64 contemporary poetry
An estimated 38 million viewers watched Obama’s inauguration
ceremony around the world, but the tensions are evident in John F.
Kennedy’s proposal that ‘politicians are the men who create power’
and artists are ‘the men who question power’.^17 Maya Angelou
and Elizabeth Alexander’s poems illustrate how poets attempt
to avoid the rhetorical fl ourishes associated with public address
while retaining a direct appeal to their audiences’ expectations.
Their poems create a dialogue with previous inaugural poems;
Alexander’s poem especially enters into a direct conversation with
Angelou’s earlier ‘On the Pulse of Morning’ ( 1993 ).
Angelou’s poem problematises the ideal of an accomplished
programme of nationhood. ‘On the Pulse of Morning’ is not a citi-
zen’s address to America, but includes three unexpected voices: a
rock, a river and a tree. Borrowing from Native American animism,
Angelou alerts us to a landscape that existed prior to the voyages
to the New World of Columbus and other European adventurers.
The America of Maya Angelou’s poem is not a pre-existent space
but an ambition to be made through exertion, care and community.
The rock urges the people to ‘face your distant destiny’ and chal-
lenges a human predilection to remain ‘face down in ignorance /
your mouths spilling words. / Armed for slaughter’.^18 Building
upon an ecological imperative, the voice of the river retells how the
denominations of people create ‘a bordered country’ whose ‘armed
struggles for profi t / Have left collars of waste upon / My shore,
currents of debris upon my breast’ (pp. 270 – 1 ). Borrowing from
Walt Whitman’s evocation of American citizenship as a body con-
taining multitudes in Song of Myself ( 1855 ) Angelou uses a listing
of identities evoking the complexity of America:
The Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew,
The African, the Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek,
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheik,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher. (p. 271 )The intervention of the tree as a fi nal speaking voice builds upon
the diversity outlined by the river with a parallel gesture towards