Local View: What, no poetry at the presidential inauguration?

No inaugural poem on Monday? Although poets are gobstruck about this, odists recognize that, symbolically, this is a Robert Frost “gift outright.” Poetry’s guerilla army of readers also have reason to celebrate. This inauguration, they will be given, as they were during most prior inaugurations, something special: a brick window through which to see how caprice continues to exclude our “tired … poor … (and) huddled” free verse from our hallmark celebration of democracy.

To misapply a fine point, poetry — like Latin, FORTRAN, and fact-checking — is a dead language. In layman’s terms, res ipsa loquitur .

If you have a syllable of respect for the upcoming inauguration’s “ On the Pulse of Morning ” non-moment, then allow me to continue to misstate my case. In his “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” W.H. Auden proclaimed, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Of course, with more knowledge at our fingertips today than sometime around lunch yesterday, the least-well-off among us have long known this without wasting time to learn it: Poetry is too poetic to keep our businesses from shipping American jobs to countries like Mexico, China, and California.

Not dissimilarly, Marianne Moore, whose muse was no misogynist, in her poem, “Poetry,” confessed, “I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.” Alliterating her admission, Dylan Thomas referred to his poetry as “my craft or sullen art.” Given his use of the adjective “sullen,” it’s no wonder the other seven parts of speech no longer invite poetry out for drinks and do not “like” it on social media.

To further belabor the point, Baltimore Ravens founder Edgar Allan Poe, in his pre-eminently popular 19th century poem, “The Raven,” written in ear-catching ABCBBB and AABCCCCBCBB rhyme schemes, wrote that football should be “evermore,” whereas poetry should be “nevermore.” In short, you don’t have to be Poe to know similes, metaphors, extended metaphors, allusions, and repetitive repetition are all as worthless as a wordless sonnet since none of these figures of speech can complete a Hail Mary pass. Don’t believe this? OK, you college-educated, parents’-basement-dwelling baristas, just read the Shakespeare-esque play about poetry, “Much Ado About Nothing.”

Regardless of poetry’s Homeric arc from “the rosy figure of dawn” to any of the latest insomnia-curing volumes of verse, the prohibition of an inaugural poem at a presidential inauguration is not a partisan issue. For example, since JFK’s 1961 swearing-in to the 44th president’s taking the oath of office for the second time, only one political party has muzzled, in Faulkner’s words, poetry’s “puny, inexhaustible voice.”

Why? Because President John Calvin Coolidge, whose savvy supporters took him figuratively but not literally, was not silent when he said, “The business of America is business (not poetry).” Nevertheless, centuries later, why we don’t constitutionally prohibit literature from littering the National Mall on Inauguration Day only Athena knows.

This is not to say various poets open our eyes to the onomatopoeia of personification. A case not germane is e.e. cummings in his “Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town,” a poem the Department of Re-Education in Washington, D.C., made me memorize and recite aloud back when America’s grammar schools were gooder than great, when, as cummings wrote, “Children guessed but only a few and down they forgot as up they grew.”

Accordingly, as one-half of America prepares to give its best attentive inattention to the upcoming inauguration, and one-half of America continues to savor its diet of whine and cheese, and the other one-half of America mulls invoking its Fifth Amendment right not to watch the Super Bowl, dozens wonder: Will poetry ever regain its prodigal place on the Inauguration Day dais?

As a poet’s poet once put it, “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.”

William Tecku of Gordon was a Lake Superior Writers Contest winner in 2017. He writes about the human condition and shares his reflections with Northland radio listeners. He wrote this exclusively for the News Tribune.