politics and poetics 65inclusion. Angelou dramatises how America exists as an intersec-
tion of individual narratives creating a tissue of connective narrative
threads. These narratives convene to create an experience of migra-
tion, wanderlust, and in many instances exploitation and a bloody
history, to include Pawnee, Apache, Seneca, Cherokee, Turk,
Arab, Swede, German, Eskimo, Scot, Ashanti, Yoruba and Kru.
Angelou opens the history of America with the violent annihilation
of Native American cultures and includes the violence of slavery
against African peoples: ‘Sold, stolen, arriving on the nightmare.
Praying for a dream’ (p. 272 ). ‘On the Pulse of Morning’ urges a
reconsideration of the ways in which a nation performs its politics.
Echoing the refrain of the Civil Rights Movement, Angelou’s
poem states that the peoples of America ‘will not be moved’ (p.
272 ) and urges its audience to ‘give birth again to the dream’ (p.
272 ). Encouraging dynamics of community and shared agency, the
poem proposes that this is a new day and wishes for
the grace to look up and out
And into your sister’s eyes, into
Your brother’s face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope –
Good morning. (p. 273 )This appeal to a communal ritual based in the everyday offers an
explicit challenge to the rhetoric of ceremony.
Interviewed by the New York Times prior to the occasion of
Obama’s inauguration, Elizabeth Alexander stated that as prepa-
ration to her writing, she ‘read the previous inaugural poems, as
well as many others’ – adding that ‘the ones that appeal to me
have a sense of focus and a kind of gravitas, an ability to appeal to
larger issues without getting corny.’^19 Crucially Alexander admit-
ted that her aim was to create a poem that did not ‘talk down to
some imagined audience’. Alexander’s ‘Praise Song for the Day’
establishes a conversation with Angelou’s poem.^20 Building on
ideas of working life, her poem marks the inaugural day with the
action of America’s citizens. The poem echoes the momentum of