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Barack Obama has undercut any claims of meritocracy with at least one choice: the woman who will delivering his inaugural poem. Aside from the fact that she has known Obama since they worked together at the University of Chicago, one is hard-pressed to find a rationale for this honor. Only the fourth poet to participate in a presidential inauguration, Elizabeth Alexander is no Robert Frost, nor even Maya Angelou. Alexander is an unpoet who arranges words into impenetrable jumbles flecked with juvenile imagery, inappropriate word choice, an obsessive PC view of race and "gender," a dubious take on miscegenation, and an occasional desire to kill whitey. Perhaps she will regale her national audience with her observations on motherhood, which she writes:Isfunky, isleaky, isa soggy, bloody crotch, issharp jets of breast milk shot straight across the room,is gaudy, mustard-colored poop...
She proceeds to display a fascination with bodily fluids and functions consistent with an eighth grade locker room:
the baby farts,we laugh. The baby burps, we smile, say “Yes.”The baby poops, his whole body stiffens,then steam heat floods the pipes....The spirit lives in your squirts and coos.Your noises and fluids are what you do.She questions the baby's feeding patterns with adolescent non-language. ("Three feedings? Hunh.")
the baby farts,we laugh. The baby burps, we smile, say “Yes.”The baby poops, his whole body stiffens,then steam heat floods the pipes....The spirit lives in your squirts and coos.Your noises and fluids are what you do.She questions the baby's feeding patterns with adolescent non-language. ("Three feedings? Hunh.")
Then she turns her attention to her discarded placenta, calling it a "mammoth giblet":
The midwife presents it on a platter.We do not eat, have no Tupperwareto take it home and sanctify a tree.Instead, we marvel at my cast-off meat,the almost-pulsing slab, bloody mesa,what lived moments ago, and now has died.
The midwife presents it on a platter.We do not eat, have no Tupperwareto take it home and sanctify a tree.Instead, we marvel at my cast-off meat,the almost-pulsing slab, bloody mesa,what lived moments ago, and now has died.
Eventually, she writes of the tenderness of motherhood, addressing her beloved child as:
my whelp, my cub, my seapup.In the days before you smile at meor call me Mama or love me,love is all tit, all wheat-smelling milk, humid crook of the arm
my whelp, my cub, my seapup.In the days before you smile at meor call me Mama or love me,love is all tit, all wheat-smelling milk, humid crook of the arm
Alexander includes dream sequences of her obstetrician spending the night before the birth with her family, writing the doctor "looks like a loaf of whole wheat bread."She dreams her child's head pops off and she has to put it back on. Then she sees:
All of my aunties chatting like crows on a line,all of my aunties on electric breast pumps,the double kind, one for each exhausted tit.
All of my aunties chatting like crows on a line,all of my aunties on electric breast pumps,the double kind, one for each exhausted tit.
She uses the word "tit" only twice in this poem but employs "funky" three times; she could write lyrics for Lipps Inc. For a profession so dependent on the use of language, Alexander is notable for her inappropriate use of same. David Horowitz has written about her misuse of the Greek word "chroma."She also misuses "caesuras" and confuses the medical discipline of "Neonatology" with new motherhood. Such confusion is not limited to the written word; the golden-tongued poet told an unflinching audience at the Cambridge Forum, "I first read Jet Magazine...before I could read." More concerning than her transgressions against the English (and Greek and Latin) language(s) is Alexander's all-encompassing focus on race, though so often drowned in pretentious doublespeak. She told the Cambridge Forum she sees poetry as a means to help blacks "envision what we are not meant to envision," such as "real and enactable black power." Her body of work reflects her choice to "meditate" on "a new-fashioned race pride." Alexander insisted in her prose anthology The Black Interior, "black thought and life rarely go uninterrupted by the violent gougings of racism...."
...Obama's may be the first inauguration to have a twelve-bar ditty about infant excrement or submerging racists's internal organs in formaldehyde.Or perhaps she will rise to the occasion and deliver something less offensive, even something inspiring. As Yogi Berra once said, "Predictions are hard, especially about the future." But predictions arise from assessments of observable data, and nothing in her career of affluent oppression, professional victimhood, obsessive racial self-analysis, or conjoining of redefined words masquerading as poetry indicates she will. She is not the voice of a nation's culture. She is a left-wing Floyd R. Turbo filtered through academia. She confuses loquacious self-absorption with sagacious eloquence. In light of Obama's campaign, she may be the perfect choice after all.
By Ben Johnson
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PS:IF this woman is a "POET" anybody can write poetry...believe me...I watched the entire thing...it was painful....I still dont know what in the world was she trying to say and what did it had--if anything--to do with the inauguration day....Gosh...SO HELP US GOD.....As in the days of Noah....
