In this morning's P.I., I say casually, this morning's P.I., as though it doesn't have a noose around its neck, but I digress.

This morning's P.I. brings happy poetry news - Mike Hickey, elected Seattle Poet Populist for 2009, gets a front page spread in Life and Arts. A few years ago, Mike put out a call for books - local prisons he had discovered had nothing in their libraries. He took up collections and took car trunkloads to Monroe and elsewhere until he was turned away. Sorting through the books, shelving and cataloguing them was too big a strain on resources he was told. All this to say, Mike champions reading and writing and loving words.

Towards the end of the article, we learn that not everyone is a fan of the Poet Populist Program, and it's guess who, someone who writes for The Stranger, the paper whose job it is to remind us that we are indeed all in junior high and that we are not emphatically not in the popular crowd, even though we may be poet populist or whatever. The Stranger's writer wrote, as quoted in the P.I. article, "Public poetry is almost always very bad. Think of Poetry on Buses, a program that consistently produces the worst poetry any of us have (sic) ever read." Unnecessary roughness, I say, and a little nasty of the P.I. reporter to report this gratuitous aside that assures me that if the Stranger's writer sent a poem to the Poetry on Buses program, it was not accepted. Here's my take on Poetry on Buses. I love it. I love the gigantic poet-upon-poet reading that celebrates the new round of poems on buses and I love the torrent of poetry writing in classrooms and kitchen tables throughout the county that precedes each deadline. And I love that poetry rides the buses, is read instead of ads on buses by thousands and thousands of people.

Let us now turn to Elizabeth Alexander's Inaugural Poem, the most public public poetry we have to consider for four years. Was it equal to the task of following our new President Barack Obama's Inaugural Address? How could it have been? What could any of us have written that could have spun us further into that momentous moment? Two million people filled the space from the capitol building to the Washington Monument. How many millions of us watched on how many screens, how many of us together in this hungered-for moment of national unity, this collective at last after eight years collective celebration?

After getting up for morning after how many mornings and writing, Elizabeth Alexander stood in front of two million souls and spoke - declaimed - affirmed her poem and spoke her piece of this historic day. I say hurray. Oh I can bring pettiness to the table, carping, my own hierarchies of who should have been invited, my correctives for her elocution, and all the sour grapes that never blend into a satisfying whine. The New York Times has the transcript of her poem on its website. I say read it, more than once. And then get out there and walk forward.