politics and poetics 63Ferlinghetti responds: ‘What are poets for, in such an age? / What
is the use of poetry? / The state of the world calls out for poetry
to save it’.^14 He adds, with considerable optimism, that ‘Words
can save you where guns can’t’.^15 As such, this chapter considers
the extent to which contemporary poets are prepared to rest their
belief for political change and critique, in the power of language.
A DAY IN POLITICS: INAUGURATION POETS MAYA
ANGELOU AND ELIZABETH ALEXANDER
Arguably, no more direct intervention between poetry and politics
exists than the presence of a poet’s recitation during presidential
inauguration day in the USA. Four American presidential inaugu-
rations (John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton (twice) and Barack Obama)
have included a poet reading as part of the ceremony. The poets
were Robert Frost ( 1961 ), Maya Angelou ( 1993 ), Miller Williams
( 1997 ) and Elizabeth Alexander ( 2009 ). Zofi a Burr proposes that
‘the occasion of the inaugural poem resurrects an ideology about
the role of poetry in the public sphere that is as infl uential now as
it was in the early 1960 s’.^16 Burr proposes that in this ceremonial
function the poet serves as an explicit ‘outsider’. Both poet and
poem’s role is to question, from a position of integrity, the state of
the political sphere:
The function of the poet as a check on power is both
analogous to that of the press of the Fourth Estate (under-
stood as having a responsibility to scrutinize the actions of
the government from the perspectives of the people) and
also absolutely unlike that of the press... the very things
that poetry is designed to check and counter in the name of
integrity defi ned in the terms of the private, the personal the
individual. Thus if poetry has a public role to perform, it is
only by virtue of its ability to remain apart from all public
discourses of society. (pp. 430 – 1 )Poetry and politics make odd bedfellows given poetry’s associa-
tion with privacy and politicians’ perpetual search for an audience.