Poem: Rita Dove

Rita Dove, in 2017
(from Wikipedia.com)

One of the highlights of my youth was working across the hall from Rita Dove (1952-), one of the great contemporary American poets. At that time she was the Poet Laureate of the US, and though I did not work for her or study under her, I did have to periodically consult with her on matters concerning a literary journal for which she served as a senior editor and which I was managing. As much by observation as by osmosis, I learned little tips and grace notes about how to deal with editors and contracts, how to navigate in the shoals of academe, and what dedication to one's art and career, within the context of the university, might look like. She was always warm and kind toward me, and though I have not had many interactions with her since, I will always remember that moment, and her and her husband, the writer Fred Viebahn, with great fondness.

My first introduction to Rita's work was Thomas and Beulah, the book that received the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. I was a senior in college, and like many, was amazed that a young Black woman writer had just won the Pulitzer in poetry--she was only the second ever, after Gwendolyn Brooks--which led me straight to the Grolier Book Shop in Cambridge to buy as many books of hers as I could afford. Her second book, Museum (Carnegie Mellon, 1983), differed from the tightly organized structure in Thomas and Beulah, a perfect volume; it was more like a conventional collection of poems, more wide-ranging in its focus, and a bit more expansive in its forms, though the sure eye and pen Rita brings to every poem in every book were evident in this one too.

I was especially fascinated by Museum's cover image, which, it turns out was by the German painter Christian Schad (1894-1982) in the counter-Expressionist, early Weimar-era style known as the Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity. Think Max Beckmann, Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, and Rudolf Schlichter; Rita ended the collection with a poem exploring Schad's painting, the artist's process, and the figures contained within it and its depiction of difference.

This final poem, "Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove" is also meta-commentary in part on process and experience in writing poems, including this one, and a metonymic exploration of art-making as well. Yet again as in previous poems I've posted, this one reminds us that it is the canvas--the ground of the artwork--and the art work's subjects themselves, whose gazes are "merciless"; they see and show what the artist does not and yet does, intuitively, in the creation of the painting, and transform the artist, and the viewer, in the exchange.

"Agosta the Winged Man and Rasha the Black Dove" is a lyric poem, but it also paints a portrait, as Rita's work often does, in quick, precise, vivid strokes. There is no excess here, and yet her skill creates an aesthetic surplus, as Anne Carson once put it, of meaning. The poem itself is a model of objectivity, mirroring Schad's stylistic approach--his sharpened realism pressed beyond the observable. Yet it swerves away from mere description with notable subtlety. It also gives glimpses of a world that was on the precipice; just a decade and a half later, Berlin, and Germany, would be at war, on the cusp of one of the most abominable horrors, the Nazi Holocaust, that the human race has ever exacted on itself, and the diverse world we see in miniature here--Russian aristocrats, a Malagasy immigrant performer, Agosta himself--would be swept away with a severity and violence the poem hints at.  Look, it is saying, look closely. And note who and what are looking back at you. Pay attention.

Rita Dove, originally in Poetry, November 1981, from Museum, Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary Poetry, 1983. All rights reserved.

The Schad painting:

Christian Schad, Agosta, the Pigeon-Chested Man, and Rasha, the Black Dove, oil on canvas, 1929, Tate Modern.

Tracy K. Smith New Poet Laureate of the US + Poem

Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

In a marvelous move, the new Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, has just named Tracy K. Smith (1972-) as the new Poet Laureate Consultant to the Library of Congress, i.e., Poet Laureate of the US. She is the 22nd person to hold this post, and succeeds acclaimed poet Juan Felipe Herrera, who was the first Latino to serve as in the post. She also will join a long list of distinguished predecessors, including three Black women who have won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, as she did: Gwendolyn Brooks, who served--as Consultant for Poetry, before the Poet Laureate post was officially created--in 1985 and 1986; Rita Dove, who served from 1993 through 1995; and Natasha Trethewey, who served from 2012 through 2014.

