By Richard Halicks

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Sunday, January 18, 2009

JFK was the first president to invite a poet to take part in an inauguration, and you couldn’t argue with his choice. “Every time Robert Frost comes to town,” James Reston wrote for The New York Times, “the Washington Monument stands up a little straighter.” In truth, the poem Frost intended to read was not in his top five, or even his top 100.

Summoning artists to participate in the august occasions of the state

Seems something artists ought to celebrate.

So began “Dedication,” which Frost wrote for Kennedy. But the glare of the sun that day was such that the 86-year-old Frost couldn’t read his typescript. So he gave up on “Dedication” and recited one of his old classics, “The Gift Outright,” from 1942.

This land was ours before we were the land’s.

She was our land more than a

hundred years

Before we were her people.

—-

Thirty-two years later, Bill Clinton revived Kennedy’s idea, inviting Maya Angelou to his inaugural.

From “A Rock, a River, a Tree”:

Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need

For this bright morning dawning for you.

History, despite its wrenching pain,

Cannot be unlived, but if faced

With courage, need not be lived again.

Lift up your eyes upon

The day breaking for you.

Give birth again

To the dream.

Women, children, men,

Take it into the palms of your hands.

—-

For his second term, Clinton invited Arkansas poet Miller Williams.

“Of History and Hope”:

All this in the hands of children, eyes already set

on a land we never can visit —- it isn’t there yet —-

but looking through their eyes, we can see

what our long gift to them may come to be.

If we can truly remember, they will not forget.

—-

Barack Obama has invited poet Elizabeth Alexander, an African-American studies professor at Yale, to read at his inauguration. Here’s a sampling of Alexander, from her poem “Smile.”

When I see a black man smiling

like that, nodding and smiling

with both hands visible, mouthing

“Yes, Officer,” across the street,

I think of my father, who taught us

the words “cooperate,” “officer,”

to memorize badge numbers,

who has seen black men shot at

from behind in the warm months

north.

And a last burst of verse:


They never write doggerel

for the inaugural —-

only classy verse.

Each poet reads a poem

by the Capitol dome —-

and is never terse

Probably every poet

is afraid he’ll blow it —-

oh, such drama!

May this year’s recitation

exceed expectation —-

and please Obama.

—- Richard Halicks