Lift Every Voice and Sing

The inaugural benediction by Rev. Joseph E. Lowery began with the final stanza of a great poem by James Weldon Johnson. The full text is below:

LIFT EVERY VOICE AND SING

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us,
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand.
True to our God,
True to our native land.

TWR on Obama and Pop Culture

TWR takes this Tuesday off to celebrate the inauguration and prepare for the inaugural poem. Lazy and self-important, he offers instead a link to Dan DeLuca's column in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer partially devoted to SemiObama--the joint project of TWR and Jonathan Silverman.

Check back later in the day for reactions to Elizabeth Alexander's poem!

Sarah Palin Invites TWR to Alaska!

LOYAL READERS OF TWR, will remember a time in the glorious past when the box to the right encouraged readers to subscribe to The Weekly Rader because Sarah Palin does. Well, to our great surprise, TWR's devotion to the former veep candidate curried favor with the good governor--we've been invited to Alaska!

And, if that isn't enough, Sarah herself is throwing in a free travel guide.

Out of humility, I didn't want to let on that the governor and I were on a first name basis, or that her pet name for me was "Neighbor" (an inside joke referencing my days living in Russia). But, now that her political future is "stable" for the time being, and no accusations of conflict of interest can be leveled at either of us, there is no reason to keep our "relationship" private any longer.

How long will I be in Alaska? Who hasn't asked that question?

Rest assured, I'll be sure to post plenty of photos of Wasilla, that bridge, and all of the helicopter/moose chases I see. Speaking of which, in the nature of full disclosure, I suppose I should mention that "watchable wildlife" is code for "in front of bulls eye in pen." I'll also post pictures of all my trophies.

Best of all, I understand my suggestion for the new motto for the state capitol has been approved. When I'm there, expect a public unveiling of official t-shirts, bumper stickers, stocking caps, and dog sweaters sporting: "Juneau Juneau like I know Juneau?"

Interview with Thomas Lynch

In a world of hyphenated descriptors, Thomas Lynch has to have one of the oddest: mortician-poet. An author of three collections of poems and two books of non-fiction, including the American Book Award winning The Undertaking, Lynch is also the owner of Lynch & Sons Funeral Directors in Milford, Michigan.

I interviewed Lynch for the program at the Telluride Film Festival, where a documentary about him and his work—Learning Gravity—was entered in the festival.

Dean Rader: Being a mortician, like being a poet, demands an attention to aesthetics. In a poem like “Couplets,” these two vocations merge beautifully. Are there other overlaps in the Venn diagram for you? Does the poetry business ever influence the mortuary business?

Thomas Lynch: To the extent that they both traffic in myth, metaphor, symbol, cadence, images, wordplay. Handy too, I suppose, that the fashionable color for both is black.

Rader: You write in a number of different genres. Do you approach genres in different ways? Is the poetry-Lynch a different bird than the prose-Lynch?

Lynch: Well poetry happens acoustically to me first, whereas prose -- both fiction and nonfiction happen intellectually first. Fiction in particular has more of a visual trigger: I'll see someone and want to get them in a story, imagine their history and future, all the particulars flash sometimes first. Truth told, they all are chasing metaphors around, trying to make connections.

Rader: Traditionally, both poets and morticians live on the margins of mainstream society. Do you think this helps them with their work, or does it merely provide yet another distancing mechanism?

Lynch: I think in both enterprises there's a good deal of waiting around for something to happen, someone to call, some necessity to press itself into your schedule. I suppose the culture regards both with great ambivalence: we're glad for funeral directors to be "on duty," in the way we approve of poets and oncologists. But both the reading of poems and being at funerals fall nearer the root-canal end of our favorite things.

Rader: My father worked in a funeral home all through junior high, high school and into college, where he studied mortuary science. He remains a profound believer in death with dignity, despite the fact that important specialists like Sherwin Nuland suggest this is a myth. Is there such a thing as a dignified death? If not, then what is death?

Lynch: Well, as oxymoronic as "the good death" sounds, I think I've seen some versions of it. And I've surely seen some clumsy, miserable, meaningless ones. So I think you're father's on the right track. Dignity is possible, even grace, and all of the opposites.

Rader: Do you still drive the Dead Wagon? [Lynch's term for his hearse]

Lynch: We still have one, but I don't drive it as much.

Rader: What’s the funniest experience you’ve had as a mortician?

