Holy shit! Just try to get a goddamned bus from the U District!

Anyway, yesterday Team Obama announced their inauguration schedule. Most of the attention, as it probably should have, went over here.

But they also announced that this would be the fourth inauguration, after JFK and the JFK-loving Bill Clinton, to have a poet read work to celebrate the incoming presidency. The inaugural poet is Elizabeth Alexander. I think she is the best inaugural poet yet. Here is a poem from her website:

Peccant

Maryland State Correctional Facility for Women,
Baltimore County Branch, has undergone a facelift.
Cells are white and un-graffitied, room-like, surprisingly airy.
This is where I must spend the next year, eating slop from tin trays,
facing women much tougher than I am, finding out if I am brave.
Though I do not know what I took, I know I took something.
On Exercise Day, walk the streets of the city you grew up in,
in my case, D.C., from pillar to post, Adams-Morgan to Anacostia,
Shaw to Southwest., Logan to Chevy Chase Circles,
recalling every misbegotten everything, lamenting, repenting.
How my parents keen and weep, scheme to spring me,
intercept me at corners with bus tokens, pass keys, files baked in cakes.
Komunyakaa the poet says, don’t write what you know,
write what you are willing to discover, so I will
spend this year, these long days, meditating on what I am accused of
in the white rooms, city streets, communal showers, mess hall,
where all around me sin and not sin is scraped off tin trays
into oversized sinks, all that excess, scraped off and rinsed away.

I think this is much better than Miller Williams, for example, (though Williams gains street cred for birthing Lucinda Williams) and also better than the vast majority of Maya Angelou's later stuff, which has gotten a little SARK-y for my tastes. And I don't like Robert Frost.

If you're looking for books of her poetry, I recommend The Venus Hottentot, although I'm willing to bet it's already sold out all across town. We already knew that our president-elect has good reading taste, but this choice—a good poet who isn't afraid to be political, but not in a stupid way—is real proof.