Packer doesn’t want poetry at the Inauguration:
Judging from the work posted on her Web site, Alexander writes with a fine, angry irony, in vividly concrete images, but her poems have the qualities of most contemporary American poetry—a specificity that’s personal and unsuggestive, with moves toward the general that are self-consciously academic. They are not poems that would read well before an audience of millions.
Obama’s Inauguration needs no heightening. It’ll be its own history, its own poetry.
I say: give her a chance. I guess at this point I’m grateful he didn’t ask James Dobson.
The Dish 