In his contribution to The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, Jahan Ramazani reminds us of poetry’s power to “foster the sense of simultaneous community” among those who engage in its collective reading. While Ramazani is thinking of the elegy, particularly as a convention in which trauma becomes “the absent center wound which the nation weaves itself,” we find ourselves thinking of other conventions in which such weaving similarly appears. In their essay “Multicultural Nationalism and the Poetics of Inauguration,” Minoo Moallem and Iain A. Boal remind us that inaugural poems, like anthems and novels, play a role in the process of nation building, often by constructing “a unity of contraries” that unsteadily yokes conflicting parts under the guise of a national whole. The fractures of the nation are thus transformed into the unity of the state, reinforcing the inauguration’s mythos as a new beginning or “a new dawn” that elusively promises to bring wholeness and equanimity to the national project. Thus, it seems both geographically appropriate, as MLA will be in the nation’s capital, and historically timely, given the acclaim of poet Amanda Gorman’s reading at the Biden inauguration earlier this year, that we devote a special session to this public yet understudied convention of poetry that evokes the complexities and contradictions of the imagined community of the nation.

We will do so through three papers and a response. Our first paper offers a general framework on the issue of inaugural poetry itself. Amish Trivedi asks in his paper a key question: what is it that governmental entities gain from promoting poetry and poets? To explore this, Trivedi takes a historical perspective, from Frost to Gorman, surveying how each inaugural poet reflects not only their position in the field of poetry, but also how the inaugural poet is used as a synecdoche for the aspirations of the administration in question. His interest is in the interplay of cultural and symbolic capital of inaugural poets: thus he turns to Bourdieu’s broad definition of capital to examine the ways in which presidential administrations may attempt to benefit politically from the deployment of poetry’s cultural capital as part of their symbolic national mission.

From Trivdei’s historical perspective, our next two papers offer focused account of particular inaugural poets. Grzegorz Kość examines the poem that Robert Frost was supposed to deliver at the 1961 Kennedy inauguration, “Dedication,” but was unable to due to excessive glare on the manuscript: he eventually gave “The Gift Outright” by memory. Kość outlines the rhetorical paradoxes of “Dedication,” exploring how Frost actively promotes in the poem a process of collective forgetting and national unity even as he promotes individual separateness and subjective resentment. In this way, “Dedication” manipulates the Cold War contradictions of national citizenship and personal freedom through the mode of the panegyric. Moving from Frost, Micah Bateman explores Maya Angelou and Amanda Gorman’s inaugural readings as state performances of “Black Angel” figures, or what or what Chesya Burke calls the “Negro Spiritual Woman,” to authenticate campaigns and outparty solidarities, and to sanctify U.S. electoralism. Bateman examines how the problematic of how mostly white Democratic candidates draw upon the authority of African-American literary personalities while sublimating those personalities Blackness into a fungible outgroup-identifier in order to solicit and mobilize mostly non-Black support from the American electorate. Blackness is thus not about legitimate African-American identity, Bateman concludes, but instead functions as a shorthand to authenticate candidates’ personhood and signal a vague outparty commitment to justice.

As a response, Sheila Liming will conclude by turning our attention to the inaugural poem that thankfully wasn’t, Joseph Charles MacKenzie’s “Pibroch of the Domhnall.” Intended to serve as a celebration of the election of Donald J. Trump, MacKenzie’s poem has been widely lamented not only as bad poetry, but as a base appropriation of Scottish mythology in the name of white American conservative grievance. Liming’s response is one-part humorous provocation, one-part a serious return to the intermingling of cultural and symbolic capital that Trivedi has introduced in his paper.

With three papers and the response, we anticipate that there will be ample time for at least fifteen minutes of unstructured discussion so that the audience may offer their perspectives on this timely topic.