Inaugural Poems: Touching Bones of Consciousness
Rudolph Lewis, publisher of the online journal ChickenBones http://www.nathanielturner.com , has
suggested that we welcome Richard Blanco’s use of proletarian elements in “One
Today.” I concur. With the exception of
Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright,” an old poem he substituted for “Dedication”
which he had written for the 1961 inaugural, inaugural poems do refer to the
proletariat or to labor. Frost could not read “Dedication” because the glare of
sunlight on snow stabbed his eyes. Maya
Angelou’s “On the Pulse of Morning” and Elizabeth Alexander’s “Praise Song for
the Day” refer to work. One might argue
that Frost also referred to the labor of colonizing.
What I remember best from Angelou is rock, river, and tree, how
Nature’s work fits within her commentary on a narrative process:
History, despite its
wrenching pain
Cannot be unlived,
but if faced
With courage, need
not be lived again.
and from Alexander’s poem I ponder a single labored line:
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.
It is the use of “we” in the four poems, however, that moves
us from selective remembering to critical reflecting. Frost’s “we” is unsurprisingly
Eurocentric. Angelou conjures Walt
Whitman in nuancing “we” as a catalogue of ethnicities. Alexander’s “we” is metonymic; it must be
translated from six crucial lines:
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.
Blanco gives identity to “we” by way of uttering greetings:
….Hear: the doors we
open
for each other all
day, saying: hello, shalom,
buon giorno, howdy,
namaste, or bueno dias
And yet do I marvel not to hear ---zaoshang hao, yah’eh-the,
suprabhat, and ohayogozaimasu. Perhaps
Blanco knows too well which immigrants are unmapped and unnamed, which
immigrants and indigenous peoples are repressed in national consciousness. When his poem speaks to us of “the impossible
vocabulary of sorrow that won’t explain/ the empty desks of twenty children
marked absent/ today and forever,” we sense that the “impossible vocabulary”
silences the survivors of the American Holocaust and of the benign genocide
that cultivates mass incarceration. I do
not marvel that inaugural poems touch bones of consciousness, for that is the
function of poetry embroiled in ceremonies of the Republic.
Given the widespread consumption of poetry in the
twenty-first century, it is understandable that we are blessed with a surplus
of poets and poetry. It is equally
understandable that our appetite for poetry marked by proletarian elements may
be increasing.
Consider that in the epilogue for Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America,
Lawrence W. Levine highlights the anti-democratic conviction that informed
Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the
American Mind, that still informs the jeremiads of Bloom’s ideological
children: “that only the minority can fruitfully investigate and discuss the
nature of the cultural authority which the majority needs to accept”(252). Some contemporary poets and critics embrace
this conviction without question, but the majority of us who write and consume
poetry recognize the conviction is a pile of excrement. Fully capable of distinguishing what is
accomplished or dreadful in honest labor-respectful poetry from what has been
trimmed by anti-democratic scissors and merchandized by Bloomians as
masterpieces, we know which poems are painstakingly crafted to touch the bones
of consciousness. We know that Brenda
Marie Osbey’s History and Other Poems
(2013), David Brinks’s The Secret Brain;
Selected Poems 1995-2012,
Sterling D. Plumpp’s long poem “Mississippi Suite”(published on Triquarterly Online (http://triquarterly.org), Frank X. Walker’s Affrilachia (2000), Nikky Finney’s Head Off & Split (2011), and Richard Blanco’s “One Today” are
touching our bones of consciousness.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. PHBW
blog January 24, 2013
