Poetry returns to Inauguration of President; "Words matter...carry meaning...carry power...."

[DeepModem Mom]

WP: Inaugural Committee Selects Poet for Ceremony
By Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 17, 2008

After a hiatus of more than a decade, poetry is returning to the inauguration of the American president. The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies announced today that Elizabeth Alexander, a prize-winning poet at Yale University who grew up in Washington, will read at the swearing in next month of President-elect Barack Obama. It is the first time that "poetry's old-fashioned praise," as Robert Frost called it, will be featured at the ceremony since 1997.

Alexander, 45, would be only the fourth poet to read at a swearing-in after Frost, who read at John F. Kennedy's in 1961, Maya Angelou, who read at Bill Clinton's in 1993, and Miller Williams, who read in Clinton's second inaugural in 1997, according to government officials.

"Poetry is what you find in the dirt in the corner, overhear on the bus, God in the details," Alexander wrote in a poem entitled, Ars Poetica #100: I Believe. "Poetry (here I hear myself loudest) is the human voice, and are we not of interest to each other?"

Alexander, a professor of African American studies, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005 and winner of the Jackson Poetry Prize last year. She is the daughter of former secretary of the Army Clifford Alexander, who made appearances on Obama's behalf during the campaign. She grew up on Capitol Hill and attended Sidwell Friends School, which Obama's children will attend. She is also a former neighbor of Obama's in Chicago.

She said she was overjoyed at the inaugural honor.

"I am obviously profoundly honored and thrilled," she said today. "Not only to have a chance to have some small part of this extraordinary moment in American history. . . . This incoming president of ours has shown in every act that words matter, that words carry meaning, that words carry power that words are the medium with which we communicate across difference, and that words have tremendous possibilities and those possibilities are not empty."...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/17/AR2008121702027_pf.html

[saracat]

1. Yeah they do, which is why Rick Warren is such a despicable choice for an

invocation. Whats he gonna pray for? The eleimination of GBTL and women to be driven back to the stone ages?