Finally, the text of Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day" is available at the Academy of American Poets site.

You can see and hear Alexander reading the poem on any number of YouTube posts (one, two), and you could, yesterday, have read the poem in a New York Times transcript, though without its line breaks. Now, it's not just a performance, not just something overheard, something witnessed. Now it's a text: something to be read.

And now, I think, we can talk more effectively about the art of the poem, rather than people's impressions of what happened...

By which I mean, I'm in a better position today to answer my mother, who called me yesterday to say she thought the poem "sucked." I started to offer an explanation, a "reader's guide," if you will, but didn't get very far.

My mother wanted Robert Frost again. Apparently she didn't know that the poem Frost wrote for Kennedy's inaugural really "sucked." He just didn't get to read it. The wind was so steady, he couldn't read the paper, so he recited a much shorter poem, "The Gift Outright," from memory.

I admire, and even enjoy, "The Gift Outright." It resonates with many half-tones from the American tradition of landscape writing—echoing particularly Emerson's "Hamatreya"— and conquest. For a short poem, it does a lot of work.

But my mother doesn't appreciate the fact that, even in 1961 Frost's poems were not exactly state-of-the-art. They weren't completely out of step—Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom had enjoyed a few decades of ascendancy—but neither did they use the most uniquely American materials. Frost, we remember, effectively launched his career as a poet in England, writing verse that sounds its kinship with the British tradition, while the break from that tradition and into an American language, most visibly advanced by Walt Whitman, was continuing all around him in the work of Pound, Eliot, H.D., and scores of other poets. And in 1961, the formalism that had resurged in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s was beginning to break down as Adrienne Rich and Robert Lowell and others like them, trained as formalists, began to step away from those verse-forms and toward a more plain-spoken or speach-based approach to poetry.

Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead," written and recited in May 1960 (published in The Atlantic in November 1960), is a good example of a public, occasional poem that also reflects that shift toward a poetics based in common, American speech.

Frost's work is not completely out of step with that American speech tradition either. I think his greatest achievement, from a technical standpoint, is that he recognized the iambic rhythm in the regional speech of his New England, and he managed to capture that regional rhythm in a traditional metrical form. I think it's fair to say that in some ways he Americanized blank verse or iambic pentameter, in his own way, though it's the connection of that verse form to the British tradition that seems to outlast his American achievement.

Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day," by contrast, seems to me to be a smart and muscular work of American speech that smartly echoes not only the themes of Barack Obama's campaign and vision, but as well particular speech traditions from which she and Obama draw, speech traditions that have been important in American literature, American poetry, and American law—all while articulating the delicacy and danger of our present moment as well as the power of the hope Obama has worked to renew.

The theme of speech develops early in "Praise Song for the Day":

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other's
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

Speech is a means of connection. Paused speech is a missed connection, and perhaps an avoidance. Here we are in the city of our imagination, and we see and acknowledge one another, or we don't. When we don't, we find ourselves lost, and we look to our past and history to guide us:

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

When we don't talk, we're trying to decide what to say, how, with our words, we might make our way through the thorns of mutual relation, through the noise.

The next passage of the poem tells us what will happen if we can make this speech come out: we will repair, we will make music, we will be carried, we will see what's coming, and we will begin to learn, and to connect.

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," she continues, finally making the case most plainly... This is why the poem, why the speech, why normal speech is so important: "We encounter each other in words." Words are our meeting place. Words are our meeting halls, our congresses.

This doesn't echo the tone, but the sentiment of Walt Whitman's democratic vision in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." Here, it's worth quoting a sizable passage from that poem:

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw its patches down upon me also,
The best I had done seem'd to me blank and suspicious,
My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre?
Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,
I am he who knew what it was to be evil,
I too knitted the old knot of contrariety,
Blabb'd, blush'd, resented, lied, stole, grudg'd,
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me.
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,
Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting,
Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,
Was call'd by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,
Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,
Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word,
Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping,
Play'd the part that still looks back on the actor or actress,
The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like,
Or as small as we like, or both great and small.

Whitman responds, in 1856 and again in 1860 as he revises the poem, to the increasing atomization not only of urban life but of national political life. On the eve of the Civil War, the sense of fragmentation was growing. Whitman's poem says that we share even that sense of fragmentation, we have that in common, and even that can draw us together.

The poem itself is a great speech-act that seeks to argue, as Alexander does, that the street or the ferry-boat, these public spaces or public conveyances, are our public assemblies, and that much constitutional work happens when we encounter one another. Whitman's poem makes the case Alexander's does, and Alexander's poem makes the case Whitman's does: "We encounter each other in words."

These words can be "spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed, / words to consider, reconsider."

We have rhetorical, tonal choices. What does Alexander choose? Words that are both smooth—dulcet, musical, easy, plain—and spiny—allusive, haunting, evocative. She is, by virtue of being on the inaugural dais declaiming, but her delivery is very measured; if not the volume of the whisper, this has the care of a whisper. So, we consider, and we reconsider. Alexander seems to say words have effects, choose well.

Words are our ways, so "We cross dirt roads and highways," we make our moves. Through language we can make the transit from the "will of some one" to "others," we can come to "see what's on the other side" and "to find a place where we are safe" and "walk into that which we cannot yet see."

What better expression both of American determination—we keep working toward a better place, a better life, and we keep working on the faith that our determination will yield the promise—and the uncertainty of the present moment?

What comes next in the poem is one of the most important points in the entire work:

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.

This is a complex passage.

First, "Say it plain." A reference, I believe, to a central tenet of the African-American oral and oratorical tradition. Speak truth to power. Say it clearly. Directly. Some of you may have read the anthology of African-American speeches, Say It Plain: A Century of Great African American Speeches">Say It Plain, while others may hear an echo of Vernon Jordan's own book Make It Plain: Standing Up and Speaking Out">Make It Plain. This as clearly describes the poem's poetics as it does Obama's oratory. Many commentators had fun ridiculing Obama's fluency, but he was a direct speaker, particularly in difficult times, like the Philadelphia speech in the midst of the Reverend Wright controversy.

"Say it plain: that many have died for this day." This is not only a reference to our veterans who have died, but a reference to all who have died in the struggle for freedom, including the martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement, countless killed in slavery. It's a trope of public speaking in America that goes back at least to Edward Everett's early speeches (maybe Daniel Webster's too) in the 1820s.

It is also, as the following lines make clear, a reference to all who have come before, all who have built the nation of which we are now a part: "Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, / who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges..."

This listing passage, which my mother criticized as "too mundane," is supposed, I believe, to be a passage of great uplift. It's the place where common acts are sanctified by the poem's attention, where they are recognized as constitutional acts. It is also the place in the poem where Alexander most reveals her debt to Whitman, who pioneered this kind of listing or cataloguing as both a poetic and a political act. The poet is a census-taker: as the poet sees and recognizes, the poet brings those people into the republic of the poem. The poet is taking stock in as plain language as she can muster: let life be the source of music. So to move from "Say it plain" to "Sing the names" is an easy, necessary, and inevitable step. Language itself, the plainest speech is sacred, is poetry.

The poem closes with two movements. First, Alexander summarizes the push of the previous passage: "Praise song for struggle." Praise the work that got us here. Praise the prudence not to waste. Praise the love that animates all this. Second, finally, she turns to look forward, to embrace the possibility the day has renewed:

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 the light.

Any sentence could be begun, any way of meeting in language. We are on the cusp, on the brink. We move forward. We move.

***

Some commentary on Alexander's poem:

It was oddly heartening, then, to see how completely Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem, "Praise Song for the Day," failed to live up to the standard of public, official verse in which the Romans excelled.