Tracy is a native of Massachusetts, and grew up in California. I have known her since her undergraduate years, when she first joined the Dark Room Writers Collective as she was finishing up at Harvard, where she studied English and African American Studies. She later attended Columbia, where she received her MFA, and was a Stegner Fellow from 1997 to 1999. Tracy now directs the undergraduate Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, where she is Professor of Creative Writing.

Her poetry has received acclaim from her earliest book, The Body's Question, which received the Cave Canem Prize and was published by Graywolf Press in 2003. Her second book, Duende, earned her the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and was published by Graywolf Press in 2007, and her third book, Life on Mars, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. In 2014, she received the prestigious Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, given for distinguished achievement. Tracy has also published a highly praised work of nonfiction entitled Ordinary Light: A Memoir, and has a new book of poetry, Wade in the Water, forthcoming next year.

Among the last ten or so Poet Laureates, some, like Trethewey and Herrera, have been very active in taking poetry outside the academy and engaging an array of communities in public programs and projects. About her own aims for the post, Tracy has told the New York Times' Alexandra Alter:

“I’m very excited about the opportunity to take what I consider to be the good news of poetry to parts of the country where literary festivals don’t always go,” she said. “Poetry is something that’s relevant to everyone’s life, whether they’re habitual readers of poetry or not.”

I am excited about her appointment, not only because of her gifts as a poet, teacher and poetry citizen, but particularly because if there is anyone who can negotiate and navigate the challenges a Poet Laureate--or any major figure in the arts--might face in our deeply divided country, particularly with the current President and administration operating in the foreground and background, it's someone like Tracy. Congratulations to her!

Update: Although Tracy noted in the Alter article that she did not plan to "advocate social causes," despite the fact that her work has, from the beginning, demonstrated a complex grasp of the world and social engagement, the following first step is a good sign: On the PBS News Hour's site, Tracy recommends four poetry books to read, and all are not just fine works of craft, but each speaks in a different and necessary way to our current political moment: Solmaz Sharif's Look; Erika L. Sánchez's Lessons on Expulsion; James Richardson's During; and Claudia Rankine's Citizen.

***

Here's one of Tracy's eponymous poems from Duende, her second collection, my personal favorite of her three poetry books, and perhaps the most formally daring, borrowed from the Poets.Org (Academy of American Poets) website. (One poet who comes to mind whenever I read Tracy's Duende poems but whose name I've never seen mentioned in conjunction with hers is Jay Wright, oddly enough.) The voice in this collection's poems immediately grabbed me. Tracy's lyric transformations, the dramatic movement in these poems, which follows not just the actions the poems describe but the pathways of feeling flowing throughout them, show incredible skill, and often in this volume, as here, cast a spell.

DUENDE

1.
 
The earth is dry and they live wanting.
Each with a small reservoir
Of furious music heavy in the throat.
They drag it out and with nails in their feet
Coax the night into being. Brief believing.
A skirt shimmering with sequins and lies.
And in this night that is not night,
Each word is a wish, each phrase
A shape their bodies ache to fill—
 
         I’m going to braid my hair
     Braid many colors into my hair
         I’ll put a long braid in my hair
     And write your name there
 
They defy gravity to feel tugged back.
The clatter, the mad slap of landing.
 
 
                                    2.
 
And not just them. Not just
The ramshackle family, the tíos,
Primitos, not just the bailaor
Whose heels have notched
And hammered time
So the hours flow in place
Like a tin river, marking
Only what once was.
Not just the voices of scraping
Against the river, nor the hands
Nudging them farther, fingers
Like blind birds, palms empty,
Echoing. Not just the women
With sober faces and flowers
In their hair, the ones who dance
As though they’re burying
Memory—one last time—
Beneath them.
               And I hate to do it here.
To set myself heavily beside them.
Not now that they’ve proven
The body a myth, a parable
For what not even language
Moves quickly enough to name.
If I call it pain, and try to touch it
With my hands, my own life,
It lies still and the music thins,
A pulse felt for through garments.
If I lean into the desire it starts from—
If I lean unbuttoned into the blow
Of loss after loss, love tossed
Into the ecstatic void—
It carries me with it farther,
To chords that stretch and bend
Like light through colored glass.
But it races on, toward shadows
Where the world I know
And the world I fear
Threaten to meet.
 
