Inaugural Poem

I hate to be a contrarian, but this lady robot, model # 3L1Z@B3+H @L3X@ND3R, who was programmed to read at Obama's inauguration really rubbed me the wrong way. I mean, I understand that a poem for this kind of event is designed to serve a very specific purpose, i.e. to celebrate a political moment in as universally acceptable a way possible, but this poem is particularly awful.

Just think back to when Maya Angelou read on Clinton's big day. That poem had dinosaurs (!) in it not to mention it made sure to hint at some of the lower moments of our nation's history: "You, who gave me my first name, you / Pawnee, Apache and Seneca, you / Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then / Forced on bloody feet, left me to the employment of / Other seekers--desperate for gain, / Starving for gold." Alexander's poem, in contrast, was all gloss. This stuck out even more after Obama's fairly somber "we're-in-deep-shit" speech (though ultimately I thought it a triumphant one).

If it weren't for Rev. Joseph Lowery's benediction I would have walked away from the television feeling a little rhetorically violated. Lowery's little rhyme at the end of the prayer was a better poem, albeit somewhat offensive in such a wonderfully well-intentioned way: "We ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to give back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right." AMEN! (Why do I want a Mellow Yellow so bad right now?)

Well here is the official Obama inauguration poem in all its glory:
Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side; I know there's something better down the road."

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

- Elizabeth Alexander

The Poem as Diagnosis

I've been following Gary Sullivan's translation work of German poet Ernst Herbeck for a while now. Herbeck was a schizophrenic who in his early 20's, while working in a munitions factory, began complaining of various animals and other people taking over his body. He was institutionalized for good in the mid 1940's. At the request of his psychiatrist Leo Navratil, he began writing poems in 1960. From then until his death in 1991 he pumped out around 1,200 poems mostly short pieces, many with color or animal titles (obviously prompted by Navratil).

While the story may have a tinge of that Daniel Johnston-esque celebration of mental illness (complete with that misguided notion of "purity" or "honesty" one reads into such disorders), the poems themselves are hard to ignore. Take his poem "The Panther":

The Panther

The pole reached the panther leaps
The leaping panther
They leap on me
The panther is beautiful
When the panther leaps
The panther has a beautiful pelt.
The panther has beautiful eyes.
as beautiful as the tiger.
The panther is great. The greatest animal
The panther makes great leaps.

(Translated by Gary Sullivan.)

* * *

Der Panther

Der Pol erreicht der Panther springt
Der springende Panther
Die auf mich springen
Der Panther ist schön
Wenn der Panther springt
Der Panther hat ein schönes Fell.
Der Panther hat schöne Augen.
schönere Augen als der Tiger.
Der Panther ist groß. Das größte Tier
Der Panther macht große Sprünge.

* * *

This was the first of Herbeck's poems that I read, and I liked it immediately for its simplicity and its sense of playfulness. The poem stuck in my head for days, and I began to think of it as a sort of ars poetica, a way of approaching the page. It served as both an enactment and a metaphor (substitue "panther" with "poem"). This is, of course, reading into the piece, though ultimately I've found that for Herbeck's poems, this idea of leaping, of being leapt upon is somewhat vital to his aesthetic. Perhaps this is lent weight by the phrasing of his symptoms "the feeling of animals or other people invading his body".

This contextualization, however unfair, makes the poems themselves appear symptomatic of the way in which he engaged with the world of objects and others, as well as with language. And I don't think this is necessarily of disservice to the poems. The fact that Hannah Weiner "saw" words lends her jarring rants a sense of bombardment that can be read as an approximation of her daily experience. The poems are confessional in the best way possible: They convey a singular experience without groveling for emotional weight, or striving for transcendence.

The poems of Frank O'Hara, Hannah Weiner, and Ernst Herbeck could, with this reading, be thrown into the same category, for all three seem to me to be exemplary of a sort of diagnosable writing that comes from both their engagement with the world and their writing processes. O'Hara while not mentally ill conveyed a temperament, a taste, and a penchant for frivolity that is entirely singular, embodies his mental engagement with the people and objects around him. The offhand manner in which he wrote, and addresses ironically in "Personism: A Manifesto" is central to the way in which his personality is rendered in the poems.

Interestingly, Herbeck wrote only when directed to. It is unclear to me whether or not the poems were important to him, or whether this poetry-as-therapy (an idea practically lampooned in MFA pedagogy) was helpful to him. Perhaps it was an extension of his psychological examination. There are hints as to the relationship between Herbeck and Navratil in some of the "Psychiatrist" poems:

The Psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist is the care of the
Patient.
The psychiatrist thanks and thinks about
the patient.
The psychiatrist thinks and protects the
words of the patient.

Translated by Gary Sullivan.

* * *

Der Psychiater.

Der Psychiater ist der Sorge des
Patienten.
Der Psychiater dankt und denkt über
den Patienten.
Der Psychiater denkt and schützt die
Worte des Patienten.

I find the last two lines of this poem fascinating. That the psychiatrist is a protector implies that Herbeck had an attachment to his work: The poems were objects in need of protection. But it is also intriguing that "the psychiatrist thinks [...] the words of the patient."