Local poets celebrate Obama decision to include inaugural poem

Why is there poetry?

What compels someone to arrange their thoughts in words that have form and rhythm? And why does this shift from sentences to stanzas heighten a moment or an emotion?

Today, a poem will be recited against the backdrop of the U.S. Capitol, reinvigorating the languishing tradition of verse commemorating an occasion. Elizabeth Alexander, a professor at Yale University whose work is published by St. Paul's Graywolf Press, was asked by Barack Obama to write a poem for the day.

She will be only the fourth poet to read at an inauguration, following Robert Frost in 1961, Maya Angelou in 1993 and Miller Williams in 1997. Graywolf will publish a chapbook of Alexander's inaugural poem in conjunction with the inauguration.

Local poets are elated, in their particularly sagacious way.

"Obama hasn't commissioned a poem so much as he's commissioned someone to make the moment mean something bigger than ceremony or political poses," said Todd Boss, a St. Paul poet. "To poets, and to those who draw meaning from poetry, the only real shock is that this kind of thing doesn't happen more often."

Minneapolis poet Tim Nolan also champions more public poetry, partly because he believes that few things are as emotionally efficient as a poem.

"A poem is one soul speaking to another soul, and that's very moving in a public setting," Nolan said. "It provides something that nothing else can really accomplish with the same efficiency and directness."

A means of remembering

People have been making poetry for thousands of years -- the word poem is from the Greek for "a thing made" -- long before words were put to stone, much less paper. We tend to think of a poem as art, but its genesis in fact was as a device, as a way to tell a story using cadences and rhymes that made it easier to remember, and so to be passed along.

Joyce Sutphen of Chaska, who teaches poetry at Gustavus Adolphus College, said she'd asked a recent class to think about the difference between words conveyed in an essay and through a poem. "The students decided that the poem got at our hearts and our emotions -- it just moved us in a way that the bare facts didn't," Sutphen said, then laughed quietly. "It's pretty mysterious."

She referred to French poet Paul Valéry's description of poetry as a language within a language. "It's really condensed and back to the heart."

Maybe that's one reason that Nolan remembers watching John F. Kennedy's inauguration on TV. He was only 6 years old, but it was a big enough deal for him to remember an old man with a shock of white hair, bundled up against the cold, reciting a poem for the great occasion.

"There'd been a fresh snow, and Robert Frost was kind of blinded by the sun so he couldn't read the poem he'd prepared," Nolan said. "So instead he just recited another poem of his, 'The Gift Outright,' that he'd committed to memory."

Obama himself had a few poems published in the student literary journal of Occidental College in 1981. "He's got the attitude of a poet, which is a large part of his success," Nolan said. "When he's giving a speech, he's very particular about his choice of words."

And again arises a comparison with Abraham Lincoln, who also had some poems published. Granted, Nolan said, "they weren't very good. But when you think of the Gettysburg Address ..."

Nikki Grimes is an award-winning poet from California who was in Minnesota in November to talk about her new book, "Barack Obama: Son of Promise, Child of Hope," a picture book that tells Obama's life story in a cycle of poems.

She chose that form because "poetry has the power to bypass the defenses of the intellect, and make a beeline for the heart," she said. That Obama chose to commission a poem came as no surprise. "He is, if nothing else, a man intent on making deep connections with the American people. What better way to sail into our hearts than on the wave of a poem?"

More occasions, more poems

In a way, Boss said, Elizabeth Alexander already had been commissioned to be a voice for the American people because she'd received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

" 'We the people' commission poets all the time to speak for us, to illuminate the present, to give words to our accruing history," he said. "In a perfect world, there'd be a poem commissioned for every occasion, not just the most momentous. Think what a world we'd live in if poets were asked, for example, to respond to every report by the National Academy of Sciences, or every World Bank summit."

People might even get over feeling intimidated by poetry, said St. Paul poet Phebe Hanson.

"Even though people are afraid of poetry in some funny way, as something beyond them, it's also the most democratic of forms," she said. Most of us have tried to write a poem, she said, whether for a tribute, for a crush or for working through a trying moment.

But it's no less important -- and perhaps more so -- to read poetry. We all need to do our part, for as Walt Whitman once observed: "To have great poetry, there must be great audiences, too."

Kim Ode • 612-673-7185