Graywolf Press recently announced that it will release on February 6 a chapbook of Elizabeth Alexander’s poem “Praise Song for the Day,” which the poet read at the inauguration of president Barack Obama. Orders for the paperback volume have already surpassed the scheduled
print run of a hundred thousand copies, the largest in the history of
the St. Paul-based independent publisher.
Alexander, who wrote the poem specifically for the inaugural ceremony, told Jeffrey Brown of the NewsHour With Jim Lehrer that, for inspiration, she looked to the work of poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Walt Whitman, and Robert Hayden, whose poems “seem to understand the historic moment.” Alexander described her process in composing the commissioned piece as being “very quiet and very humble before the forces that make me able to write a poem.”
The poem, while well received by many readers who posted comments on the Web sites of national newspapers and blogs, has garnered its share of criticism.
“The poet should be able to renew language by being precise, surprising, unhackneyed,” said poet Carol Rumens, and went on to label Alexander’s poem “too prosy” in the Guardian. “Otherwise, what is the point of such a commission?”
“The poem's argument was as hard to remember as its language; it dissolved at once into the circumambient solemnity,” wrote Adam Kirsch in the New Republic’s blog The Plank. “Alexander has reminded us of what Angelou's, [Miller] Williams's, and even Robert Frost's inauguration poems already proved: that the poet's place is not on the platform but in the crowd, that she should speak not for the people but to them.”
Williams, who read at Bill Clinton’s second inauguration, told the Associated Press that Alexander had well accomplished the task of the inaugural poet, illuminating the national story with “some nicely surprising adjectives.” He did have a critical note for the inaugural poet, though, touching not on the piece but on its presentation: “Had she read it in my living room, I would have said, ‘Keep your voice up at the end, and nod to the audience and say, ‘Thank you,’ when it's over.’”
