When Elizabeth Alexander was chosen to give the inaugural poem, there was some stirring in Philly. Elizabeth got her PhD from Penn and put down some roots here. John Timpane wrote a story about her, with a "local angle," for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and asked me for a few comments. I thought about the context (four poets have read at inaugurals) and told him that she didn't have the stature of Frost (Kennedy) but was a better poet than Maya Angelou (Clinton).PennSound has an Elizabeth Alexander author page. It features recordings of poems she read a few years ago at the Kelly Writers House. Among them is "War", which is the poem she should read on January 20 if she can't write a new work for the occasion.
A critic of the choice of Alexander writes: "Now granted, one can't determine a presidency by its poet. Or can you? Robert Frost for Kennedy, lots of glitz and stirring end rhyme with a seedy underbelly and a lack of much substance? check. Maya Angelou for Clinton, lame pandering to the masses and a seeming unwillingness to look beyond the ego of the poet? check. I guess it remains to be seen exactly what sort of poet and president this combination will bring us."
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
