Got into a discussion with someone about why I hope reincarnation isn't real, mostly because I never, ever, ever want to have to go through being a teenager again.
Then the discussion went to the wonderful Amanda Gorman and her wonderful inauguration day poem which I hope is the beginning of a long and great career as a poet. I was very glad to see that her books are flying off the shelves. Let's hope for even greater work from her.
We discussed Obama's second inaugural poet Richard Blanco (Maine's got a piece of him, he lives here, sometimes). And Clinton's first, Maya Angelou. I said that I liked what I recalled of those poems, I'll have to go back and read Elizabeth Alexanders and Miller Williams, that I didn't remember them might have had something to do with me not watching all of Obama's first or Clinton's second inaugurations. I was mad at Clinton before his second and was too nervous for Obama's first one to watch most of it.
I had to admit that I detest the original inaugural poem, which wasn't written for the inauguration, Robert Frost's The Gift Outright, a poem that pretty much ignores that the United States is based on land stolen from people the Europeans Frost says were given it murdered to get it. NOT a big Frost fan. And my view of the Kennedy administration is pretty much changed from how I originally saw it.
We tried to remember if Trump had an inaugural poet and decided that he'd think it was too sissy to have one, making do with his Stephen Miller written manifesto that should have started an A for Achtung!
Thinking afterwards I had a kind of creepy feeling that reincarnation might be real and that it had a kind of nasty sense of irony, reincarnating Goebbels as Stephen Miller.
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