                                    3.
 
There is always a road,
The sea, dark hair, dolor.
 
Always a question
Bigger than itself—
 
          They say you’re leaving Monday

          Why can’t you leave on Tuesday?

Tracy K. Smith, "Duende" from Duende.

Copyright © 2007 by Tracy K. Smith.

Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press.
www.graywolfpress.org

On The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry

First, I have not yet done more than glance at this anthology but, as a major hullabaloo has arisen around it, here are some links, with a little commentary, tell the story.

Rita Dove, a poet I know (a little) and admire greatly, edited The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry (New York: Penguin, 2011). For those who may not be aware of her background, Dove is the author of 9 books of poetry, the third of which received the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her collection Thomas and Beulah (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon, 1986) (she was the second African-American, and second black woman to be so honored). She has also published a book of stories, a novel, a play, and a collection of essays. (I should note that I once wrote a short critical précis of her play; I also have taught several of her stories, in addition to her poems, over the years.) She was US Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995. She is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia, which is where I met her (and had the pleasure of working with her on several projects while employed there).

In the November 24, 2011 issue of The New York Review of Books, a publication that very infrequently publishes reviews by American critics who are not white or reviews of works by American authors who are not white, Helen Vendler, a major contemporary poetry critic, and the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, wrote a demonstrably negative review of Dove's anthology, entitled "Are These the Poems to Remember?" For those not aware of Vendler's background, she is the author or editor of 31 works of criticism, including several anthologies, among them The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985) and The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1986). She is known for her non-theoretical, close readings of the poetry and poetics of a select number of Anglo-American Modernists, Romantic poets, and contemporary American poets. (I should note that as a managing editor, I edited an early, literary journal version of her essay on Dove, "The Black Dove: Rita Dove, Poet Laureate," which appears in her 1996 collection of essays, Soul Says: On Recent Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).)

Dove responded, as poets--as writers, especially ones as famous as she is--rarely do, with a blistering takedown, in The New York Review of Books. Writing about the "row," as he termed it, the poet James Fenton suggested in the London Evening Standard that Dove should not have answered Vendler, and that she should not have criticized Vendler personally, before he criticized Dove's anthology on some of the same grounds as Vendler.  Yet given Vendler's history of writing about almost no poets who are not white (though, as I note above, she has written about Dove, and I once heard her give a great talk on Langston Hughes, whom she notes in the introduction of Soul Says, is a "black" poet that she, as a "white" woman, does enjoy--these are her words, not mine, and you'll find them on Google Books, I assure you)--which is her right, as a person and critic--and given the rhetoric at the close of the review, a riposte was in order.  Among Dove's many points of rebuttal, she calls out Vendler out for condescension and racism, a step that also doesn't occur very often among poets of Dove's stature. (I will note that Dove's husband, the author Fred Viebahn, famously and publicly critiqued the cliquish, sexist, racist composition of the Academy of American Poets' Chancellors--a board of major poets legitimating the organization's work--back in 1998. His letter buttressed the resignation, in protest, of two of the Academy's rare female Chancellors, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Maxine Kumin and Carolyn Kizer, thus helping to change that organization's structure and approach to the American poetry world.)

One snippet from Dove's response:

The amount of vitriol in Helen Vendler’s review betrays an agenda beyond aesthetics. As a result, she not only loses her grasp on the facts, but her language, admired in the past for its theoretical elegance, snarls and grouses, sidles and roars as it lurches from example to counterexample, misreading intent again and again. Whether propelled by academic outrage or the wild sorrow of someone who feels betrayed by the world she thought she knew—how sad to witness a formidable intelligence ravished in such a clumsy performance.

Vendler's response: "I have written the review and I stand by it." That's it.

