ELIZABETH ALEXANDER
Inauguration opened a new world for poet
Elizabeth Alexander's Praise Song for the Day, the inauguration poem that helped deliver Barack Obama into office, was in the making for almost half a century, surely for three generations: The grandmother who sang lullabies, poetry set to music. The parents who took their 1-year-old daughter to the Lincoln Memorial to hear Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech. The husband who emptied the house of the two boys, because, more than anything, Alexander needed hushed space to muster words and thoughts, then distill them into something beautiful, powerful, memorable.
