A bit of a letdown. I think if I were choosing an inaugural poet, I'd choose a formalist. When you're delivering a poem to a mass audience like that, there's nothing like rhyme and meter to really send the message that this is a poem. Otherwise, unless you have a real perfect-pitch sense of language, it's going to sound like rhetoric, like a speech -- and Obama before her, and Lowery after, were better rhetoricians.
Who? How about two inaugural poets -- Richard Wilbur and a rapper?
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