Lynch: I don't think I've had it yet, least ways nothing comes to mind, though the dear knows I've spent more time laughing than crying so far.

Rader: What profession elicits the oddest response—being a mortician or being a poet? Have you ever been tempted, when meeting someone new, to “bury” your work as a mortician?

Lynch: Few people are shocked by anything anymore. Life is full of hyphenated types: the wrestler-governor, the belly-dancing colo-rectal surgeon, the cowboy-president. And no, I've never been tempted that way.

Rader: Most of us have anxiety dreams about our work now and again. What is one of your recurring mortician dreams?

Lynch: I don't think I have one...and now I'm feeling a little left out. Sometimes I dream I'm in a bar with my hands on a glass of Irish. It's always Mrs. Egan's Marble Bar on O'Curry Street in Kilkee. She's long dead, the bars gone, (turned into a gourmet chipper); I've not had a drink in going twenty years. I always wake up with a dry mouth, a cold sweat, in a panic -- which is a lot like what happened in my drinking days. Always glad it's only a dream.

Rader: In The Undertaking, you write about how often poets write about death. Coming at this from a different angle, do you think that death (or morticians) have anything to say about art?

Lynch: Death is demonstrably mum on this and other subjects. Morticians will, of course, hold forth on any theme. The real thing though -- art -- mostly leaves us all a little gobsmacked and dumbstruck.

Rader: Is there a great film about mortuary science?

Lynch: Aren't they all? Sex and death: the themes between which all the others seem to fall in line?

Obama and "the whites"

THOSE READERS TIRED OF basketball posts will be relieved to know that this short piece is less about basketball and more about race.

The New York Times ran the photo to the left as part of their January 3 story of Obama as a high school student at the prestigious Punahou school in Honolulu. According to author Jackie Calmes, Punahou was known as the school where the "whites" went. Calmes interviewed classmates and school officials who experienced a much different "Barry Obama" than the young, conflicted Obama that the President-Elect writes about in Dreams from my Father.

Both Calmes and her interviewees seemed surprised that the young Obama was hard to read--an inscrutable text of outward pleasantness and inward turmoil.

As Toni Morrison notes, Americans have never been particularly good readers, and that level of near illiteracy can often extend to reading humans and their emotional terrain as texts. We tend to be shallow, easy, even lazy readers.

Except for Obama.

Navigating the dangerous waters of the elite private school for white conservatives taught him to be an uncanny reader of all sorts of texts--particularly those racial texts of skin, culture, and taste. But, even Calmes notes that this patient, observant ability to decode, served the young (and the older) Obama well:

Blacks were a small minority statewide, too. Celebrated as a melting pot, Hawaii has for years had its own racially charged brew of native Hawaiians, ethnic Asians and whites; the few blacks mostly came in recent decades as part of the American military presence.

In bridging the unusual racial undercurrents, Mr. Obama honed the people skills that helped him fit in and ultimately propelled him into politics, with the crossover appeal that won him the presidency.

2009: The Year of the Poem

HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM all of us here at TWR Central. We took the week between Christmas and New Year's off to count up all of the Google Ad revenue from 2008. Looks like we can buy than Snicker's we've been pining for . . .

Speaking of pining, it's become more and more clear that, without knowing it, Americans are pining for poetry.

Sure, there is no evidence for this; in fact, the landscape looks pretty bleak. Some estimates suggest that only around one percent of the U. S. citizenry purchase collections of poetry, and I suspect that figure may be high. Everyone knows that unlike Russia or Chile, the United States is a country of prose, in part because Americans are intimidated not merely by reading poems but by the concept of poetry; it’s very label and all of the painful associations of class and learning that come with it. Of all the countries in the world, perhaps none are more transfixed by labels and categories than the U.S., whether it comes to movies, cars, food, clothes, or music.

It is fair to say that this preoccupation with boundaries occurs in the world of literature and literary criticism but also in the popular reception of literary texts. Americans buy fiction, non-fiction, comics, and self-help. They rarely buy poetry. Even in the most mainstream literary project—Oprah’s Book Club—there are no collections of poems. Similarly, in a quick survey of book clubs in San Francisco (perhaps the most poetry-friendly city in the country) and of those on various radio programs, I have yet to come across a book of poems up for discussion. Hollywood makes no movies of poems or poetic projects; collections of poems are rarely featured on display tables at Borders; poets are never guests on The Daily Show or Late Night with David Letterman—they don’t even make Charlie Rose. In a world of decreasing time, of truncated attention spans, of short films and videos, one would think that the lyric poem would provide the sort of quick fix that White Teeth or Almanac of the Dead cannot.

