Over at Intuitive Intertextuality, complaints about Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem using the term “pedestrian” are being rebuffed, and rightly so. However, the Amiri Baraka poem from a pedestrian perspective brings up an interesting point about Elizabeth Alexander’s point of view in the inaugural poem.

If the inaugural poem didn’t connect, the main problem was most likely a problem of perspective. Elizabeth Alexander chose to express the point of view of we: the general will in response to the moment. The strategy of this perspective is based on the belief that the best way to connect with a large and broad audience is to use a general perspective, simple language and a universal theme. The idea is that for the poetically uninitiated to enter the poem, the narrator must not be too peculiar, and the poetics must be minimized.

Paradoxically, the perspective of the everyman is a perspective no man is interested in.

Take a decent screenwriting course¹ and you’ll quickly learn that a general character is an uninteresting character. Audiences are much more likely to respond to a peculiar, yet specific character than they are to a so-called everyman.

A better strategy for the inaugural poem would’ve been to present the poem from a compelling individual perspective.

This is what makes Amiri Baraka’s “pedestrian” poem, Something In The Way of Things, easy to connect with. There is no question that the narrator’s perspective is atypical, but that’s what you want from a poem– a unique perspective. The character established is more compelling than the character of the “general will” from the inaugural poem, and listeners are more likely to connect to a character than to an abstract consensus.

That being said, I think Elizabeth Alexander was handed the most challenging job in poetry and dealt with it reasonably well. Her voice was definitely present in the poem, just not as prominently as I would’ve hoped. She certainly has more interesting work in print, but I believe her inaugural poem suffered from bad strategy and not from bad poetics.

1. I should note I’ve taken two and nearly failed both. ↩