost was the first to write an inaugural poem, for fellow New Englander John F. Kennedy. Frost was 86. The poem he wrote was called "Dedication," but when he began to read it, the sun's glare off the January snow was so bright it blinded him. He gave up and recited another poem from memory "The Gift Outright," one he'd written back in 1942. Personally, I'd say it was a good thing. "Dedication," in my opinion, isn't half as good.

By nature, a poem's voice is intimate and private. Even when it deals with huge issues -- as poems often do -- it does that by looking closely, precisely. It's seeking something that can't be expressed in words. It is seeking what's between words, what's not public. It's seeking what sometimes can't even be pinned down as a definite emotion.

Elizabeth Alexander, the poet commissioned to write the inaugural poem for Obama, said, "the pressure -- the challenge -- is to write a poem that can serve ... all of those expectant, gathered millions and to let the poem be what calms my nerves when I am up there." My good wishes are with her in this daunting task.

For the Inauguration of William Jefferson Clinton, 1997:

Not having been asked to write the inaugural poem,
even though I am from Arkansas, I will take what's here,
the birds at the feeder, not saving the world but only
being it, each kind of bird taking up its career
to fill out some this-or-that of creation on a small scale,
like this poem nobody asked for and few will hear.
Cold birds, eating extra for warmth, finely detailed
to catch the sun. Ridged out in friction-gear,
they jerk from position to position, as if the eye's
first impressions have been caught before the brain
smooths them out. The chickadee clamps a precise
seed and tosses its shell, nothing amazing.
To start up a fanfare would be to see it as specimen,
to deflect one's attention from the exact life performing
its dip, crack, toss. The long beak of the wren
is extended by a thin white stripe traced full-swing
down the head, so the wren seems half beak. I need
to get these lines, delicate as a Chinese painting.
Any poem would quiver with delight, with the chickadee
in it, or wren, but wouldn't want to do anything
about it. That's the hard thing about writing a poem
that's supposed to inspire the country at a crucial time,
that's supposed to hammer like a woodpecker. No one
could hear, with its hammering red, black, white!
It doesn't bode well for the quiet poem, or the insect
inside the bark, or the old tree crumbling to dust
inside itself while the public word tree holds it erect.
Still, I think when the bleachers no longer rise august
along Pennsylvania Avenue and the meandering ocean
of confetti has been swept up, it is good to cross a bridge
in your mind, to something earlier, oblivious to emotion,
something like wrens going on inside the language.

-- from "Breathing In, Breathing Out" (Anhinga Press, 2002)

Fleda Brown is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. She now lives in Traverse City's Central neighborhood with her husband, Jerry Beasley, also a retired professor. You can learn more about her on her Web site, fledabrown.com.