The Chronicle of Higher Education saw fit to write about the exchange, titling it "Bloodletting Over An Anthology," which seems to focus more on Dove vs. Vendler and the latter's supporters, while deflecting attention from many--most?--of the larger issues Vendler's review, and Dove's response, as well as the responses of many to the critique and rejoinder enjoin, including the larger history of American and European racism and ethnocentricity, which color literary production as much as anything else; the contestations around American literature history and literary studies, and the politics of the literary canon; the struggles between poets and critics around and for critical and aesthetic authority; the ongoing transformation of the American poetry world and its multiple power centers; and the politics of anthologization and literary publishing.  As I need not note, this critical exchange between Dove and Vendler does not occur in a vacuum, and its prehistory is the early history of American literature--and colonialism and its discontents--itself. One need only look at the critical condescension that the first published African American (and second American female) poet, Phillis Wheatley (c.1753-1784) has endured since publishing her only book, and the relationship between this view of writing by authors who are not white (or male), and the long history of excluding or condescension to works by authors who are not white, male, Christian, openly queer, working-class and poor, and so forth, not just from anthologies, but from classroom curricula, print book reviews and online review sites, and so forth, practices that unfortunately still may be occurring today, to grasp that the stakes go beyond these two figures, and point to a much broader problem that persists.  As someone who has had to deal with these issues on many levels, I can attest to their persistence at the institutional level, and in the broader world of literary art and criticism.

I'll end by noting that Dove's anthology has received some other negative reviews, such as this Jeremy Bass's, entitled "Shelf Life"), which appeared in The Nation.  Bass was respectfully critical without descending into nastiness. The Chronicle notes a few others. Yet the anthology has also received positive reviews, including a Starred review (the best) in Publishers Weekly, and strong reviews also in Booklist and The Chicago Tribune, to name two other venues. One of the criticisms that Vendler broached that Dove responds to in another venue, the current issue (December 2011) of the Associate Writing Program's Writers' Chronicle (the article unfortunately is not online), is the exorbitant fees and extortive tactics one publisher engaged in over several authors for whose works it held the rights, Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath among the most famous of them, which prevented Dove and Penguin, an admittedly major and very wealthy and powerful publisher, from running these poets' works.  In the Chronicle article, some commentators suggest that without these authors, both of whom are among the most important 20th century American poets, the anthology is inadequate. Point taken. But then again, no anthology is perfect. How could one be, unless it were something of the sort that might be found in Jorge Luis Borges's Library of Babel?

Having written all this, I now need to go check out--buy--Dove's anthology!

Publishing Looking Up + New Poet Laureate, Philip Levine

Apple's iPad, with iBook Library & iBook

Up until a few years ago the publishing portion of the undergraduate creative writing major course on the history, sociology, and global cultures of writing, "The Situation of Writing," that some other faculty members and I have taught was popularly known as the "Doom and Gloom" unit. Though we faculty members strove to give our students a wide array of views on publishing's state in the US and across the globe, though there were many buoyant notes amidst the often nostalgic critiques and dire prognostications, and though I personally aimed to convey a broader and more holistic view of the subject, based on my personal experience, I too sometimes wondered where the mainstream publishing industry as it had developed--as I knew it--up through the mid 2000s, was heading, and if it was going to destroy itself or be destroyed by the raft of technological innovations, the financial and technical challenges, the shifts and alleged declines in reading, and other problems it was facing. Doom and gloom.
I noticed after winter's class, however, that many students in the large class told me they felt quite "positive" and "hopeful" about the future of publishing, mainstream, independent, large, small, and otherwise. I too felt the same way after reading the many articles assembled for that portion of the course, and they reframed books like Jason Epstein's The Book Business: Past, Present and Future in positive terms. In today's New York Times, Julie Bosman, in her article "Publishing Gives Hints of Revival, Data Show," reports that this morning's BookStats, "a comprehensive survey conducted by two major trade groups," the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group, showed that publishers' net income rose 5.6% from 2008 to 2009, for a net revenue of $27.9 billion, and that in 2010, publishers sold 2.57 billion books, an increase of 4.1 percent over 2008.

