Is the problem really delivery?
Or is it content?
In other words, if the text were worthy, would it not have held up, even under brutal delivery?
Here's a case for content triumphing in spite of delivery. An audio link is embedded in the introduction. Listen as you read the transcript. I'll wait for you.
Are you back?
Okay.
Certainly not the finest opening, right? The delivery was shaky, stumbling, uncertain. And then... great text prevailed. It moved with a cadence and a greatness that befitted the occasion. The text, moving swiftly and surely, overcame the delivery and swept away the speaker and his audience.
The text required no explanation, no footnotes on form, no debate about its meaning.
The text was, quite simply, magnificent. Appropriate. And fundamentally right and true.
About that other poem
Look.
I understand what she meant, and I actually appreciated the folk-art-ish rendering of the quotidian -- it served as a reminder that the ordinary, the commonplace, the everyday undergirded an extraordinary and momentous occasion. More, I embrace wholeheartedly the idea that an artist must remain constant in his or her vision and message. It's just that, well, a commissioned artist -- which is, essentially, what the poet slated to offer his or her work at an inauguration is -- must also consider the event, the venue, and the audience for which his or her work is intended.
And I don't think she did. Not really. The day deserved a poem majestic, a pillar of words and images on which new dreams could perch.
In other words, it wasn't so much praise song as an opportunity lost.
I’ll just have to get through it the best I can. I think I’ll say …
This was to be a preface to a poem I can say to you without seeing it. The poem goes like this ... (Applause.)
“The Gift Outright”
The land was ours before we were the land’s
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people....
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