If you are a little-known poet – and perhaps, let’s be completely honest, maybe rightly so - being told you’re going to have to follow a speech by President Barack Obama is a very, very, very bad gig to pull.

Praise Song for the Day was unmemorable. How do I know that for sure? Why, because I can’t remember it. Two minutes after it was spoken I couldn’t remember it. Our columnist, David Baddiel, wondered whether he couldn’t spot the Secret Service agents hastily removing the bullet-proof screens as she spoke; oh, I suppose that’s going a little far. But only just.

If you listened to President Obama’s inaugural address, you would have been reminded of the remarkable ability of language to both be a part of what we are and yet also somehow to raise us above ourselves, to remind us - as he wished to remind us - that we are capable of greater things. He spoke of what the ancestors of today’s Americans had done: “For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and travelled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West; endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth. For us, they fought and died, in places like Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.”

Mr Obama understands the music of cadence and beauty that simple repetition can bring; Professor Alexander, alas, sounded merely repetitious, or at the very least, confused: “All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues.” That tongue seems like a pretty crowded place to me. Ouch.

Alexander is clearly an admirable woman; it’s not hard to see why President Obama would admire what she stands for: as she tells us on her website, she is the first recipient of the Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship for work that “contributes to improving race relations in American society and furthers the broad social goals of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.” Which is terrific. But this poem, alas, was not terrific. It was pedestrian and dull. It attempted to convey, in language much less skilled, some of the message which the President so ably conveyed in his inaugural address, his own language drawing on that of scripture and of past great Presidents and orators.

“Ordinary” speech – the rhythms and phrases on which Professor Alexander drew – can indeed, rightly used, be poetic. I was reminded of that possibility when listening to John Williams’ setting of the Shaker song, Simple Gifts, as played by Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma just a few moments before: “’Tis a gift to be simple, ’tis a gift to be free, ’tis a gift to come down where we ought to be...” That is indeed simple, and that is indeed poetry.

Never mind. Who cares? Not me. I just got to type the words “President Barack Obama” for the very first time; and listen to the new President’s words take us, we may all profoundly hope, once again towards – as someone once said – a new birth of freedom.

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