The two trade groups surveyed 1,963 publishers, including the 6 largest trade publishers, encompassed 5 major categories of books--
"trade, K-12 school, higher education, professional and scholarly"--and also expanded the categories of what qualified as books, including not only print and softcover codex books and e-books, but "professional and scholarly journals and databases, multimedia teaching materials and mobile apps." Sales of books in all five categories rose, with the largest gains, according to the article, in the higher education area, of 18.7% in three years. Tina Jordan, Vice President of the Association of American Publishers, pointed to the expansion of higher education and increased enrollment as a result of the weakening economy. (I would add that for-profit universities may also be playing a role in this jump.)

As heartening to me were other figures: adult fiction rose by 8.8% over the 3-year period, while scholarly books, once considered a shaky area among not only the trade publishers but even academic publishers, rose by 4.4%. One of the questions that arose repeatedly in articles we looked at in the "Situation of Writing" was whether e-books would depress the overall market for books, or expand it. Early signs from this survey suggest that the latter is occurring, as e-books continue to take off. Though only 0.6% of the trade market in 2008, they were 6.4% in 2010, and Bosman points out that overall sales for e-books in 2010 came to 114 million. That is still a small portion of the larger book sales figure, but the article notes that in 2011 e-book sales continue to rise, and eventually, I think, they will constitute the majority, as more and more younger readers grow accustomed to reading using digital devices such as laptops and desktop computers, cellular phones, e-readers like Barnes & Noble's Nook, Amazon's Kindle, various tablet computers like Apple's iPad, as well as devices not yet perfected, invented or imagined.  Books themselves continue to change too; what is possible with e-books and apps, as the digital The Waste Land proves, offer quite a different book-immersion (because it goes beyond but still encompasses reading) experience.

Barnes & Noble's Nook e-reader

Unsurprisingly as e-books continue to gain, sales of adult hardcover and paper books remained flat, growing only about 1% over the 3-year period, while mass-market paperbacks have declined 16% over the same period. Economically this may signal that publishers will be making far less per book (say $25-$30 now for hardcovers, $12-17 for trade paperbacks, but $5-12 for e-book, less for mobile apps), but could be making up for that financial loss through a larger volume of sales. Certainly their overall and specific costs decline with e-book production, but the terms with and for authors are changing as well. Authors face fewer barriers self-publishing and distributing e-books, and can set more favorable terms for themselves, though gaining attention for these new texts remains an issue as the old gatekeepers remain. This is true too for smaller publishers who don't have media contacts or links to the marketing budgets of the larger publishers. But they too are poised to reward authors better than the old system did, and can earn more for themselves as well.


This is only one article out of many written daily (I do scan Publishers Weekly's daily, dizzying waterfall of tweets to see what the publishing news of the day is, and also glance at other publishing sites when I can), and it thankfully is anything but "doom and gloom." There are readers, they are reading all kinds of books, and while reading may have seemed at risk a few years ago, things appear, at least for now, to have swung back in the other direction.

***

Philip Levine
www.english.illinois.edu

The new Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress of the United States of America, for 2011-12 (and possibly a second year thereafter) will be Philip Levine. Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1928, Levine has been a steady chronicler, in often memorable free verse narratives and monologues, of the lives of working-class Americans. A graduate of Wayne State College (now Wayne State University) and the University of Iowa's Writers Workshop, in 1995 he received the Pulitzer Prize for his collection The Simple Truth, but his best-known volume perhaps is What Work Is (1992), which contains the poignant title poem, and which received the 1991 National Book Award. He has also received the American Book Award and twice been honored with National Book Critics Circle Award and Guggenheim Fellowships. For many years Levine taught at the California State University-Fresno, and later was Poet in Residence at NYU.