But, TWR wants to do something about this, so it has officially deemed 2009, The Year of the Poem!

We don't know what this means, exactly, but we'll follow up with subsequent posts.

In the meantime, enjoy the new year and a new poem . . .

NYT Piece on Elizabeth Alexander

Dwight Garner of the Times Book Review interviews Elizabeth Alexander and muses on the inaugural poem in this recent piece.

The Theft Outright, A Poem by Heid Erdrich

IN RESPONSE TO MY most recent post about Elizabeth Alexander and the role of the inaugural poet, my friend Heid Erdrich sent along a copy of a fairly recent poem of hers, which he has been gracious enough to let me post here. In truth, Heid's poem is a response to Robert Frost's famous inaugural poem, "The Gift Outright," read at John F. Kennedy's inauguration. As I suggest in an earlier post, the poem is a swan song for the chauvinism and ethnocentrism of Manifest Destiny. Suffice it to say that when in the first line the speaker says, "The land was ours before we were the land's," he was not channeling Chief Seattle, Wovoka, or any person of color. Frost, frosty as they come, embodied whiteness.

Erdrich (Ojibwe) plays with Frost's line and its sentiment, inverting the poem's claim to land by invoking the transgressive history of land reclamation, removal, and theft.

A special thanks to Heid Erdrich and her publisher, Michigan State University Press, for allowing TWR to print "The Theft Outright" from Heid's forthcoming book, National Monuments.

The Theft Outright

after Frost


We were the land's before we were.

Or the land was ours before you were a land.

Or this land was our land, it was not your land.

We were the land before we were people,

loamy roamers rising, so the stories go,

or formed of clay, spit into with breath reeking soul—

What's America, but the legend of Rock 'n' Roll?

Red rocks, blood clots bearing boys, blood sands

swimming being from women's hands, we originate,

originally, spontaneous as hemorrhage.

Un-possessing of what we still are possessed by,

possessed by what we now no more possess.

We were the land before we were people,

dreamy sunbeams where sun don't shine, so the stories go,

or pulled up a hole, clawing past ants and roots—

Dineh in documentaries scoff dna evidence off .

Th ey landed late, but canyons spoke them home.

Nomadic Turkish horse tribes they don't know.

What's America, but the legend of Stop 'n' Go?

Could be cousins, left on the land bridge,

contrary to popular belief, that was a two-way toll.

In any case we'd claim them, give them some place to stay.



Such as we were we gave most things outright

(the deed of the theft was many deeds and leases and claim stakes

and tenure disputes and moved plat markers stolen still today . . .)

We were the land before we were a people,

earthdivers, her darling mudpuppies, so the stories go,

or emerging, fully forming from flesh of earth—

Th e land, not the least vaguely, realizing in all four directions,

still storied, art-filled, fully enhanced.

Such as she is, such as she wills us to become.

Elizabeth Alexander Selected as Inaugural Poet

IN "ARS POETICA #100: I BELIEVE," one of my favorite poems by Elizabeth Alexander--President Elect Barack Obama's choice to be his Inaugural Poet--we hear more than the echoes of past poets like Wallace Stevens and Langston Hughes or the words of Civil Rights leaders such as Martin Luther King. We hear the soaring rhythms of Mr. Obama himself:

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

It's that final line that sounds so much like Obama. That desire for connection, that fundamental interest in the other.

But, so does the irreverent line about the dead dog. Alexander is a serious poet who doesn't take herself too seriously. One can say the same about Obama as a politician (just check out the header photo at SemiObama to get an idea of his willingness to poke fun at his persona).

But, there is nothing funny about this occasion.

How does one write a poem as momentus as the inauguration of the first African American president?

The presidency, like poetry, is a construct. It has its rules, its genres, its rituals, and its traditions. Being successful at both requires a knowledge of those traditions but not an allegiance to them.

It is that quality in Mr. Obama that no doubt prompted him to select Alexander to read his inaugural poem--the first time since Bill Clinton's second inauguration that event will include this bizarre but charming neo-tradition. Unlike many of Obama's cabinet choices, Alexander would not have appeared on many inaugural poet short lists--including those on this site. As much a scholar and an essayist as a poet, Alexander isn't really a central figure in what some refer to as "the poetry shirt crowd"--the central cast of poets who win awards, appear in The New Yorker and Poetry on a regular basis, and move in the main poetry circles. Her books are not published by the big New York publishers or the elite university presses; instead she goes with Graywolf, one of the best independent presses--one that focuses on quality over quantity.

