Poet offers 'praise song' for inauguration day

Following the world's most awaited oration — President Obama's inaugural speech — poet Elizabeth Alexander echoed the new leader's tribute to daily labor, his call for responsibility and his reminder of the sacrifices that made his election possible.
"Say it plain: that many have died for this day," Alexander, 46, said Tuesday during her brief reading, in which she also spoke out to the world about "love that casts a widening pool of light, love with no need to pre-empt grievance."
Alexander's recital at the National Mall in Washington culminated her own surprising journey, from academic and award-winning poet to a platform that only the tiniest number of her peers have been granted. She is just the fourth inaugural poet, following Robert Frost, Maya Angelou and Miller Williams.
The poem, titled "Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration," consists of 14, unrhymed three-line stanzas, and a one-line coda: "praise song for walking forward in that light." It will be released as an $8 paperback, 32 pages, on Feb. 6 by publisher Graywolf Press with an announced 100,000 first printing, a veritable fairy tale for most poets, but not for an inaugural work. Angelou's "On the Pulse of the Morning," recited in 1993 at President Clinton's inaugural, was a million seller.
Ceremonial poems, commissioned rather than inspired, rarely make for historic literature, but Alexander avoided direct references to political issues, current events or to Obama himself. Her poem was a grounded, non-topical summation and joining of minute details and infinite themes, connections that run through American verse from Walt Whitman to William Carlos Williams, and through such Alexander works as "Fugue" and "A Poem for Nelson Mandela."
Alexander, wearing a bright red coat, delivering her poem in poised and determined style, offered a sketch of everyday work and interaction ("walking past each other, catching each other's eyes or not, about to speak or speaking"), and a Whitmanesque celebration of anonymous deeds:
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......

Reported By HILLEL ITALIE, AP