When I was in graduate school and he was a visiting poet, he would sit in on at least one graduate literature class I took, taught by Harold Bloom, who seemed both amenable and impervious to having a major poet listening in on his soliloquies on the "Major American Poets"; Levine always appeared to take Bloom's pronouncements with a good deal of respect and humor in return.  Levine is 83 and continues to write and publish his work, though like the previous Poet Laureate, W. S. Merwin, also highly lauded and an octogenarian, it's unclear how much traveling and proselytizing he'll be able to do.  I think he's a fine enough choice, but I really wish that the Librarian of Congress would make more of an effort to regularly appoint more women poets, and to diversify the choices.

I hate always to have to point such things out, but among the last 10 Poet Laureate Consultants in Poetry of these very diverse United States, only 3 have been women--Rita Dove, who held the post from 1993-95; Louise Glück, from 2003-4; and Kay Ryan, from 2008-10.  Since 1986, when Gwendolyn Brooks held the original post of Consultant in Poetry, only one poet laureate has not been white: Dove, and over the entire history of the position, Brooks, Dove and the late Robert Hayden have been the only laureates of color. No Asian American or Pacific Islander, no Latino, no Native-American, no Arab American, no non-black mixed-race poet has ever held the post. Really, the folks in charge can and must do better. We are in the 21st century, in a country more diverse than it has ever been (and it has always been diverse). Though mostly ceremonial, the Poet Laureate is the major face, especially outside of the literary world, of poetry and its chief public advocate.  I can recall how excited I and many others were, especially young people in the nation's capital and across the country, when Dove, a superb poet and lovely person, as well as dynamic figure and excellent teacher, served in this post.

One additional point: it would also be great to have more aesthetic diversity among the Poet Laureates, and this goes in all directions. Having a poet coming from the spoken word direction, a poet also primarily working as a musician, a poet known for more formally innovative work, would all be great ways to go.  This is not to knock mainstream poets, but there are many poetries within the larger American house, and selecting poets representing some of these other traditions and trends would be a great step for the Librarian of Congress to take, because the Poet Laureate should be poetry's chief public, governmental advocate, and many kinds of poets can and would be willing to do that. So congratulations to Philip Levine, but going forward, let's really see some change we can believe in.

On Philip Levine (from Modern American Poetry)
Poems by Philip Levine (from The Poetry Foundation)

An Un-Common Gathering of Poetry @ the White House

What kind of week would it be without a bit of hullabaloo over something the Obamas said or did? Not substantive hullabaloo, say, over his continued use of drones in Pakistan or possibly illegal intervention in Libya or his war on whistleblowers, a direct contravention of his campaign rhetoric, but hullabaloo of the most transparently political and partisan, but also uninformed kind. I am talking about the right-wing hullabaloo over Michelle Obama's invitation to poet and hiphop artist Common to appear at yesterday's White House-hosted poetry event. After the announcement became public, conservative organ Fox News denounced Common in histrionic terms, calling him a "vile rapper," because of his lyrics (rightly) criticizing George W. Bush for his warmongering and, the channel's Fox Nation claimed, calling for violence against police.  Fox News commentators like Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Sarah Palin piled on, though none of them seemed to recall that Fox News commentator Jason Robinson had previously interviewed Common and praised him as "really positive." D'oh!

Commentators conversant in hip hop quickly challenged the caricature of Common quickly and conclusively. I did so on Twitter, calling attention to his powerful song "The People," which I think captures the experiences of millions of Americans today better than many poems being written, and found myself tweeting back and forth with Honorée Jeffers, a poet I admire and adore, over her denunciation of the homophobia and misogyny in Common's work. I noted that he had spoken out about his prior homophobia, but I accepted her critiques of his misogyny. I did not reply that if misogyny were a criteria for barring people from the White House or any public venues, a majority of men, not just hip hop artists, and even many women, would not set foot there. But again, Honorée's critique is important. Yet the criticism of Common was not that he rapped misogynistic lyrics or that he had once been a homophobe. Conservative caricaturists described the work as something else that it was not, which to my mind disqualified their criticisms altogether.