A professor at Yale, Alexander has published four books of poems. Her most recent, American Sublime (2005) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It's a great book, full of jazz and popular culture references as well as riffs on the classic "ars poetica" (the art of poetry) genre in which she re-examines poetry through the lens of race and popular notions of race. This makes her an unusual candidate for such a big moment. How will she do? What tone will she take? Will her poem be funny? Earnest? Will its resonance be commensurate with that of the moment at hand?

Pundits have spent the last several weeks dissecting Mr. Obama's cabinet selections, musing over what they suggest about his presidency. Along those same lines, I'm interested in what his selection of the inaugural poet reveals.

I am impressed that he resisted the pressure to reappoint Maya Angelou or to go with more obvious choices like Nikki Giovanni, Yousef Komunyakaa, or Rita Dove, who served as the Poet Laureate. All three are outstanding writers, and all would write memorable poems. Of that, you can be sure.

Ms. Alexander is, in some ways, more risky.

The others have had a large stage. She has not. But, like Obama himself, she is a thinker. Her poems indicate someone inward-looking and nuanced. Someone thoughtful. Again, not unlike Obama.

I can say this--I'm more excited to see what kind of poem she will write than I would be by any of the three I mention above. The anticipation of her poem--like the anticipation of the Obama presidency--is that of the unknown . . .God in the details, the only way to get from here to there.

Conservatism Matures

TO THE SURPRISE, AND no doubt, dismay of many conservatives, Bill Kristol closes his November 17 column for The Weekly Standard, with earnest congratulations for Barack Obama and suggests, of all things, support:

We at The Weekly Standard congratulate Barack Obama on his impressive victory. We pledge our support for those of his policies we can support, our willingness to give him the benefit of the doubt in cases of uncertainty, and our constructive criticism and loyal opposition where we are compelled to differ. We hope President Obama's policies and decisions will strengthen the nation he will now lead, and that our country and the cause of freedom in the world will emerge from the next four or eight years even stronger than they are today.

Conservatism has always been more persuasive as an idea than a project, and to be sure, Kristoll is an idealist. Moreover, through a combination of economic extremis and a slightly more progressive American mainstream, intellectual conservatism finds itself in a tough place. Having been forced to hitch its wagon to the bigger, more powerful social conservative horse, it has been dragged around through the mud and muck, with no one of any real strength on the reins. But, social conservatism seems to have gone the way of the wagon, leaving more moderate conservative thinkers wandering around the trail, not sure where to go.

In the old days, most Republicans would take this opportunity to set Obama in opposition to mainstream America, but Obama's views pretty much mirror mainstream America. This makes things even more difficult for conservative idealogues. Kristol's stance signals a major shift in how intellectual conservatives see the immediate future. Perhaps their best hope is, ironically, in Obama.

The election of Obama solidifies America's move to the center. Many liberals claim the first Black president indicates a sharp move left, but, Obama is a centrist, and this past election (think Proposition 8 here in California) simply reinforces America's political (and social) middle of the roadness. More Americans probably agree with Kristol than Bill O'Reilly just as they likely find resonance with Keith Olberman more than Michael Moore.

One wonders, then, if Mr. Kristol's comments are more than a congratulation--perhaps they are also a valediction: a goodbye to the hate mongering of Rush Limbaugh and Mike Savage; a farewell to the anti-Christian rhetoric of James Dobson and Jerry Falwell; a so long to the smug vacuousness of Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly.

Though they may never admit it, intellectual conservatism is, in actuality, a centrist stance. It tends to be agnostic on religious/moral issues, arguing instead for issues of public policy like smaller government, lower taxes, lighter regulations, and a stronger military. It's more about how government governs than how individuals make decisions.

Kristol's comments set him apart from those conservatives who are on a mission of conversion, revealing instead a man wooed by ideas--the very engine driving the Obama campaign.

We at The Weekly Rader congratulate William Kristol on his impressive column. We pledge our support for those of his ideas we can support, and our willingness to give him the benefit of the doubt in cases of uncertainty, and our constructive criticism and loyal opposition where we are compelled to differ. We are confident that in the next four or eight years, we may see him and Hillary Clinton giving each other the dap.