The poetry program also included former Poets Laureate of the United States Rita Dove (who served from 1993 to 1995, and was a colleague of mine during that period at the University of Virginia, where she still teaches) and Billy Collins (who served from 2001 to 2003), one of the most popular living American poets; the 2008 Inaugural Poet Elizabeth Alexander (a former teacher of mine at Cave Canem and someone I know personally and hold in highest esteem); Kenneth Goldsmith; and musicians Aimee Mann and Jill Scott, and artist-performer Alison Knowles.  Before the evening's events, Michelle Obama hosted a nationwide student workshop, led by several of the poets, that included a panel discussion of the importance of and necessity for arts education.  I cannot praise the First Lady and President highly enough for hosting this event, and sincerely hope that despite the controversy, which unfortunately forced the White House to have to defend itself, they will continue such programs and, when Obama is reelected, will take them on the road.  Having the First Lady kick off arts and fitness events all over the country represents one of the best forms of advocacy either of these areas might possibly receive.

Here's the official White House video of the event:


Here's Common:

"One King dream / he was able to Barack us."

Mostly missed by the mainstream media was the startling presence of Goldsmith, who is by almost every measure most people writing and teaching poetry today would likely label as one of the most formally avant-garde writers in American or world literature. Goldsmith is a leader in the area of conceptual writing, or post-autonomous writing if I might venture another name, and his work is forbidding on multiple levels. You could even argue whether it constitutes poetry at all, as it fails to satisfy many of the criteria writers and critics have used to define or categorize this genre.  (I believe he is both a poet and conceptual artist of major importance.) Yet someone close to the Obamas, astonishingly to me, selected Goldsmith to participate and he even read from one of his most difficult works, Traffic, which is a vast river of text comprising snippets of weather-related broadcasts Goldsmith recorded over a fixed period. Other Goldsmith landmarks include his stewardship of Ubuweb, the repository for contemporary experimental creative works; his having sung philosophy texts by the likes of Theodor Adorno, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Walter Benjamin; and his hosting the Poetry Foundation's Avant-Garde Poetry/All the Time podcasts.

Not to make too much of Goldsmith's appearance, but one way I read it--and Common's--is as a sign that amid the pragmatism and conventionality of a great deal of Obama's governance, there is a more daring streak that sometimes bares itself, rears its head, but which for obvious reasons he keeps in well-guarded safe. Rita Dove and Billy Collins are two of the best known and now canonical American poets alive, and Dove received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1987. Elizabeth Alexander, a professor at Yale University, a leading poet in her generation, was a colleague of the Obamas at the University of Chicago and remains their friend. The musicians who appeared also are fairly mainstream, and Jill Scott has spoken-word bona fides. But Goldsmith really is an outlier, so far out--believe me when I say that I have colleagues who would probably hesitate to invite him to read his poetry on campus, let alone profess before a classroom of undergraduate and graduate students as a poet--that his presence suggests, perhaps metonymically I would argue, another aspect of Obama's vision, the sort that perhaps Hannity identified but in caricature: Obama's capacity for the deeply fascinating juke, the more radically avant-garde and progressive but tightly concealed parts of his persona, ideology, policies, what his "politics of the possible" thankfully don't whittle or grind away. Hannity cited Common in this, but that's the obvious choice; Goldsmith's traffic went right over his and his fellow ranters heads, though I doubt Obama's--Barack's or Michelle's.

I'll conclude with a snippet that Reggie H. sent from Obama's speech at the event. You can read the entire transcript here, but catch the grace note of vernacular; I wish we saw more of that on a daily basis, though I recognize it might be too much for many. A little swinging improvisation goes a long way.

"The power of poetry is that everybody experiences it differently.  There are no rules for what makes a great poem.  Understanding it isn’t just about metaphor or meter.  Instead, a great poem is one that resonates with us, that challenges us and that teaches us something about ourselves and the world that we live in.  As Rita Dove says, “If [poetry] doesn’t affect you on some level that cannot be explained in words, then the poem hasn’t done its job.”  Also known as, it don’t mean a thing if -- (laughter) -- it ain’t got that swing.  That’s a little ad-lib there.  (Laughter.)"